Online Marketers Need to Stress Benefits Not Jargon
Posted January 5th, 2009 by Glenn Seaberg
Glenn Seaberg
Spyder Trap Online Marketing
Most respected industry reports predict increased online marketing spending in 2009. Yet many marketers are reluctant to embrace this as readily as traditional marketing. How could this be?
The answer is simple. Most people avoid that which confuses them. Maybe you’ve witnessed an online marketing guru say something like this:
“If you take a look at organic SEO and PPC, then vet them against your KPIs, you can easily see SEM as the thing to do. But don’t overlook title tags, meta tags, and alt tags, and even long-tail keywords or your SEO could be SOL.”
WTF?
As online marketing professionals, our job is to explain why online marketing is worth the investment, even at the expense of traditional media budget – especially in this economy. Therefore, we shouldn’t speak in jargon and TLAs.* We need to clearly explain the unique features and business benefits of this new marketing frontier; efficient targeting, ease of testing, instant trackability and real-time analysis & correction (among others). These are the concepts that all marketers understand and embrace.
After all, the real benefit of online marketing is increased ROI. And that’s the only acronym that matters to the decision makers, whether they are VPs, CMOs or CEOs.
* TLA = Three-Letter Acronym
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For a cheat sheet of online marketing jargon, watch for my next post “The Unfortunate Glossary of Online Marketing.”
Tags: Minneapolis Online Marketing, Minneapolis Pay Per Click, Minneapolis Search Engine Optimization, Traditional marketing
2 Responses to “Online Marketers Need to Stress Benefits Not Jargon”
January 5th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
This applies well to pay per click advertising as well. SEOs focusing on selling SEO are missing the chance to sell their services to people unfamiliar with the term.
January 5th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
You are right, Ed. Thanks for pointing this out. Many in technology-based services are guilty of this. Technology often is celebrated over the benefit the technology was designed to provide in the first place. Thanks again!
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