Perhaps you’ve experienced it yourself. You’ve come across spelling mistakes on a website or in a marketing campaign, and thought twice about making a purchase? I know that I have.

Poor spelling doesn’t reflect well on brand credibility or professionalism. It breaks trust.

People don’t want to spend their hard-earned money with a business who doesn’t care enough to check their copy properly.

Poor spelling will cost your business money

Their vs there. Stationary vs stationery. Your vs you’re. Seperate vs separate. These are just some of the common slip-ups in the English language.

The odd spelling mistake may seem harmless enough, but if you’re making them in key marketing communications – you could very well be turning potential customers away.

And since it takes just six seconds to capture a user’s attention when they visit your website or social media platform, first impressions really do count.

Five expert tips for word perfect marketing copy

So, how can you avoid making costly spelling mistakes in your marketing communications?

We’ve put together five quick tips that you can put into action right away.

1. Spell check and proofread

Sounds obvious, but often when you’re busy it can be tempting to skip this final step. Be sure to check your spellings manually (don’t just rely on your online spell checker – it can easily miss mistakes). And if possible, give your work a final, super-thorough proofread (and/or ask someone else to).

2. Step away from your computer

When you’ve been up close and personal with your work for a long period of time, the words can often start to blur! Take a break and come back to it a few hours later (or even the following day) with fresh eyes, and you’ll pick out mistakes much more easily.

3. Read it aloud

Such a powerful proofreading technique! When you read your writing aloud, you can hear and/or see grammatical errors and rogue spelling mistakes with ease (ones that often get missed with scan reading). Reading aloud forces you to slow down and be so much more thorough with your proofing.

4. Read it from bottom up

This one might sound odd! But reading your work from bottom to top means that as you carefully review each sentence, you can check for context. And in doing so, any errors will jump off the page more readily.

5. Utilise online tools

Some helpful online proofreading tools include:

• Grammarly.com: A clever AI-powered writing assistant that goes beyond spelling and grammar. Grammarly will also help you with style, tone and much more.
• Hemingway App: A smart online editor that will eliminate wordy sentences, and help you write with greater clarity.
• Subjectline.com: A free headline analysing tool, great for email marketing campaigns.

Do you have a tried and tested proofreading tip to share? Join in the conversation on Instagram – we’d love to hear from you!

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