Use Your Words (Don’t Overuse Them)

According to the Urban Dictionary, the phrase, “use your words,” when spoken to a child, communicates a gentle reminder to speak clearly and enunciate. For our purposes, we just want to remind small business owners, email composers, bloggers, business writers and marketing communication professionals to choose your words wisely.

What you write and say should engage and motivate, not cause eyes to glaze over. The only time people might want to see or hear phrases like “at the end of the day” and “30,0000-foot view,” is if they are playing corporate bingo.

(Relevant Side Story Here: I once worked with someone who almost seemed to search out these kinds of meaningless phrases. A group of us decided to make up a phrase and try to get him to think it was real business lingo so he’d say it in front of someone important. But, alas, he didn’t take the bait. Dang it. What was the phrase, you ask? “We better get this brook babbling or we’re going to look like a bunch of doe-eyed Labradors.” I’m not even sure what we were pretending it meant, and in hindsight, we realize it was just too long and complex to remember. Not to mention that it wasn’t very nice of us, either.)

To help you avoid the common mistake of incorporating overused words and phrases in your marketing, we’d like to share something we saw at Yahoo! Small Business Advisor the other day: 11 marketing words no one wants to hear in 2013, by Jeff Haden. You can go to the article for the background, but here’s the bare-bones list:

• customer focused
• best in class
• low-hanging fruit
• exceed expectations
• unique
• value added
• expert
• seasoned
• exceptional ROI
• partner
• turnkey

The bottom line is: say what you mean, don’t use marketing speak, be clear and concise and focus on the benefits to your customer.

You know there are way more than 11 inane words and phrases being used by marketers. Share your favorite marketing-words-to-hate below. Maybe we can create our own small business bingo game — and improve some marketing copy in the progress!