The Importance of Spelling and Grammar in Your Brand Communications
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According to American author Jeffrey Gitomer, “Your grammar is a reflection of your image. Good or bad, you have made an impression.” The importance of spelling and grammar in your brand communications is loud and clear in that statement.
All businesses rely on written words to convey their brand message. In the digital space, it’s more important than ever, especially with content marketing. Why? Because it is often the first point of contact we have with our audience.
Your blog articles, newsletters, press releases, emails, and website content reflect your brand. Are you conveying the right message? Or are grammar and spelling errors pushing customers away?
3 Reasons You Shouldn’t Underestimate the Importance of Spelling and Grammar
There’s a reason we learn about spelling and grammar in school. The ability to produce high-quality content is an essential skill that serves us well in life, especially in business.
You’ve worked hard to build your brand reputation. Don’t ruin it by allowing spelling mistakes and poorly written sentences to go unaddressed. After all, the last thing you want is to leave your customers and business partners with a negative impression of your organization.
The importance of spelling and grammar might seem trivial, but it reveals your attention to detail. Here’s how failing to correct errors could be hurting your brand…
1) It Can Affect Your Credibility
Well-written website content is closely linked to your brand’s image and credibility.
No one wants to buy from a company whose website is riddled with spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. It is critical to outline the standards for crafting your brand communications, and you can’t discount the importance of spelling and grammar.
Even though spelling and grammar are not directly related to your offerings, good writing is a must if you want to come across as a professional. The presence of errors can make it seem like you aren’t serious about what you do.
Customers look at the quality of written content on a website as a reflection of credibility. If a website contains several errors, customers can be quick to look elsewhere. And it’s not always a conscious decision—they might get a bad impression and simply decide to click away.
According to entrepreneur Charles Duncombe, who runs several websites, poor grammar and spelling errors cost businesses millions in revenue. In fact, he claims that “a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half.”
Proper spelling and grammar should therefore be included as part of an effective content marketing strategy.
2) It Can Change the Meaning of Your Content
It’s easy to brush off a spelling or grammatical issue as “human error” or a “simple mistake.” But in many cases, it can water down or even alter the message you are trying to convey to your audience.
Is this a cause for concern? Yes! After all, about 99% of your communication on the internet is done through the written word. Changing the meaning of your content can confuse your audience, and that’s the last thing you want to do.
For example, a Twitter post from Verizon featured a minor typo, with “your” used instead of “you” in addressing a customer support ticket. However, the spelling error overshadowed the brand’s commitment to delivering good customer service and support.
Remember that spelling and grammar affect the message being communicated and the way customers perceive that message.
3) It Can Affect Your SEO
If you want to increase your chances of ranking in search, you should be aware that spelling errors and grammatical mistakes can also hurt your SEO efforts. Although you won’t necessarily be penalized by Google, you will have a harder time moving up in the results. That’s because Google prioritizes high-quality content that matches user intent, and poor writing can prevent your site from being seen.
Here’s why…
- When people visit a page and notice a lot of errors, they tend to leave quickly. As a result, your bounce rate increases, and your dwell time decreases. These numbers signal to Google and other search engines that your site is low quality or unreliable.
- The presence of errors can also prevent Google from seeing your page as relevant. Google’s own John Mueller notes that it can be challenging to recognize what a page is about when many errors are present.
Spelling and grammar are vital to your on-page SEO efforts and should not be overlooked.
Mapping Out Spelling & Grammar Requirements in Your Style Guide
Creating a style guide is a foolproof way to keep brand communications clear and consistent. Given the importance of spelling and grammar for brand messaging, it will serve as your reference point for any content you put out.
Here’s what to do…
Consult Grammar Experts
As you build out your style guide, be sure to consult a grammar expert to ensure you are creating an accurate template.
Beyond that, you might want to consider hiring an editor to proofread the copy on your website and brand communications. There are also plenty of tools that can aid you in writing grammatically correct website copy. For example, Grammarly is a great tool to spot any inconsistencies in your grammar or typos that you could easily miss on your own.
Keep Your Audience in Mind
When talking about the importance of spelling and grammar, you can’t be too diligent in your approach. And you need to understand that every brand has a language of its own.
Make sure you adapt your phrasing and the language you use according to what resonates with your audience and your brand. Identify what language guidelines you observe when writing copy to make it easy for your audience to comprehend.
Some audiences prefer slang. Others look down on that and are more formal in their communications. So, go with what your audience will respond to best. But if you are choosing a less formal approach, be intentional about it so that it’s apparent that you aren’t making an error.
Set Capitalization Rules
Knowing when to capitalize—and when not to—might seem trivial, but it significantly affects your consistency in terms of developing website copy.
Right off the bat, you need to establish the rules within your company about capitalization. Once you have specified the rules, be consistent across the board during implementation.
Are you using AP or Chicago style? It’s a minor detail, but consistency will help reinforce the pattern and make your copy stand out as high quality in the eyes of your audience.
Include Industry Terms & Speak Like Your Audience
Your copy might be impacted by your industry; therefore, using jargon is a crucial part of your brand communications. However, there is a fine line between using industry-specific terms and alienating your audience.
The importance of spelling and grammar, in this case, is to ensure that your audience understands what you are trying to communicate to them.
A common mistake with brand communication is to use hifalutin words or industry-specific jargon. All that does is alienate your audience because it creates the impression that you’re talking down to them. So, when you do introduce jargon, make sure to define it for your audience.
Set Number, Date & Currency Formatting
Just as you need to set rules for capitalizing words, you need to think about formatting for numbers, dates, and currencies.
Will you be using symbols, or do you prefer to type them out in words? Again, it is crucial to establish your preferred formatting so that it can be implemented in all forms of brand communication—website, email, newsletter, social copy, and so on.
There’s no right or wrong way to do this. Every brand can choose whatever suits its standard of messaging. Once you’ve settled on a stylistic preference, though, you should stick with that. If you don’t, your copy will look sloppy and unprofessional.
Final Thoughts
Customers put a premium on credibility when choosing which businesses to support. The importance of spelling and grammar shouldn’t be overlooked, as it’s closely linked to quality and credibility.
You can’t say your business excels in everything you do and then fail to deliver in terms of basic spelling and grammar. Just as Gitomer noted in our opening quote, it leaves an impression on your audience.
The effort you put into developing content for your website, social channels, and beyond can make a drastic difference for your brand. So, pay attention to the details!
Want to get a review of your marketing as a whole, including the accuracy and strength of your messaging? Request a FREE Marketing Audit today!
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