Proofreading your business documentation is essential for two main reasons:
- It enables you to demonstrate professional business competency, and
- It helps prevent miscommunication which can be highly embarrassing but also financially costly.
You will notice a mistake, typo or error in what you are reading, which will either irritate you, make it hard to understand the text, or stop you reading the rest of the document. When there are spelling or grammar mistakes in an email, social media post or eBook, you will find it difficult to take the writer or the article seriously.
If you were to write an article or advert for your business to attract potential customers which contained a spelling mistake, then you would just be wasting your time and money.
As a business owner, it is essential that you proofread all of your emails, letters, promotional materials and anything else that goes out to your customers, suppliers or prospects. Anything that can be seen by the public needs to be proofread to protect your business; you must professionally portray your business at all times.
It may only be a quick email reply to someone as you leave the office at the end of the day, but it is just as important that these emails are proofread, or perhaps even more important, as once you have pressed the irreversible send button you cannot fix that spelling mistake or grammatical error. I think we’ve all been there! How many of you have hit send and then had a horrified expression on your face as the reality of what you’ve just sent sinks in?
A business email will often be the first point of communication between you and a potential new client, and it would look very unprofessional if you had made a silly mistake in the content of the email or even the subject header.
When people receive an email with errors in, they may feel that they are not important to the person sending the email, that the person doesn’t really care about either them or the subject they are emailing about. Poor english usage delivers a poor impression of the business, and the email could even be considered as spam by the recipient.
These same thoughts go through readers minds when they read an article, an eBook, a social media update, a blog post, website content or any other marketing material with spelling mistakes or grammatical errors – does the company even care what first impression they are creating?
One small mistake can detract a reader’s attention from the entire piece, and this can cause the overall impression to suffer. A spelling or grammatical error always conveys a business of carelessness and lack of attention.
A piece of content that is scattered with spelling mistakes, incorrect punctuation and grammatical errors undermines the credibility and authority that a business has worked so hard to gain and can really affect a business and the way others portray it.
The main issue I have seen with proofreading is that nobody really worries about it until it causes them a problem. For example, they may lose a potential client to a competing business as the client’s name was spelt wrong in an email, or the price was published incorrectly in the sales brochure. Perhaps 1,000 flyers are ordered with the wrong company telephone number, or 5,000 business cards are printed with the wrong email address. It isn’t until these marketing materials arrive that you realise they can’t be used and you have to throw them away and start again. When a mistake is made in a legal document, it can cost a business a lot more than some new marketing materials!
Most proofreading errors are not so dramatic but can be worrying for a customer who has not used your services before. Many a time I have seen a website that claims the company has ‘good attention to detail’ and then the website is littered with spelling mistakes and broken links. By not proofreading your content, emails, social media posts, eBooks, marketing materials and other business documents you are portraying an image of a company that is not committed to quality or attention to detail; it rightly or wrongly looks like you don’t put much effort or thought into what you do.
Ideally, you should get someone else to proofread any content that you create, as it is only too easy to overlook errors in your own work.
350VA services can assist you with proofreading any of your advertising material or business documents and communication.