The term “Content Strategy” may be one of the mosts misunderstood concepts in the marketing industry. One of the reasons is that there are many different definitions for the term, not to mention that most agencies, organizations, and even core teams have differing opinions of what makes up content strategy and execution. Everywhere I have worked has handled content strategy in different ways, but all had one common trend: Content Strategy was integral to a successful website build.
One such definition by marketing guru Rahel Bailie states:
Content strategy deals with the planning aspects of managing content throughout its lifecycle, and includes aligning content to business goals, analysis, and modeling, and influences the development, production, presentation, evaluation, measurement, and sunsetting of content, including governance. What content strategy is not is the implementation side. The actual content development, management, and delivery is the tactical outcomes of the strategy that need to be carried out for the strategy to be effective.
Rahel Bailie, coauthor of Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits and principal of Intentional Design
Rahel does a great job in articulating the essence of Content Strategy. At the end of the day, it is about the process that is put in place to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. Content Strategy is not a set-it-and-forget-it task; it requires active attention and ongoing support to ensure success.
At Bluetext, content strategy is a key component of every website project. At the beginning of a project, we work with our clients to define the right balance of support required to ensure that they are successful. We strongly believe that without a well-defined and well-executed content strategy there is an abundance of business opportunity left on the table. Whether this be in the form of missed SEO juice, messaging gaps, or outdated and unimportant content, the bottom line is that your organization is missing out on some of its potential.
So what does a sample content strategy process look like?
In this blog post, we walk through a very high level overview of the core pieces required to have a successful content strategy. These are by no means the only things that make up content strategy and there will be different flavors/add-ons/adjustments based on your organization’s specific needs.
Step 1: Define your Audience
The core of a sound content strategy is defining your audience. A content strategy may have more than one target audience, but without at least a basic understanding of your users, you will effectively be shooting in the dark. For growing companies whose business goals are raising more capital, investors will be an important audience in your content strategy. Differentiating between primary and secondary audiences will help prioritize your website’s content curation, presentation, and execution. Understanding the nuances of your audience — their goals and their behaviors — will allow you to tailor the content on your website such that you give them the best experience possible.
Sample Tasks:
- Analytics Trend Analysis
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Market Research
Step 2: Define your Content Areas
Having a clear definition of what content you need and how it will be structured will help ensure a sturdy foundation for your website. Thinking through how content will be grouped and how a user will find content are key to being successful in this area. Outputs from Step 1 should inform how you construct your content areas. Do you need a page dedicated to target audience testimonials? Are you planning on being a thought leader in your space? Consider where on your site your content areas will be most effective at delivering your core messaging to your target audience.
Sample Tasks:
- Sitemap Audit
- ROT (Redundant, Outdated, Trivial) Analysis
- Competitor Sitemap Analysis
Step 3: Define your Editorial Strategy
Editorial strategy covers many different topics. Defining the voice, point of view, and writing style will help you create a unified website that is easy for your user base to consume. The last thing you want is every page to read like it was written by a different author with no cohesion or consistency.
Sample Tasks:
- Keyword Analysis & Planning
- Competitor Research
Step 4: Define your Editorial Process
As I mentioned earlier, Content Strategy is not a “set it and forget it” type of task. It takes constant attention to keep up with not only your competition, but also evolving web trends and expectations of your user base. An editorial process will provide a guideline for you and your team to continually monitor and improve your websites content strategy.
Sample Tasks:
- Blog Planning
- Content Refresh Schedule
- Ongoing SEO Analysis
Ultimately, the content strategy for every business, industry and organization will be a little bit different. The important part of a content strategy is that you have one, you are actively engaged and thinking about it and that you and your team understand it is a living, breathing thing.
Looking for help with your content strategy? Contact Us!
In their drive to attract, engage, recruit and ultimately retain new members, Association marketers are facing added competition from more
than other trade associations. Increasingly, they are being squeezed by for-profit commercial businesses that have ramped up their own efforts to attract this same audience. One of the primary services that associations offer to their members is information, in the form of content, and that’s where the battle lines are being drawn.
