Watch Your Marketing Language

Marketing is ALL about narrative. But what happens when your Marketers (or you) get too caught up in OTHER PEOPLE'S language?

Last week on The Digital Download, Tom Miner was sharing about the difference between "tracking leads" and "helping people". As you might expect, the difference is HUGE. But it's super easy to get caught up in doing what Sales asks us to do (generate leads).

But if we get TOO focused on that, it's easy to forget that those "leads" are PEOPLE. And as soon as we stop treating them like people? They notice.

So today, let's explore some common areas where our internal language might be letting us down...AND how we can re-frame it to get ourselves back on track.

Let's go!

Generating Leads

As mentioned above, it's really easy to get caught up in the rigamarole of "generating leads". And yes, we NEED people to buy our stuff in order to stay in business. But if we forget about why THEY want to buy our stuff in the first place, we can easily end up running ourselves in circles. Oh, and also in this category...can we please stop calling people TARGETS? We're not shooting at them, are we?

The Reframe >>> Turn "leads" into "people" and ask yourself...is it actually within my ability to GENERATE people? Unless you're REALLY into making babies, that's probably not how you're going to find customers. Instead, what CAN you do for Your People? Help? Support? Inform? That's where you find your way back to actually taking care of Your People 💖

Finding Prospects

This one came up in the last episode of the Crazy, STUPID Marketing show with Peter T. Britton. When we talk about prospects, it's very commonly related to anyone who could possibly buy our product. But when we talk about SUSPECTS instead—by Peter's definition, those who have Means, Opportunity and Desire—we end up speaking to fewer people (saving time and money) AND increasing the likelihood that what we say will resonate with them. Seems like a good ROI to me ;)

The Reframe >>> Turn "prospects" into "suspects" and deep-dive what it looks like for someone to have the Means, the Opportunity AND the Desire to purchase your product (or service). And then? Do out and FIND them. Yes...the finding activity isn't just for Sales; Marketers have the opportunity too!

Educating the Public

There is a lot of information out there about how we need to "educate" our audiences to get them ready to buy. But has someone ever tried to teach you something that you had no interest in learning? How well did you retain that information? Oh, and how did you FEEL about that person? That they were actually trying to help? Or persude for their own good? This is a common thing we receive, yet we go right back out into the world and serve it to other people.

The Reframe >>> Stop "educating" and start "helping" Your People. Imagine you were a nurse in an ER, helping the people who came your way that need your help. Your job isn't to convince anyone driving by the hospital to come in. It's to help the people that do; and do a good job communicating to the outside world what you're there to help with.

Tracking Engagement

This is a juicy one...primarily because we are so programmed to be concerned about engagement on our content (so much so we have to get our internal staff to interact with the posts to trick ourselves). Add that to the fact that many Marketing departments have outsourced "conversations" to Sales, and it's easy to get lost here.

The Reframe >>> Forget "engagement" and seek "conversation". After all, the concept of engagement is related to an interaction, and what better interaction to have in a business sense than a human2human one?

Seeking Conversions

When we're in the Marketing Funnel conversation, we're almost always looking at conversions; otherwise known as how many people move from one part of the pipeline to another. But this puts us back into transaction mode; making everything mechanical and one-directional. And unfortunately, that's just not the way humans move.

The Reframe >>> Replace "conversion rates" with "commitments" on your client pathway. First of all, looking for commitments can easily help you re-frame the value of things like website downloads (is that REALLY a meaningful interaction?) and can allow you to add the very human multi-directionality back into your client relationships.

Planning Campaigns

I feel like this one ties in with the above, but I can tell you for CERTAIN that I've never been a part of a marketing team that HADN'T run a campaign of one kind or another. But this language actually borrows from military language, connecting to missions, targets and wins. And while that might sound good conceptually, the focus of "going to war" never really won anyone anything, did it?

The Reframe >>> Stop "campaigning" and start creating experiences for Your People. Shifting from doing something TO Your People to doing something WITH Your People is HUGE. Not onlyin the FEELING it gives Your People, but in that so few people are doing it, you can't help but stand out :)

Automating Everything

There's a lot of research currently going on around how to automate as much as possible, and AI has only increased the desire. But automation tends to drive a singular focus on efficiency, and when the efficiency starts to outweigh the empathy in your process, the people start to float away. Especially if you have a competitive play that is NOT focused on efficiency as your primary advantage.

The Reframe >>> Stop removing human touchpoints and start assisting Your People. There are definitely ways that technology can help Your People, but when you focus too much on it only helping YOU, you're just distancing yourself from your peeps. Can you say, longer sales cyles? That's not what we're looking for, right?

Building Retention

Ok, last but not least. I think most of us understand that "retention" is about holding onto something. About keeping it...regardless of the mutual value. When the "keeping" activity doesn't take into consideration the perspective of the other party, we break down the primary human understanding of relationships...that they are 2-way.

The Reframe >>> Forget "retention" and focus on "relationship health". One of the reasons that NPS became such a phenomenon is that it's one way to measure the relationship health you have with your customers; after all, people will only refer you if they are happy with the relationship they have with you. So, instead of just MEASURING NPS, can you imagine what your relationship health could look like if you focused on it?

Choose Wisely

Remember that wise old Templar Knight in Indiana Jones? I always think of him in times like these. What does it look like to choose wisely with your Marketing Language?

If you haven't made those choices intentionally to date, your language probably isn't actually YOURS💡

And there's no time like the present to make it work for you!

P.S. If you want a partner to go on a Marketing Language Definition journey with, let's chat!