Ten years ago, content marketing was still new enough that most businesses hadn’t started investing in it as a marketing strategy. Now, brands of all sizes are producing huge amounts of content as one of their most important lead generation tactics. In modern businesses, every brand is a publisher of sorts, creating web pages, blog posts, social media content, emails, eBooks and all kinds of other resources.
The question is: who’s proofreading all of the content your brand creates today?
The rise of content marketing
Whether you like it or not, content is the key marketing commodity in the modern business world dominated by online interactions. When people need to learn more about what you’re selling, they turn to Google, read online reviews, check out social media pages and watch demo videos – a huge amount of content for almost every purchase decision.
The problem for many businesses is that creating enough of this content can be a challenge, especially when resources are tight. This tends to result in shortcuts being taken – something that normally starts with hiring budget writers and ends with skipping on things like proofreading services.
That’s not a combination you want representing your business: cheap writers who rush through every piece of content to try and make ends meet and no quality control in place. Rushed writers aren’t going to spot half of the mistakes in their writing and even the most dedicated writers won’t spot every mistake. There’s a reason all major publishers have dedicated proofreaders and editors.
So, if you want to produce quality content, get decent writers on board and make sure you have a proofreading services system in place.
Are proofreading services really that important?
The role of a proofreader is to get rid of any mistakes and inaccuracies in your content, but how damaging can these mistakes really be? Well, it’s worth remembering that search engines like Google consider the accuracy of your content as part of their quality assessment, which means too many typos and grammatical errors could hurt your search ranking.
Perhaps more importantly, people reading your content are going to have a difficult time trusting what you have to say if you can’t put an apostrophe in the right place or have basic grammatical errors throughout your content (e.g.: “to” instead of “too”). Even though the best writers on the planet make typos and errors, people aren’t very forgiving when they make their way into the final version of a piece of content.
At the more extreme end of the spectrum, typos and other basic errors can be extremely bad for businesses. Have you ever heard about the missing hyphen that cost the US government $80 million or the Yellow pages forking out $10 million in compensation to a travel agency over a typo in one of its ads?
While most typos and writing errors are innocent enough, there’s always the risk something more sinister can happen when you don’t double check everything your brand says. When you’re publishing content on a weekly basis that tells people how to use products, make purchase decisions or run their business, don’t underestimate the damage a simple typo can cause.
If you need help with creating a proofreading workflow that doesn’t get in the way of everyday businesses, get in touch with our team today.