Can We Please Stop Using Cliché Marketing Words?

This is a rant for all the marketers that write blog posts or speak at different conferences.

I found myself sitting in a chair, listening to a marketer talking to his audience at a business/marketing/social media conference.

He is well dressed, with a presentation in which he has his logo, name, Twitter and Facebook account on every single slide. I was that guy who stood somewhere in the back, charging my phone and checking my Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, SlideShare, Linkedin and even Pinterest account.

Why did I have this kind of behavior? Because I didn’t hear a thing from what that so-called-marketing-specialist was talking about.

What I heard were words like “You should use relevant messages” or “If you want people to buy from you, you should have a great product” or “If you want to have a great marketing campaign, be creative and bold”

But… wait a minute? What is ‘a relevant message’? What do you mean by ‘great products’? What’s a ‘creative campaign’?

And then, in that exact moment I had an idea. I opened my Evernote app and started writing these general words that I heard from him.

By the way, mister marketing specialist guy, thank you for being such a great inspiration for me:)

So I wrote down these words and saved my idea.

Then the days and weeks and months passed by and I absolutely forgot about my experience at that event. But I’ve done my job and I’ve also written a lot on my personal blog and other websites.

I’m guilty too

I thought I had many things to say about what I think about social media marketing these days, how to use visual marketing, why Instagram Stories are a good strategy for marketers and other stuff.

And guess what, after I published those articles and read my personal blog posts too, I was ashamed. Why? Because I had that general language in my writing like my good old marketing specialist “friend” had back in that day. I used exactly those general words that mean nothing.

I wrote articles in which said “Use a relevant message on your landing page” or “Create a great product that people will buy from you” or “Don’t forget to create a good customer experience” or “Create quality content on your blog so you can gain more traffic on your website”

But what do I mean by “relevant message” or “quality content” or “good customer experience” or other phrases that are so general?

Was I too lazy to delve into the topic? Was I choosing the wrong topics to talk about? 60% Maybe – 40% Yes.

Perhaps those words meant something for the reader who checked out the article, but in fact, they’re just some random words we use as marketers to get to get under the skin of the reader. They’re just some words thrown on a page so we can get another backlink or another story to publish on a different blog.

So why am I writing this article today? Why I’m doing this? Why didn’t I keep that in secret and moved passed it?

I made this decision because I want to push myself out of the comfort zone and I want to draw some limits (maybe for myself and for my readers) when it comes to talk about “a good piece of content I just read”.

Yes, I admit, I used these general words but now I want to move forward and try creating a better content for you, my reader, to read something valuable that can help you do your daily job.

And also, please stay away from the content (blog post, video, webinars, slideshares etc) that only tell you that you need to create a great product, send a relevant message and make a better customer experience so you can have a brand like Apple or Starbucks.

We all know what we need, what’s more important is what we need to do to get there.