Like it or not, we weren’t all born as spelling bee champions.
In this world of text messaging and social media, precision in language has often been replaced by brevity. As long as the meaning gets across, we’re doing alright.
But then it comes time to write some content for your website and it’s a whole new ballgame.
Surprisingly often, the task of preparing content for a website is no more than an afterthought, despite the fact that it is the vehicle for communicating to your clients what they are getting and convincing them why they should get it.
And whether it’s the crush of hitting the deadline or simple carelessness, typos do happen.
Close counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. But not in spelling.
How do you want customers to perceive your brand?
The priority may be different depending on the type of business, but odds are we all want to come across as credible, professional, capable and precise.
A couple of typos can quickly shatter that perception.
After all, if you can’t even make sure your own content is mistake-free, why should a client expect top level service?
Even a little mistake can cause a reader to lose a bit of trust in your brand. At worst, an egregious mistake can turn into an embarrassing mishap that goes viral and erodes confidence on a larger scale. It’s certainly happened before and it will happen again.
Take, for example, the impact of a typo in a digital marketing campaign. You invest thousands of dollars into online ads to push customers to your business.
And then a couple weeks later, you find a critical typo in the ad content.
So now you’ve been spending hundreds of dollars a day to prove to thousands of viewers that your company doesn’t pay attention to the details.
Oops.
The challenge of relying on those squiggly red lines
Modern spell checkers are damn good. Instead of spending three hours in grammar class trying to learn when to use “affect” instead of “effect”, you can simply hammer in whichever one you want and wait for the squiggly red line to reveal the truth.
Piece of cake, right?
Well…
Sometimes the English language is a bit too tricky for a computer program to know what’s going on. Selecting “Correct All” won’t guarantee a mistake-free selection of content.
If you want full certainty, someone is gonna have to get in there and do the dirty work of proofreading.
But as we read above, investing a couple minutes to make sure your content is error-free is worth the time when balanced against the damage your brand could take from a handful of glaring or embarrassing errors.
