Are your words the ones your customers use?

Have you ever listened to the way people talk? No, I mean really listened. Is what they're saying what you're hearing, or do you translate their words into ones you're comfortable with?

Word choices are telling. They can tell you things like:

• degree of emotion in the speaker
• level of understanding of the topic
• how much investment they have in the outcome
• whether or not they're interested

And the list could go on...

Marketing communications (at least in tech) have mushroomed into these jargon-laden missives that you can't even read out loud easily, let alone understand without really working at it. There's something to be said for using the jargon native to an industry, but when common understanding becomes an exclusive benefit for the "in" community, there's a problem.

Why, you ask? Because people will respond based on their level of comfort—once interest has been established. If the words you use stifle their ability to relate to your content, then they can click and move on to another vendor who isn't so lofty in their communications.

Exposing your expertise and thought leadership are wonderful ways to prove your company brings added value to your products and services, but when your words don't connect with your readers—within the amount of effort they're willing to extend—you're losing opportunities.

Considering that the number of people involved B2B complex purchase decisions is growing, causing sales cycles to lengthen, your content needs to use words that resonate with each of them. This is why developing content nurturing tracks that are focused on how each person involved relates to the project can generate momentum.

If your words can become their words, then they'll talk to each other easily. And they'll be talking about your company and products in a way that allows them to build higher levels of engagement with you. And they'll be doing the heavy lifting—inspired by your words.

So, listen to what your customers are saying—the words they use. And do so before they become indoctrinated into your "company speak."

Yet another reason for marketing to continuously debrief sales for feedback and even ride along to experience the interactions first hand. The words your customers use can help you position your content to be embraced, accepted and immediately relevant. That's what inspires people to reach out to you.

Using words meaningful to them creates marketing communications with pull.

Comments

[dominic]

Hi, this is really interesting and give me some ideas on how to enrich my product :-) thanks.

What I think could be done is the following:

1. spot a sample of clients (i.e people that you know are your clients),
2. extract their LinkedIn, Facebook profiles and the blogs from their profiles (pages are too standardized)
3. do text analytics and extract their expressions either most commons or unusual expressions.

By the way these could be words or "non words" like, do they use structured language ( 1,2,3), first person, complex words, emoticons, reference to a specific youtube video... I have filed a patent about non keywords elements in blog conversations.

If you can do 1, we can do 2 and 3 :-)

Anyway, thanks for the post. I really liked it.

[Jon Burg]

These insights should come from/via automated learnings are not currently built into most social media tracking tools.

There is a such a richness in the multi-touch-point data, that most solutions providers have not yet harnessed the true potential of the information.

[Ardath Albee]

Thanks to Dominic and Jon for joining in.

I agree that we have a long way to go to get the full richness of social media applications. It's good to see some thinking going on about it!

Thanks,
Ardath

[dominic]

@Jon @ Aradath

Agreed there is a long way to go.

There are already things that can be done today. Let's say you market to parents of teens, it's already possible to monitor the popularity of topics like
:teen pregnancy, drug free teens, financial responsibility, college tuition.

It's not yet the words that customer use but the topics they have in mind and can be leverage in a marketing campaign.

Dominique