Speaking Marketing: a phrasebook for busy owners
You don't need to be fluent. You need ten good phrases and the confidence to point.
The first time I landed in Tokyo, I didn't need fluent Japanese. I needed about ten good phrases and the confidence to point. Marketing works the same way. It has its own language, and a lot of it exists to make simple things sound expensive.
Most owners have sat in a meeting while someone talks about "omnichannel synergies" and thought: I'm pretty sure I already do that. You're probably right. You know this stuff. You just call it something else.
The phrasebook
Ten favourites, translated into plain English.
- Synergy
- Working together, but invoiced. Two things that work better together than apart, like your website and your newsletter actually talking to each other.
- Leverage
- Use. That's it. Use what you've already got.
- Ideate
- Think. With sticky notes.
- Funnel (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU)
- Sounds like a vegan café menu. It's the journey from stranger to customer. Top: they've just heard of you. Middle: they're comparing you with the business down the road. Bottom: they're ready to buy.
- Touchpoints
- Every time your business taps a customer on the shoulder: your website, your invoices, your phone manner, the sign out front.
- Omnichannel
- Being everywhere, consistently. A customer gets the same experience whether they call, click or walk in.
- Value proposition
- Why should anyone care? The one reason customers choose you.
- Conversion
- Someone did the thing you wanted. They bought, booked, called or signed up.
- Personalisation at scale
- Remembering a customer's name, ten thousand times. AI makes it affordable for small businesses now, as long as it's done safely: with permission, and with their data looked after.
- Disruption
- Doing what customers wanted years ago, before the rest of the industry caught on.
Nerd note: every piece of marketing you make should know which part of the funnel it's for. If it doesn't, it's decoration.
Why this matters
Jargon isn't the problem. Hiding behind it is.
The best marketing I've seen, from remote villages to global brands, could always be explained in a sentence. If a marketer can't tell you in plain English what they're doing and why, ask them to. You're the one paying for it, and it should make sense to you.
That's how I work. I'm not here to impress you with words. I'm here to help your business grow, in a language we both speak.
If it can't be said simply, it probably isn't that clever.
Every idea here is mine, sorted with Claude's help. Nothing scraped, nothing auto-generated.