Have you ever watched someone’s eyes glaze over when you’re excitedly explaining your latest campaign’s impressive engagement metrics? Or noticed the subtle confusion on your CFO’s face when you mention your robust omni channel attribution model? Let’s break down what’s happening there.
Translation: Our Secret Marketing Superpower
As marketers, we’re drowning in a sea of buzzwords and jargon. We live in a world of KPIs, CTRs, SEO, and CRMs, where we “leverage synergies” and “optimize user journeys.” It’s our native language—our marketing mother tongue.
Here’s what we often forget: it’s not everyone else’s language.
I learned this lesson the hard way during a presentation to our executive team years ago. I proudly shared how our “Our content was driving significant engagement” The business leader interrupted with a simple question: “Does this mean we’re making more money?”
The key is this: it’s not just our responsibility to craft compelling messages for prospects and customers. We must also ensure our strategies, metrics, and value are crystal clear to our internal teammates—the very people who approve our budgets and evaluate our impact.
The Translation Gap: Marketing’s Biggest Missed Opportunity
Mark Ritson and Helen Edwards hit the nail on the head when arguing that speaking a shared language within a business is key for marketers to progress. They’re not suggesting we dumb down our expertise. Instead, they’re highlighting our opportunity to translate marketing’s true value into terms that resonate throughout the organization.
Think about it—would you present quarterly results to your board in a foreign language and expect them to just figure it out? Of course not. Yet that’s exactly what we do when we bury our achievements in marketing-speak.
Your Action Plan: Becoming Fluent in Translation
What can we do as marketers to ensure we’re speaking in terms our stakeholders immediately understand? Let’s try a different approach than the typical “best practices” list:
1. Ditch the Jargon (Even When It Hurts)
Instead of saying: “Our social engagement metrics show significant uplift after implementing our new content cadence.”
Try this: “More people are talking about our brand and spending time with our content since we changed our posting schedule, which is helping us build stronger relationships with potential customers.”
Remember: If you can’t explain your marketing concept to your non-marketing friend at dinner, you haven’t translated it well enough.
2. Know Your Audience (Really Know Them)
I typically have 3 versions of the same campaign report:
- For the Leadership: Focused on Inputs (Money/Time) vs. Results
- For the Product team: Highlighted engagement and alignment
- For the Sales team: Emphasized pipeline effects
The result? Each team felt the marketing work directly supported their priorities.
The key is to answer the question that matters most to each stakeholder:
“What’s in it for me?”
3. Use Storytelling (Not Just Data Dumps)
Instead of leading with “Our email click-through rate increased by 23%,” try: “Remember that customer problem we identified last quarter? We addressed it directly in our recent email campaign, and nearly a quarter of recipients were interested enough to learn more. Here’s what they’re telling us…”
Stories create context that raw numbers never will.
4. Practice Translating (It’s a Muscle)
Challenge yourself: Take the most complex marketing concept you’re currently working on and explain it to someone outside your department in under 30 seconds. How they respond will tell you everything about your translation skills.
What if we created “translation sessions” where marketers practice explaining complex strategies to non-marketers, and received immediate feedback?
The Translation Payoff: Why This Matters More Than Ever
If we all committed to becoming better marketing translators, imagine what we’d see:
- Improved communication – Less frustration, faster decisions, and fewer meetings spent clarifying what marketing is actually doing.
- More effective campaigns – When everyone clearly understands the strategy, cross-functional collaboration becomes not just possible but powerful.
- Increased value perception – When others understand your work, they value it more. Period.
- Better cross-functional relationships – Translation builds trust. Trust builds influence. Influence builds careers.
The most successful marketers don’t just need the most technical knowledge or creative brilliance. They’re the ones who can translate their expertise into language that makes others nod in understanding and say, “Now I get why this matters.”
What marketing concept do you find most difficult to translate to non-marketers?
