Why You Must Always Proofread Your Marketing Copy

Whether you’re marketing in print, on a web page, or via e-mail, your marketing copy needs to be clear and easy to understand.
You need to show your professionalism by using the correct words, the correct spelling, and the correct arrangement of sentences and phrases within sentences.
Misspelled words will indicate to some that you lack intelligence. That’s a shame – because many brilliant people don’t spell well. To others it will indicate a lack of attention to detail, and if you are in a line of work where attention to detail is essential, that can be just as damaging.
Depending upon the words and their placement in the sentence, misspelled words can sometimes completely change the meaning of your message.
Consider these examples pulled from church bulletins: “Say ‘Hell’ to someone who doesn’t care much about you.”
“This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.”
Then there are misused words. Those serve as huge “stop” signs in the middle of your copy, because they cause confusion. Your readers have to stop and look again to be sure they understood your meaning.
Yet, we see them all the time. Hear is used in place of here. Wear is used for where. There is used for their. One of the most common is loose used where lose belongs.
Missing words can confuse – or they can leave your readers laughing out loud.
Here’s another example from the church bulletins: “Please place your donation in the envelope along with the deceased person you want remembered.”
Your sentences also need to knit your ideas together in a logical order so they clearly convey your meaning. You don’t want to leave it up to interpretation like this example does: “Don’t let worry kill you off – let the Church help.”
Obviously, errors like these are entertaining, and when they are shared among friends they do no damage. In fact, they might do good, because everyone needs a good laugh now and then.
But that changes when you’re writing for business. Unless your business is comedy, you want to be taken seriously and you want your readers to understand your message immediately. You want to answer their silent question: “What’s in this for me?”
Very few potential customers will call and ask if they don’t quite know what you mean. Worse, some of them will misunderstand and get a message that’s clearly not what you meant to convey.
So never skip the proofreading. And if you can get someone else to read your material before you send it out, do so.
After all, you know what you meant, so you might not catch a paragraph like this one: “Irving Jones and Nancy Carter were married on September 17. So ends a friendship that began in their school days.”