acronyms
acronyms - Abbreviations that confuse website visitors and lower your sales.
Acronyms and abbreviations can hurt your software sales because they confuse prospects. US and CDROM are probably understood by most people, and needn't be explained. But you're losing money if you assume that your users understand techie shortcuts such as Win9x, Win2k, and the dozens of other acronyms and abbreviations that we, in the software development business, use every day when talking with colleagues.
Also, avoid Usenet expressions such as AFAIK and LOL. Confused prospects won't buy your software.
active voice
active voice - The sentence structure used by sales people.
In fact, everybody who wants to communicate in a clear, friendly way uses active voice. The format is "Subject does something to object."
Here's an example of an active voice sentence: "I made a mistake."
Here's an example of a passive voice sentence: "Mistakes were made."
If you're using your website to sell software, get rid of as much of the passive voice writing as you can.
Here's an example of active voice: "You should remove passive voice sentences from your website."
Here's an example of passive voice: "Passive voice sentences should be removed from your website."
Active voice is great for selling. In day-to-day conversation, people naturally use the active voice.
The easiest way to find sentences written in the passive voice is to say them out loud. If they sound awkward or contrived, ask yourself how you would say it if you were talking with a friend. You'll likely come up with the active voice version of your passive voice sentence.
activity stream
activity stream - the movement of information across the social media sites.
To participate in these activity streams on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites, you need to engage. For example, you have to convince people to retweet your Twitter tweets, and comment on your status changes in Facebook.
Be sure to include photos and videos whenever it's appropriate. The goal is to get other people sufficiently interested in your software to tell their friends about it.
adjacencies
adjacencies - in retail stores, putting products next to each other to increase sales.
Creating adjacencies is a merchandising technique that retail stores use to get sell more products. Putting two products next to each other can often get people to buy both of them. This same technique can be used online, too, to increase software sales.
In his book "Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping," Paco Underhill discusses a number of interesting examples of how the grouping might be done -
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He found that book store sales increased when books were grouped by the gender of the buyer. For example, stores made more money by grouping health, fitness, diet, and nutrition books together, along with other books typically bought by women.
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He recommended that a computer store group printers by manufacturer, only to find out that this wasn't the way that consumers wanted to see them grouped. Instead, they wanted to compare, say, $100 injets across all manufacturers. By grouping by price range, sales went up.
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He recommended that children's books be grouped by price-range, only to find that the price of all of these books was so low, that nobody cared about the minor differences between the various prices.
Online, you have to experiment and see what works best. If Underhill's instore experience is any indication, then your first guess about grouping applications might not be the most effective one.
Endcaps and self-standing displays often work well in physical stores. Online merchants need to find ways to replicate the effect.
adjacent
adjacent - An SEO term that means "next to each other".
Many search engines allow you to look for words which appear near each other on web pages. From an SEO perspective, search engines take note of how close your keywords and key phrases are to each other.
ADOS
ADOS - an acronym for Attention Deficit Ooh Shiny
This lighthearted term was created by Peter Shankman in his 2006 book "Can We Do That?!". The phrase is meant to poke fun at the inability of many Internet users to concentrate on any given subject for more than a few seconds.
Software developers need to keep this concept in mind when they're writing sales messages for their websites and blogs. Prospects and customers scan sites, and click anything that might be close to what they're looking for. Make it simple for them to find and click important links on your website and blog.
adversity
adversity - Opportunity in disguise.
All software developers can do a better job of marketing their applications. Don't be discouraged if you're just starting to think about software marketing. Instead, dive in and enjoy it. Marketing is fun. And it's rewarding when you do it right.
advertising
advertising - Paying somebody to say good things about your software or your software company.
Advertising is all about selling more product and making more money. It's not about visibility.
So says Sergio Zyman, former Coca-Cola marketing executive and author of "The End of Marketing As We Know It."
Zyman talks about the Mean Joe Greene Coca-Cola ad. Everybody remembers it. But it didn't sell more Coke. It was a dud.
"A campaign or promotion that doesn't get consumers to buy more of your product is, by definition, a dud," Zyman tells us. "Buy my product. Period."
adware
adware - A software marketing method.
Using adware, developers grant licenses to users for free, and users agree to let banner or text ads appear on the software screens.
In the late 1990's, adware was touted as the revolution that would eliminate both shareware and shelfware. Privacy concerns and worries over spyware have all but eliminated adware as a marketing method for laptop and desktop software.
According to a report from Borrell Associates, spending for in-app advertising for mobile applications was $305 million US dollars in 2010. They forecast $685 million in 2011 for advertising delivered by mobile applications, and $8 billion by 2015.
So, yesterday's failed marketing method may prove to be tomorrow's huge success.
Software Marketing Glossary
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