Marketing Terms You Need to Know: Improve Your Promotions by Developing a Marketing Language

Developed from the ProThink Learning Course Effective Marketing: Methods, Models, and Processes to Ensure Success

It might surprise you to learn that many marketers — most marketers in fact — don’t know basic marketing terms. This is a stark contrast to other industries: dentists know bicuspids from incisors, lawyers know affidavits from briefs, and architects know cornices from parapets. But rarely will marketers be able to distinguish between a Push and Pull Strategy, explain the Innovator Adaptor curve, or define Marketing Orientations.

There’s no shame in not knowing marketing terms. Not a single person was born knowing them. We all had to learn. What is shameful is practicing marketing without knowing them, and I mean really know them — being able to apply them to everyday work and teach someone else about what they mean. Saying “If I think hard enough, I might be able to remember them” or “I could look them up if I had to” won’t cut it.

As a leader of a company, it can be difficult to motivate your marketing teams to learn and implement these terms on their own. Most people involved in marketing are too busy or simply won’t bother to study. As the CEO of a marketing company who teaches marketing, I had a devil of a time getting staff to learn their terms, but now I’m here to share with you the simple, successful solution we developed.

Give a Reason Why

Before implementing any kind of action plan, it’s important to be fully transparent and share with your employees why it is necessary that they become familiar with these terms. Otherwise, all your efforts will be met with a weariness or even antipathy. Lucky for you, I have your reasons right here.

As a marketer, you need to know marketing terms so you can think and communicate with others about marketing fast. Once you memorize and internalize marketing terms, you will be surprised at how rapidly you can think about marketing, and if others know these terms, how quick and in-depth your conversations become. Having a team of people literate in the marketing lexicon will allow them to easily, quickly, and confidently diagnose and discover solutions to any problems they face.

The School Room

In our first attempts to teach our staff marketing terms, we treated our marketing teams as though they were students. We had mandatory classes that everyone attended, and we tested for retention just like in a classroom setting, even creating special training room that looked like a classroom. We did this for about two years before realizing it wasn’t working. Why?

· Just like “real school,” people memorized for the tests and then forgot everything soon after they “passed” the test.

· New employees couldn’t jump right in but had to wait until a new class began.

· Classes took employees away from client work.

It was nothing short of a mess.

Take Two: The Word of the Day

Rather than adopting the traditional classroom setting, we determined to find a way to incorporate these terms into our day-to-day activities and apply them to the work we performed by implementing a Word of the Day. Here’s how it works:

1. Select a list of 31, or more, key terms you want your employees to be familiar with. These words should be ones important to your company’s functions and promotional efforts.

2. Assign each of your words to a day of the month. You can find a full schedule of words in the book The CEO’s Guide to Marketing or by registering for the course Effective Marketing: Methods, Models, and Processes to Ensure Success.

1. Start every meeting of every day by defining and discussing the respective marketing term of the day. For instance, if term number fourteen is Market Segmentation Strategies, then on the fourteenth day of the month each meeting will begin with a short discussion on how Market Segmentation Strategies apply to your current work. If someone happens to be in three meetings on the 14th, they will discuss Market Segmentation Strategies three times.

2. Repeat step three month after month with occasional changes to your word bank.

The learning process happens organically as people discuss the term’s application to the work they are doing. And because of this, they aren’t just memorizing a term, they are internalizing it. Moreover, this simple system allows new employees to be included immediately. Rather than take time away from client work to attend classes, the staff is actually working on clients as they learn the terms. Day after day, month after month, year after year, these terms become ingrained in everyone’s mind.

Increase Your Marketing Literacy Rates

The fact that most marketers don’t know basic marketing terms is something of an embarrassment. Fortunately, if you use a simple system like this one, the fix is easy and effective, and you’ll notice a marked improvement in the quality and speed of your marketers’ communication.