How Grammar & Spelling Affect Your Brand
While we all know how important it is to be precise with the wording of our online content. Small errors with punctuation, spelling, and proper phrasing can be easy to overlook. National Grammar Day reminds us each year to be just a bit more careful with our words in both our personal conversations and workplace projects so that our points can always get across, free of grammatical error.
For brands, the risks of poor grammar are far higher- from appearing unprofessional to downright destroying consumer trust. If your information is valuable, then it’s crucial to do everything in your power to communicate accurately. If your readers conclude that your brand is unprofessional due to spelling errors, that’s a pretty sad reason to miss out on a sale. Scariest of all, studies have shown that grammatical mistakes on websites can reduce sales by up to 50%. That’s why whether you’re a freelance copywriter or writer in any capacity, improper grammar will inevitably affect your business.
The Gravity Of Accuracy
As marketing progresses and more data pours in, we’re able to determine the exact factors that are holding businesses back. While some poor practices involve falling behind with technological advances, spelling and grammar are surprisingly important when it comes to marketing because words are part of nearly every campaign. As a minimum, the average person comes across 300+ marketing messages per day, and unsurprisingly, they only spend about 15 seconds viewing each advertisement. That means that in a sea of pitches and gimmicks, any business has to navigate toward ultimate attention. Unfortunately, many companies devote a great deal of time toward grabbing attention, rather than supplying info once the attention is garnered. It’s up to the wordsmiths handling content management to not only present gems of information, but to devise them in ways that are correct and endearing.
Tools For The Trade
Remember when spell check came out for Microsoft Word in the 90s? It was a mind-blowing innovation that has only adapted over time, and today’s newest version of it would be the application called Grammarly. Whether you’re a freelance copywriter working online or offline, Grammarly is a proofreading sidekick that oversees your content to point out errors. While it’s similar to spell check, Grammarly often catches irregular sentence structures as well, making it an asset for any freelance copywriter or editor. For the copywriters at our marketing agency, Grammarly has become the go-to staple for assisting content management, no matter who the client is.
On the other hand, relying too much on A.I. to point out every single error just isn’t realistic. After all, language shifts every single day, and we can’t expect our computers to just catch up anytime we add “yo” to the dictionary (it’s in there). If you’re working with a marketing agency, or you’re a solo editor, making proofreading a central part of your content management routine is essential. Take some time away from the PC, go for a walk, and when you come back to the screen you’ll almost always find issues or sentences that can be improved upon. Asking a friend or coworker for another set of eyes to check over your important writing also serves as a great barrier against unwanted lingo. No matter what it takes, even if you have to pull a published article back into edit-mode to fix an error you came across, taking the time to assure you’ve got perfect grammar will never yield negative results.