The majority of the critical information that members used to get solely from an industry association today can be easily found and obtained elsewhere—and typically free of charge with no annual membership fees. The American Heart Association for example – once had a near-exclusive lock as the sole source of premium content for all things related to the heart. That role kept membership strong and growing. They now are now facing increasing competition for share of mind from hospitals, medical groups, for-profit businesses and manufacturers of prescription drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. As more competing content sources compete for mindshare, the less valuable the association becomes as a leading resource for information – let alone a ‘paid’ resource.
Associations should look at this as not just a challenge in terms of member acquisition but also as a major threat to their member engagement and retention strategy. And what aggravates that is the fact that many lack the resources and strategy to run robust and ongoing integrated member acquisition and retention campaigns to keep existing and prospective members engaged.
The bottom line is, Associations can no longer rely on traditional tactics to acquire and retain members – they need to get into the content game and start producing fresh, relevant content to drive traffic and engagement. This is not a simple task – it takes a disciplined approach that regularly creates and distributes new insights, ideas, and information, packages them in a concise and compelling way that attracts attention, and communicates the value that the content delivers to its members. And to truly be effective, that content must also be search engine optimized to make it easy to find, and properly coded with relevant keywords in key areas of the site that Google is looking at, including page URLs, page titles, and content across the association’s website. When this is done properly, a dashboard can be set up to track, measure and optimize engagement and conversion of the content marketing program.
With organizations of all sizes jumping into the content game – it is absolutely critical that you begin a smart content marketing strategy to re-capture and retain the membership base and reclaim your stake as the dominant voice of your industry.
Download Our Free eBook on Trade Association Marketing in a Competitive Landscape!
It’s pretty obvious that videos placed on YouTube have huge appeal with consumers who love to be entertained while seeing a product or brand in action. YouTube videos can be cutting and funny, irreverent or just dumb, yet they have the capability of capturing consumer attention and driving interest and conversion. Good videos translate to more sales—according to one recent survey, consumers are nearly two-thirds more likely to purchase a product after watching a video.
But how well does that work for enterprise and business-to-business companies? Do videos on YouTube help with marketing when the the target buyer may be a busy executive, the sales cycle can be long, and a variety of different types of individuals may have input into the decision?
With B2B and enterprise products and services, it is even more important to leverage a channel as important as YouTube. Here are a few simple reasons why:
• YouTube is the second most frequently used search engine, which not only means that your target audience is probably researching solutions on YouTube, but also that a properly labelled and tagged video can show up high in the search results;
• Attentions spans are getting shorter, and a tight video or animation can capture that attention better than words or images on a web page;
• It offers strong opportunities to engage with your target customer; and
• It allows you to show off your creativity and position your company as a thought leader in your market.
Here, then, are six tips for how to leverage YouTube for B2B marketing:
1) Short is Sweet. As recently as two years ago we were producing videos up to five minutes in length to showcase brands and their executives. That time has dropped by more than half. A recent study confirmed that the most successful videos on YouTube are under two minutes in length—and those around the one-minute mark are the most popular.
2) Set Up a Branded YouTube Channel. Creating a company channel delivers a better experience than individual uploads, even if the titling and tags are already aligned for the best search results. A branded channel allows for a branded experience, with creative elements that showcase the company or product. It also allows a company to segment the videos so that the target viewer can better find what they are after.
3) Be Disciplined About New Content. Just like your other social media platforms, YouTube thrives on consistent content. Just posting video without a regular refresh leaves too much silence and no reason for a viewer to come back. When you develop your YouTube strategy, make sure you can add new content on a regular basis for a sustained campaign.
