Grammar, spelling and punctuation is not something a lot of people have really thought about since high school. That’s because it’s not really very important, especially if you are in business, right? Right?
Wrong. Because if your business is somehow connected to sales and marketing (not to mention that it includes any form of communication with others) then grammar, spelling, and punctuation are really important. Or, I should say, poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation can have a very real and detrimental effect on your business. Here’s how:
Poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation can dilute your marketing message
You’ve worked hard as a team to identify the right message for your audience. That work may have included focus groups, market research and any other number of steps to get to the point where you know the content that will sell your product or brand.
And then what? You go and produce that content complete with grammar, spelling, punctuation, or even stylistic errors that dilutes the very message that you worked so hard to create. There is a fine line between success and failure in business.
Poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation affects the consistency of your brand message
People look for a brand that they can trust. And a brand that they can trust is a brand that sends out a consistent message. Consistency includes many different things, but consistency in the wording used is a key feature. How can poor grammar, spelling, and so on help with any degree of consistency unless we are talking about the consistency to regularly make mistakes?
Poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation affects brand credibility
Regularly, poor grammar and typos are cited as being one of the main things that puts people off a brand. Landing on a webpage that includes many mistakes leads to a high bounce rate. People simply don’t trust brands that seemingly do not take the time and effort to produce content that is free from errors. What does it say about your brand?
Poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation affects user accessibility
Have you ever considered that not all people who read who you have written will automatically ‘get’ what you mean? There is a number of reasons for this, but an obvious one is that not all people have a fantastic grasp of English. Typos and grammatical mistakes in your content will only make matters worse if that user is literally trying to understand the relevance of every word – whether that word is right or wrong.
And then have you considered that that are millions of people out there are visually impaired and so will rely on assistive devices that will scan and then read aloud your written text. Is your content going to make much sense now?
Poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation can lead to potential customers literally not understanding you. Or even worse sometimes, they may misunderstand you. Either way, it’s not good for your brand, and it’s poor marketing.
How a marketing team can avoid grammar mistakes in their content
There are some easy-to-implement solutions out there, even for team’s who are perhaps working outside of their native language in using English. Proofreading will always help, of course, but what you need is a sophisticated writing assistant. Something powered by AI. Something that not only highlights all manner of mistakes and typos, but will lead to your team actively improving their communication skills. Something like Linguix Business.
As well as being an amazingly sophisticated proofreading and editing tool which can quite literally fix hundreds of thousands of typical mistakes (and categorize them), Linguix Business is a corporate solution that can grow the written content ability of your marketing team.
Set parameters against which all team writing is assesses, ensuring that content is not only free from errors but it consistent in the style and tone that you have set for your brand of for this particular marketing drive. Get a comprehensive array of statistics which assess team member’s writing against these parameters. This can also be useful in hiring too, ensuring that the new member will have the capabilities you are looking for.
The snippets tool allows you to allocate short-cuts for often-used pieces of text, meaning useful phrases, sentences etc can be entered into any team member’s text and the simple click of a button. There is also a templates library which helps team members write content from scratch. These tools quite literally reduce the time spent writing content, ensuring you make a very real financial saving too.
You can also set up a corporate dictionary of approved words, phrases and synonyms which will not only further add to the consistency and quality of message produced by the marketing team, but will further educate your team too. We are talking about continuous improvement to boot.
And soon to come will be Linguix Business style guides which are practical reference tools for your team to ensure that they are writing consistently real content.