I was three slides into my quarterly review when my leader interrupted me.
“Elizabeth, I see these engagement numbers going up. What I don’t see is how that helps us hit our revenue target.”
I had 47 slides. Slide 14 showed email engagement up 34%. Slide 22 proved our social reach had tripled. Slide 31 demonstrated our content resonating with target personas.
I didn’t have an answer to his actual question. I’d spent three months building a presentation in marketing language while he was asking a business question.
That’s when I learned: translation isn’t a nice-to-have skill. It’s the difference between being heard and being ignored.
The Translation Gap
We speak in acronyms and jargon that mean nothing outside our department. CTRs, attribution models, engagement metrics, omnichannel strategies. It’s our language.
It’s not theirs.
Mark Ritson and Helen Edwards argue that speaking a shared language within a business is key for marketers to progress. They’re not suggesting we dumb down our expertise. They’re saying: if your colleagues don’t understand what you do, that’s on you to fix.
Would you present quarterly results to your board in a foreign language? No. Yet that’s exactly what we do when we bury our achievements in marketing-speak.
Four Translations That Work
1. Ditch the Jargon
Instead of: “Our social engagement metrics show significant uplift after implementing our new content cadence.”
Say this: “We changed when we post on social media, and now 40% more people are sharing our content with colleagues. That’s 40% more conversations happening about us without us starting them.”
If you can’t explain your marketing concept to your non-marketing friend at dinner, you haven’t translated it well enough.
2. Know What Each Stakeholder Actually Cares About
I write the same campaign report three times.
Version 1 for our CFO leads with one sentence: “This campaign generated $47K in pipeline with a $12K spend.”
Version 2 for Product opens with: “Users spent 4 minutes engaging with the feature demo video—that’s 3x our usual engagement. Here’s what they’re telling us about the interface.”
Version 3 for Sales starts: “This campaign qualified 83 leads. Here’s the objection we keep hearing, and here’s the content we created to handle it.”
Same campaign. Three languages. Each team felt the marketing work directly supported their priorities.
3. Lead with Story, Not Data
Instead of: “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. 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
Take the most complex marketing concept you’re working on. Explain it to someone outside your department in under 30 seconds. Their response tells you everything about your translation skills.
Why This Matters
When I revised that quarterly review for our CFO, I cut 44 slides. The remaining three told a story:
- We identified a $2M revenue gap in our product line
- Marketing ran campaigns targeting that specific gap
- Pipeline increased $180K in the segment we targeted
Same work. Different language. The budget approval I’d been fighting for? Approved in that meeting.
The best strategy in the world dies in a budget meeting if you can’t connect it to revenue, efficiency, or risk.
Elizabeth Humphries helps internal-facing marketers translate expertise into influence so your work shapes strategy, not just supports it. With 25+ years of B2B marketing experience, she teaches the frameworks that turn invisible work into undeniable impact through her Market Your Marketing methodology.