4) Treat Your Video Like a Blog Post. Don’t waste the opportunities to drive traffic to your YouTube channel through other social media platforms. Think of it as you would a blog post. The more nurturing it gets from all of your social activities, the more traffic it will get. So tweet it, blog about it, post it on Facebook, and promote it through your email newsletters.
5) Advertise. Remember, YouTube is owned by Google, so you can promote your videos through Adwords for Video. There are currently three ways to advertise and drive traffic to your channel: as a pre-roll ad before the videos that viewers watch; as a banner ad when people are browsing and searching the Internet; or as a promoted video when people are searching for similar videos. Each requires a careful selection of keywords to make sure you are getting to the right targets.
6) Be Creative. A static video of an executive talking about the company won’t capture anyone’s attention. If it’s meant to be instructive, consider using animation to tell the story. If it’s a thought leadership campaign, then have experts discussing trends. Use multi-camera shots, tight editing, and professional sound and lighting to keep it engaging. It’s ok to be entertaining, but it also needs to give viewers the information they are searching for.
YouTube should be a key element in every campaign’s mix of platforms to reach and engage the right audiences. It provides the audience with visual content that can showcase the brand, and it’s easy to gather the analytics about what is working and what’s falling flat. It requires a disciplined and smart approach, but the results of a smart YouTube campaign are more engagement and conversions.
Speed is by far the most critical metric to consider when re-designing an enterprise website – it won’t matter how beautiful your new site looks if nobody is going wait an extra millisecond for your homepage to load. In addition to providing a fast loading, responsive user experience – speed has a direct impact on your ability to optimize higher user engagement, conversion rates and SEO rankings – all of which drive better brand and marketing performance.
One of the primary signals Google’s algorithm uses to rank performance is site speed – but by extension it is really page speed that Google is measuring. According to Moz, page speed can be described as either “page load time” (the time it takes to fully display the content on a specific page) or “time to first byte” (how long it takes for your browser to receive the first byte of information from the web server).
Page speed is also vitally important to user experience – pages with longer load times tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page that result in an immediate negative impact on conversions. According to Google, 53% of users will abandon a site or web page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. This also has a direct impact on search rankings – with less than half a second separating the first and third pages of Google search results.
So how do you measure site speed? Google introduced its own web-based tool, accessible via Google Labs, called Page Speed Online. It’s available as a web-based tool as well as a Chrome extension. With it, you can quickly get an overview of high priority, medium and low priority fixes that can help increase your page speed.
Here are the top 5 for your digital agency implement to add instant horsepower right out of the gate:
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Technology – AMP is a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web by enabling code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can load instantaneously —no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using. With Google splitting its index into separate versions for mobile and desktop – the time has finally come to start prioritizing mobile
- Wrangle Your Javascript and Stylesheets – Have your scripts and CSS load in external files instead of cramping up each and every web page. This way, only the browser has to load the files one time, rather than every time someone visits each page of your site. Ideally, put your external CSS in the portion of your site, and your external Javascript file as close to the tag as possible. As a result, the browser isn’t bogged down wading through all those requests for external files right from the start. The only time you won’t want to do this is if the Javascript needs to load near the top of the page – such as to display a name or load up an image carousel.
- Optimize Your Images – In Photoshop or Fireworks, you can use the “Save for Web” option to drastically reduce image size. An image quality slider lets you see the visual trade-offs between graphic file size and crispness. Also – don’t rely on HTML to resize Images – while HTML makes it easy to create a smaller version of a larger graphic it doesn’t mean it’s taking up any less room on the server. The browser still has to go through the process of loading the entire image, checking the width and height you want and then resizing it accordingly.
- Use GZIP compression – You’ll want to ask your web host if they use GZIP compression and deflation on their servers. These are two techniques that can significantly speed up a site, reducing file size by as much as 70% without degrading the quality of the images, video or the site itself.
- Caching – Many content management systems now have plugins that will cache the latest version of your pages and display it to your users so that the browser isn’t forced to go back and dynamically generate that page every single time. Plugins like WP Super Cache can take a serious bite out of page load times.
