A comprehensive guide to marketing buzzwords

Let’s be honest, marketing can get a bad reputation. And do you know what? Sometimes it’s fair.

Marketing folk are known to rely on buzzwords, clichés and jargon to:

• At best: Try and sound cleverer than they are

• At worst: Deceive and mislead potential customers

This dates all the way back to the days of the Wild West, with con men hopping from town to town to sell their amazing ‘Snake Oil’. An all-in-one magical elixir that was meant to cure all ailments, but in reality did the square root of nowt.

Marketing agencies have concocted their own Snake Oil over the years, using this language to fluff up their offering and better sell their wares. We like to think we’re better than that.

So to help you from being blinded by the bullshit, here’s a non-exhaustive list of marketing buzzwords that we regularly encounter, along with a clear explanation as to what they actually mean.

Now read it and weep. Literally.

(We’ll keep adding to this over time but feel free to email us with suggestions too!)

Agile

Being flexible and tailoring your approach, dependent on the situation.

Like any good business should, really.

AOB (Any Other Business)

Anything else that you need to chat through at the end of a meeting.

AKA the very important stuff that wasn’t deemed important enough to be an actual agenda point.

Bandwidth

Whether someone has the mental capacity to take on more work.

Either honestly or dishonestly.

Battleground

A market, category or channel where two or more brands are directly fighting for the same customers.

Best-in-class

Best. It literally just means best.

It’s marketing, not Crufts.

Budget exhaustion

All the money has gone. 🙁

Circle back

To bring something up again that was discussed earlier.

Normally reserved for a sales scenario, where you’re being made to hear something you deliberately ignored earlier.

COP (Close of play) / COB (close of business)

A fancier, more Wolf of Wall Street way of just saying “end of the day”.

Deep dive

A thorough piece of analysis on a particular topic.

Put the mask and goggles away.

Disruptive

Someone who thinks they’re changing the world, but in reality, they’re likely just doing something ever so slightly differently.

And VERY obnoxiously.

Elevate

Make better.

Evergreen content

A piece of content that is created with the purpose of always being relevant.

Alternatively could be promotional material for Will Young’s early music career.

Flagship

A brand’s most important product/campaign/insert noun here.

Flight Plan

A timings plan for a paid media advertising campaign.

No pilot license required.

Growth hacking

Finding less commonly used solutions to grow a brand quickly.

Most commonly used on LinkedIn to promote a secret code for success that doesn’t actually exist.

Guru

Someone who has had moderate success, and now believes they should be revered as some kind of marketing demigod.

Particularly enjoys posting selfies on LinkedIn and preaching about “the hustle”.

Hard and fast (rule)

A rule with no exceptions or compromise.

Holistic

A real corporate favourite.

Looking at something as a whole, rather than individual parts.

Hustle

Working hard, often to the point of unnecessary exhaustion.

Innovator

Someone doing something new.

Or someone who thinks they are.

Often the latter.

Laser Focused

Very focused.

Don’t you dare suggest it’s only a little bit focused.

It is REALLY focused.

OK?

Leverage

Use.

Low hanging fruit

Something that’s easy and/or quick to do.

Move the needle

To do something that makes a proper difference to a particular metric or campaign.

Because everything else is clearly pointless.

Omnichannel

Digital marketing activity that's across more than one channel.

Paradigm Shift

A fundamental change in the way something is understood or done.

Mostly used to describe things that are absolutely not fundamental changes.

Pivot

Change direction or approach.

Can also be shouted when moving a sofa up a staircase.

Scroll-stopping

Content that is so unbelievable that it’ll make someone stop their aimless doom scrolling just to look at it in its entirety.

Silver bullet

A single idea that will magically solve all of a brand’s problems.

Snackable content

A short piece of content.

Please do not attempt to eat your Instagram Reels.

Supercharge

Make better.

Sweat the small stuff

Focus on all of the details.

The opposite of which, presumably, is just doing a bad job on purpose.

Synergy

A scientific concept to make collaboration sound groundbreaking.

It isn't.

It's just working together.

Take to the next level

Make better.

Touch base

Talk to.

Or to just get off to a solid start when playing baseball.

Turbocharge

Make better

(Sensing a theme here?)

WIP (Work In Progress)

Something that isn’t quite finished yet.

If you can't already tell, we take this seriously at Good n Proper.

One of our main aims as a digital marketing agency is to be "refreshingly normal". That means no buzzwords - we talk to everyone just as we would in the street, not like a corporate robot.

To keep us all on track, we have a piggy bank sitting pride of place in the middle of the office. Every time one of these buzzwords slips out (it can happen to the best of us), we pop a coin in that’s worth £5. At the end of the year, we tot it all up and donate the money to a communally agreed charity.

So if you catch us slipping, please tell us!

And if you want to check out the best examples of our content marketing and paid media advertising work, just head here.

Make sure you do it before COP today.