While some can be very minor and easily overlooked, others are glaringly obvious and can ruin any company’s credibility when made in important marketing material. What are they? Typographical errors: typos to you and me. By Charlotte Roe, Business Writer.

  

The sad thing is most typos are made not because the person writing can’t spell or use grammar, but because they haven’t bothered to check. This flippant approach to their own company’s marketing material sends out a message to potential clients: ‘We can’t be bothered to get the detail right for our own company, so what makes you think we’ll give a flying frog about yours?’

 

Okay, so that might sound a little over the top; we all make mistakes. But I recently heard someone say that a typo is not a small detail if it’s the only thing that people see. No matter how good your business, how compelling the sales pitch on your flyer, how poetic the introduction on your website, if there is an obvious typo sticking out like a sore thumb then you may as well not have bothered.

 

One flyer that dropped on my doormat this month, from a company that I shall not name, states in bold proud letters on the front “Free month advertising”. Surely, what they really mean is, “One month’s free advertising”, don’t they? On the same flyer it says that the company is so confident that it can improve my business it’s offering “exclusive advertising on it’s website”. They may be confident about what they can do for my business but this misplaced apostrophe makes me less so.

 

It’s not just typos in marketing material that can damage a company’s credibility, it’s mistakes in other correspondence such as e-mails and letters as well. E-mails in particular seem to be littered with typos due to people being over eager to respond, overlooking the need to check what they have typed before they hit the send button.

 

The use of ‘text talk’ in e-mails is another thing that gets my goat. Abbreviations such as ‘c u l8r’ are fine if you are e-mailing or texting your best friend, but for an e-mail being sent from your business account? Surely it is not that much effort to type those few extra letters if it means the difference between someone reading it and thinking ‘fool’ and someone reading it and thinking ‘professional’.

 

As a writer I am probably more picky than most when it comes to typos and the proper use of the English language. In my office we have a policy of checking every piece of work three times: once by the person who wrote it and then by two others as well. 

 

Every day I come across more people who agree that mistakes on a company’s website, flyer or in its brochure can mean they decide to take their business elsewhere. My advice is to slow down a little. Is the e-mail, flyer or brochure that urgent that you can’t take a minute to check it before it wings its way out into the big wide world? If you’re not sure about what you have written, get someone else to look over it. Don’t just think ‘that’ll do’ - because most of the time it won’t.

 

Photo:  Charlotte Roe