You can also look beyond your website itself and consider a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that serves up pages depending on where the user is located. Faster access to a server near their geographical area translates into faster load times.
While speed is the most critical metric of any re-design effort – it’s not the only metric. Working with a smart digital agency to define KPIs for the re-design of your next generation website will significantly improve performance metrics across your digital marketing ecosystem right out of the gate.
Go the need for speed? Contact us
Content marketing is one of the best ways to drive target audiences to your website and to get into your sales funnel. A key question to ask is whether you you have the right content marketing strategy to drive organic search and grab attention in your outreach. Is it innovative and using graphics the right way? And while innovation in content marketing is certainly not a new concept, many brands still struggle with moving their content away from the traditional heavy text and towards a more engaging graphics-based approach.
Here are four solid tips for brands that are embracing a more innovative strategy for their content marketing:
1) Interesting is good. Boring not so much. This might sound obvious, but with many business-to-business or business-to-government solutions, it’s not always easy to sound interesting on technical topics. Resist the temptation to edit out content that might be fun and relevant, and that plays on popular topics or cultural experiences. Take Hootsuite as an example. There’s nothing very sexy about a tool that allows you to manage your social media posts. It’s mostly a dashboard with a number of useful applications tacked on. But Hootsuite rose to immense popularity by playing off a popular theme, the HBO television series “Game of Thrones.” It created a video called “Game of Social Thrones,” using graphics and music similar to the television show to demonstrate its capabilities. Each popular social platform has its own Game of Thrones city, and logos and images are cleverly used throughout. Timing is everything, of course, and the Hootsuite video garnered lots of buzz on YouTube. Hootsuite also makes sure that its content, even when serious, is fun, increasing its popular appeal. So while your brand or product may be technical and specialized, you can still write content with which your audience will identify on a popular level. The lesson: Don’t feel that you need to be serious all of the time. Create some fun, light content now and then.
2) Make sure your strategy aligns with your brand. IBM is known for three key assets: Its technical expertise, its role as long-time market leader, and its position as a respected source of IT information. To match its steady flow of content to its brand attributes IBM follows the same path. To uphold its reputation as a technology leader for more than a century, it has to produce authoritative content that underscores its thought leadership. Because the company is a technical powerhouse, it has to ensure that the content is technically authoritative. And because the company is trusted by millions to provide detailed descriptions of challenges and solutions, it has to make sure that its content is at an expert level. While trying to follow in IBM’s footsteps is not an easy task, it provides a strong lesson for how to approach your content. It should be well-written, possess authority, and have an expert voice. That’s what customers want and respond to.
3) Storytelling never gets old. It’s easy to fall back on technical explanations, and these are often important when conveying the value that a product or solution brings to the market. But telling a human interest story that illustrates what that technology brings to customers can be much more penetrating. Few do this better than Microsoft, whose “Stories” blog posts rarely even include the term software. Instead, they tell stories of how Microsoft technology has helped people, and in some cases changed their lives. In one example featuring sportscaster Daniel Jeremiah, the story is one of the human experience, of triumph, challenge and redemption. Daniel explains how as a scout for the Philadelphia Eagles, when he didn’t trust his instincts and the data at his disposal, he lost the opportunity to push for Seattle Seahawks superstar Russell Wilson. It’s a fun,personal and powerful story, and one that demonstrates Microsoft’s leadership not with a hard sell of its products, but with a tale that will stick in your mind.
4) Let visuals help tell the story. Visual images draw attention, tell a story, and help illustrate a brand’s true value. The problem is, many companies, particularly in the technology space, don’t believe they have much they can show using photos or high-impact graphics. I’m going to put forward GoPro as a great example of a company that relies on the visual to tell it brand story. And yes, I recognize that it’s not a fair comparison—a company that sells action-oriented video equipment of course would have great videos to show off its products. But the thing about GoPro is that it almost never actually shows its cameras in its marketing efforts. Instead, GoPro focuses on its users. One of its leading cameras is called the Hero, and its campaign is to turn its customers into heroes. Much of its content is created by passionate users who are, in turn, becoming public heroes. Companies who aren’t in the video business can take a similar approach. Tell the story of your customers and end users using video and other visual assets to make them the heroes—for the challenges they are addressing and the problems they are solving. At the very least, use visual content and images to enhance your text-based content.
