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There might have been a time when writers were at war against the use of trending buzzwords in their articles and blog posts. But sadly enough, they seem to have given into the growing power of industry jargon.

 

Just for a quick back-to-basics visit, buzzwords are trendy terms and phrases often used to exhibit style and flaunt one’s knowhow about a specific field, area of interest, and mostly industry. Subsequently, every industry is exploding with new buzzwords and social media marketing has played a key role in encouraging the trend.

 

Buzzword Titles

Image Credit: Sean MacEntee

 

You speak to beauticians and it won’t take you long to identify sensitive as their industry buzzword. Moving to common workplace buzzwords, the list is endless but a few examples include:

 

  • Value-Addition
  • Paradigm
  • Synergize
  • Game-Changer
  • Leverage

 

The finance industry has several overused buzzwords like naked shorts, ankle biter, cockroach theory, and so on.

 

Despite the increasing popularity of buzzwords that are coming on strong in their own fields, industry jargon has its negative impact as well. One type of its repercussions is in the way professionals in the industry seem to get annoyed by the overuse of buzzwords while in other cases, some buzzword terms fail to make sense. But when it comes to content marketing, one of the biggest drawbacks of buzzwords is felt by the target audience and content readers. Whether it is mainstream or the small time online media, excessive and irrational use of buzzwords is becoming common as a means of capturing reader attention.

 

Well, you might wonder how the use of jargon in online content and social media marketing is all that bad. Here is how its adverse consequences occur: Many content marketing professionals create buzzword titles to capture the attention of their target audience. But with corporate jargon, people hear someone use buzzwords at the workplace and they seem to let it go easily. On the other hand, falling for buzzword titles online and not finding enough value in the main content is not something your audience will forget and forgive.

 

The main reason for today’s content marketing being full of articles with buzzword titles is that the creators of such content are oblivious towards the negative impact of their practice. One would expect such social media marketing to come from small time media platforms with a limited consumer base. But the startling reality is that mainstream online media is equally sharing content with buzzword titles and reducing the overall online reading experience for the audience.

 

Why You Should Avoid Using Buzzword Titles

 

On one hand there is too much stress on the importance of catchy titles as they enable you to attract your potential customers and readers to click on them and read your entire content. But on the other hand, it is not advisable to stuff catchy terms to come up with buzzword titles that fail to live up to the expectations they build. Your article or blog post title must reflect your content. It all boils down to how you create the balance for a catchy title that truly complements the inside content that you have developed.

 

Buzzword titles can undoubtedly appear to be exceptional and attractive. However, pairing them up with content of below-average quality is quite a simple equation for a reading disaster.

 

Failure to Deliver

 

Utterly disappointing! This is the most likely emotion felt by readers of incompetent articles with buzzword titles. With this being the audience response, it is needless to mention that buzzword titles make it almost impossible for you to start building long-term relationships with your target audience. Naturally, people who stumble upon your articles with buzzword titles and go back feeling disappointed would not be willing to become part of your repeat readers or consumers.

 

Difficult Recovery

 

The use of buzzword titles gives your content marketing the reputation of good titles with fruitless content. Once your target audience identifies you with this reputation, it becomes increasingly difficult to win them back. This clearly means that the power of buzzword titles is such that interested readers get tempted to click on them. But when they discover content that does not hold any value to them, it damages the online reputation of content owners.

 

Examples: Ineffective Articles with Buzzword Titles

 

Here are a few mainstream and small time media examples of buzzword titles used for content that is unable to live up to the headline.

 

 

The term clickable and clickability are popular social media marketing buzzwords, but the use of the jargon for an admittedly captivating topic has ended up in making it an over-promising attempt. Just as I expected, the main content did not deliver to what it should have, based on its remarkable headline.

 

 

Here is another one of the buzzword titles promising to add value but failing to do so. The content has almost basic information on the field of HR but the use of the overused jargon, value-added makes it important for the writer to give readers with something really inspiring and new.

 

 

The example above falls under the category of buzzword titles because social media marketing is just buzzing with the term Earned Media. As a result, players in the content marketing industry are likely to get attracted to this article. Firstly, this article enjoys the Page-1 SERP Visibility on Google. Secondly, being among one of the buzzword titles, it clearly captures the attention of interested individuals in the topic and theme. And most importantly, the title seems to give out the sense of sharing methods for brands to follow as their earned media strategy. But definitely NOT to my surprise, the article is more informative and descriptive about the earned media and digital marketing. To put it another way, the headline does not clearly reflect the theme of the content.        

 

It would not be wrong to conclude that the use of buzzword titles takes you a step back from the dream of building customer loyalty. At the same time, buzzword titles also shake the existing loyal customer base, making them find other reliable article sources.

 

Share your thoughts below. How do Buzzword Titles impact your content?

 

Persuasion

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