People Use Buzzwords as a Box They Need to Check, but Often Don’t Know What They Mean

Our industry is drowning in buzzwords. This should come as no surprise to you if you have read any article, been to any conference or sat through any sales presentation. I hear them in my sleep ‘big
data’, ‘programmatic’, ‘real-time’, ‘earned/owned’, ‘discovery marketing’ and on and on..
But being a buzzword is not necessarily a bad thing.



There is usually a reason people are talking about it (beneath all the hype). Something new happens: there is a trend, a movement in the industry, and it needs a description, a term. But what starts off with a definition often gets fuzzy. People end up using the buzzword as a placeholder or a box they need to check, but don’t know what it means.

People string these buzzwords together into sentences and hope they mean something. The fact that this goes (mostly) unchallenged is a testament to the resignation and in some cases, the wilful ignorance, of members of our ecosystem.

It’s as if people enjoy the cover that complexity can offer in the digital marketing arena.
‘Marketing automation’ as the buzzword du jour

There is one buzzword in particular that has been on my mind a lot lately – one that is perhaps the most flagrant example of a catch-all phrase, the meaning of which has gotten increasingly fuzzy. I’m speaking, of course, of: ‘marketing automation’.

What I would like to challenge our industry to do is not just try to remove the fuzziness from the definition of this particular buzzword, but also rethink the definition altogether. Marketing automation is an area of our industry which is ready for a rebirth.

What is the traditional meaning of the term? You’re thinking it probably has something to do with email marketing or delivering messages to customers you already know.

Marketing automation occupies a very narrow, specific segment of digital marketing-automated, rules-based email marketing with an emphasis on CRM and not so much on lead generation. But now as technology and marketers become increasingly more sophisticated, the notion of marketing automation is accruing new and broader significance.

Marketing automation is now as much about new customer acquisition and top of the funnel efforts as it is about retention and bottom of the funnel efforts. Where it was simple to automate communications to those consumers who have self-identified, setting up rules based on information they have outright told you, it is a trickier task to take those tactics and reach those potential customers who have not yet raised their hands


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