Taking an innovative approach to content marketing can pay off in spades for any brand willing to think creatively and act accordingly. But sticking to some basic truths about what customers want and expect will increase your brand footprint and drive market recognition and share.
Learn how Bluetext can help you design and execute a successful content marketing program.
Rapid response is a core component of Bluetext’s public relations services. We focus on having messages and media targets teed up when there is an opportunity for our clients to contribute expertise to breaking news events, whether it is a cyber attack, tech policy development, or in this case the horrific wildfires raging across Southern California. As the leading Emergency Mass Notification Services (EMNS) provider, Bluetext positioned client OnSolve’s CEO to speak about the challenge local officials face to alert citizens when wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters hit; ways for citizens to stay safe; and innovative new capabilities available through providers like OnSolve. Multiple interviews were arranged for OnSolve, including this live segment with The Weather Channel.
Need help with driving better PR results? Bluetext can help!
There’s good news and bad news for companies hoping to make their mark in the cyber security universe. First the good news: The market for these products is huge and growing exponentially. Security Analyst and researcher Richard Stiennon, in a column on Forbes.com and extrapolating from Gartner data, projects a ten-fold increase in IT security spending over the next 10 years- to $639 billion annually by 2023. That’s a number that would have any company executive working overtime to tap into.
But here’s the bad news: This is not exactly a secret. The competition is fierce and growing, as the growing number of solution providers races to meet this demand and take advantage of the opportunity.
It’s easy to have a marketing plan that pushes key messages out to prospective customers. At Bluetext, we think an influencer strategy is essential as part of that plan, and especially in such a crowed space as cyber security.
How any company—from established household names to challenger brands—can break through the noise and the clutter to attract the attention of this market requires an engaging and creative marketing approach that clearly sets it apart and above the competition. This demands a fine understanding of the value it brings to its customers and why it’s the best solution for any particular challenge.
Yet, simply having great creative is only half the battle. Getting that message out to the market is a whole new challenge, and needs both a direct approach and an in-direct strategy—the bank shot to reach the intended audience. Direct tactics are obvious—direct mail, email blasts, online and print advertising, a digital presence, trade shows and webinars; these are all direct appeals to potential customers.
The indirect approach is in many ways more difficult. It requires using industry influencers to reach their larger audiences with your content and messages. That is no small task, and it takes a dedicated investment in time and research. Here are some of the required elements to implement an effective influencer strategy:
1. Identify the best influencers for cyber security.
2. Recruit those influencers as allies and advocates for your thought leadership.
3. Engage those influencers through social media and direct outreach so that they will spread the word to their audiences.
Let’s take these one at a time.
Identify. Identifying the right influencers for any market, and in particular for cyber security, takes some research and digging. The key is finding the leaders who not only have the most followers on social media, but whose content—including tweets, blog posts and news articles—are shared the most frequently. When Bluetext executes an influencer campaign for its clients, we look first at the number of twitter followers and LinkedIn connections for each influencer candidate. But that’s only our starting point. More important is researching their history of shares among that audience. If a particular individual has a large number of followers yet few who share and rebroadcast that content, it could mean that his followers don’t find his content to be valuable, or that he doesn’t post content very often. If there are a lot of shares, retweets and comments, that’s a good indication that the person is read and taken seriously across the industry.
