In content marketing and in journalism, the word jargon has come to be used mostly as an insult. It's a label that people put on unfamiliar language they dismiss as gibberish.

Jargon has another meaning, though, and it doesn't have an inherently negative connotation: the specialized vocabulary or language that a profession or group uses. Often riddled with industry-specific acronyms and colloquialisms, industry jargon is difficult for outsiders to understand.

Content marketers contemplating whether to use that sort of jargon need to note whether their target audience is general and broad, or specialized and narrow.

If you're targeting a general audience (say, you're writing a beer commercial), you should comply with conventional wisdom and avoid jargon. But if you're writing or speaking to a highly specialized group, as content developers are increasingly doing, you should consider embracing jargon.

Here are three things jargon can do for you

Don't avoid jargon reflexively; first consider the following three criteria for useful jargon that can help make your content more effective.

1. Using jargon (correctly) identifies you as an insider, a trustworthy peer of your target audience

Years ago, I wrote a blog post about prenups for chess players. If you don't play chess, you would probably be able to generally understand the post, but you wouldn't recognize the acronyms (ICC, FICS, OTB) or the significance of some references (Wijk aan Zee, Linares, blitz, and lightning chess). You almost certainly wouldn't find the post funny, and you might think it's stupid.

That's fine. It's not written for you, it's written for chess players. And judging by the comments below the post, they think it's a riot.

Now, if you use jargon incorrectly, it identifies you as an impostor, not an insider.

You can't use jargon to fake it. You have to do your homework. Do not use jargon that you don't understand thoroughly. (When I was writing for IT and information security audiences, I used to get an earful from readers whenever I got careless and misused a technical term.) But if you know the terms and you use them correctly, you can better connect with your audience: You're speaking their language.

2. Using jargon makes your communication more specific

For example, if you're writing about "machine learning," a hot topic in the business world, you might need to refer to its "deep learning" subset. Imagine you are writing about a specific computing system, and you have a choice between these two statements:

• This system is designed to perform deep-learning tasks at a high level.
• This system is designed to perform certain kinds of machine-learning tasks at a high level.

The first sentence is more specific than the second.

For a general audience, using the second might help you avoid introducing an unfamiliar term. But for a reader who is already knowledgeable about machine learning, it would be less informative.