Recruit. Recruiting an influencer doesn’t mean offering them a job. It means building a relationship so that that person knows you are reading his content and pushing it out to your audience. The best way to do this takes work. The first step is to follow that person on Twitter, and to subscribe to his feed if he has a syndication service. The second step requires that the person’s content be reviewed on a daily basis. Any time there is a post that is relevant to your market, share it, follow it, retweet it, comment on it or call it out and add your own perspective. The idea is demonstrate that you are an active fan and follower who is paying attention to the expert.
Engage. Engaging with the influencer is a long-term project. After you have shown interest and built a credible track record of reading and sharing his content, he can be approached as an industry expert, a colleague and a reporter. That might include asking for his opinion on a new development, offering to share an announcement that he might find interesting, and even giving an advance look at a new piece of research or development. The goal is to be viewed the same way that a reporter would view a valuable source—with credibility and interest. When that engagement is solidified, the influencer is much more likely to pay attention to your content and to share it with his audience.
This may seem like a cumbersome process, and Bluetext dedicates a fair amount of energy to make this happen for our clients. But the payoff is significant. Using the bank shot to reach a much broader audience through sources that they trust can help rise above the competition in a crowded and growing market. A smart influencer strategy takes time and commitment, but it’s worth the effort.
Assumptions can be a dangerous thing. Often, sales, marketing and PR teams make assumptions that not only undermine integrated marketing efforts, but the viability of the business itself.
Marketing Team Assumptions About Sales
A marketing team might assume that content it is creating for sales teams proves invaluable to generating leads or closing sales. The fact is, however, a 2015 survey by Highspot indicates that 65 percent of that content is never actually used by the sales teams. That same survey indicates less than 10% of the marketing budget goes to efforts that produce sales results.
An effective integrated marketing effort requires a two-way conversation between marketing and sales, and these conversations must happen frequently and with multiple members of the team. Sales executives can provide marketing leaders with a holistic view of market trends, sales team paint points, and competitive challenges, but on-the-ground sales troops are the ones who interact with existing and prospective customers every day. They understand nuances between different market verticals (i.e. – government buyer v enterprise buyer v non profit buyer), and what content is proving most valuable in meetings. Integrating that sales team feedback must happen before – not after – marketing content strategies are developed.
PR Team Assumptions About Sales
PR teams might assume that media coverage is creating “air cover” for sales teams to go in and close sales. But often this is not the case. First, PR and marketing teams may not understand the buyer “trigger point.” Too often, integrated marketing efforts attempt to solve a sales problem that doesn’t exist – or doesn’t exist yet. For example, a marketing team might assume that the primary paint point for sales is that competitor technology product offerings are positioned more strongly in the market, thus requiring content to demonstrate your product is superior based on price, performance, efficiency, etc.
This may be valuable; however, it is possible the more immediate sales team obstacle is that the buyer is stuck earlier in his/her decision journey. They may require content that educates buyers on why an underlying technology is more secure and superior to what is currently being used. There may be a lack of understanding on the company’s suite of offerings, or even credibility issues with the brand itself. Only through in-depth and frequent conversations with sales teams can you be sure that the content being created is optimized to the buyer trigger point, and timed correctly on the buyer journey.
Another false assumption often made by PR teams is that there is a process in place to ensure any media coverage generated or thought leadership content produced is funneled in real time to sales. The Highspot survey indicates otherwise, finding that 28% of content is never even found by sales, and that sales teams spend nearly one-third (31%) of their time searching for it. Highspot also found that 24% of companies have formalized marketing to sales handoffs, which helps explain why PR and integrated marketing content often never quite makes it to the individuals who can do the most with it.
Everyone company’s definition of “integrated” is different, but for organizations to truly benefit from valuable marketing content and efforts, it is critical to ensure sales teams are not on the outside looking in.
As digital marketing evolves and new channels emerge to target business, consumer and government audiences, the pressure is on marketing firms to push clients into waters that are sometimes deep and potentially un-chartered. Let’s face it…another eBook or press release just won’t cut it in 2017. If those are the ideas coming from your marketing firm then it is time to shop for a new one.
Recently my partner Jason Siegel wrote a great 2017 Survival Guide blog https://bluetext.com/survival/ which highlights several areas that marketers need to be thinking about. Make sure to check it out.
I recently had a chance to visit the National Retail Federation’s 2017 BIG Show in New York. It was a great event and demonstrated how marketing firms can think outside the box at an industry conference that many would consider very traditional. Here are a few ideas that hopefully you will hear from your agency in the months ahead:
- Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA), as defined by Google, is a feature that lets you customize your search ads campaign for people who have previously visited your site, and tailor your bids and ads to these visitors when they’re searching on Google and partner sites. If you dipped the toes in the water with re-targeting in 2016, then in 2017 it is likely that you will begin to hear about RLSA from your marketing firm.
- Instant Articles from Facebook. If you spend any time blogging or creating valuable content, the key is to find as many channels as possible to distribute it. With Instant Articles from Facebook, you hit a world of users that may not have been touched in the past, you can distribute easily, and you get solid analytics to see what how the content is performing. It is this continued innovation from companies like Facebook that marketing firms should be presenting to you on a regular basis.
- The continued emergence of augmented and virtual reality. This is an area of marketing technology that will cross the chasm in 2017 and go more mainstream, as more companies want to create unique and immersive customer experiences. As budgets go more digital, it is critical to think about all of the unique ways that virtual reality can impact revenue. Digital briefing centers, gamification, customer service – all of these areas can be impacted positively through augmented and virtual reality.
We are 30 days into 2017. Has your agency recommended any new ideas? Time is ticking and the last thing you want to do is look ahead to 2018 planning and have a wish list of ideas that stayed on the shelf for another year…
A few weeks back, I posted a blog about over-used PR terms to avoid. Needless to say, that post generated lots of responses and even a clever email from an old colleague that tried to use all them in one friendly note to me. The list of pr terms to avoid seems to be endless. So many to choose from, so little time.
So, due to popular demand, here are seven more PR terms avoid – to debate, disagree with, eliminate from your online dictionary, but above all else, to please stop using. And as with my previous post, I too am guilty of using some of these terms and will take my own medicine. I also recognize that language is defined by common usage, so that even though some of these terms may not be allowed in the Queen’s English, dictionaries reflect how people actually use words, regardless of the Queen. Nevertheless, I am fighting a last stand to get these words out of the PR world, at least for now.
- Leverage. This is a tricky one because as a noun, I think it’s perfectly fine. The problem is when it is so frequently used as a verb, its meaning becomes vague and just seems lazy.
- Impact. I know I’m losing this battle, but the word “impact” is a noun, not a verb or a gerund (ending in “ing”), and certainly not “impactful.” That’s just removing whatever impact it had in the first place.
- Their. As in, “Bluetext is a cutting-edge digital marketing agency – their work is amazing!” While the sentence may be accurate, it still doesn’t work. Agencies, companies and inanimate objects are “its”, not “theirs.” This is a pet peeve of mine, and I always correct this whenever I see it.
- Unique, when preceded by “somewhat” or some similar modifier. The word “unique” is binary – something is either unique or it isn’t – there is nothing in-between.
- Disruptive. This is a big red flag in a PR pitch or press release. Unless when talking about a student’s behavior in kindergarten, let’s all agree that this is both over-used and not used correctly. We can only look backward to see if a new product or technology was in fact disruptive. Predicting this in advance is wishful thinking.
- Authentic. I was once guilty of using this word far too often. The idea was that campaigns would resonate better with target audiences through content such as social media and blog posts if they were “authentic” as opposed to “artificial” in their voice. In fact, everything we do for our clients should be authentic, and pointing this out just undermines its credibility.
- State-of-the-Art. Doesn’t every client want to describe their product as “state-of-the-art”? Let the product speak for itself. The audience can decide whether it’s new and different or not.
Part 3 of PR terms to avoid will be forthcoming.