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Avoid marketing mistakes that will negatively affect your firm’s credibility.
Perhaps you’ve had this experience: You’ve spent hours – sometimes even weeks or months – perfecting your firm’s latest blog post, email campaign, direct mail piece or brochure. You finally send it off into the world, only to be hit with the sinking realization that you’ve made a mistake. There’s a misspelled word, a missing name or an incorrect phone number.
The list of possible errors is endless, and endlessly embarrassing.
Everyone makes the occasional goof, but consistently sending out marketing materials that contain grammatical errors, typos and other mistakes reflects poorly on you and your firm. After all, if you can’t spell clients’ names correctly, can you be trusted with their investments?
Fortunately, using checklists and implementing standard review procedures will help you produce error-free marketing communications.
Test yourself
When it comes to your writing, you may not even be aware of the errors you are making. Are you putting apostrophes in the right places? Do you know the difference between affect and effect? What about compliment and complement, principle and principal, or it’s and its?
If you’re worried that your grammar might be a bit rusty, check out this infographic, which highlights some common grammatical errors that will “make you look silly.” If you’re really feeling motivated, complete this free online course, which will help you learn to recognize common grammatical errors and avoid mistakes in your writing.
Use a second set of eyes
One of the easiest ways to reduce errors in your blog posts, collateral, emails and other communication is simply to have someone review these items before they are sent or published. Ideally, this person should have great attention to detail and be familiar with your firm’s communication and branding guidelines and style. If the reviewer is someone who has not previously been involved in writing or designing the piece, that’s even better, as they will bring an unbiased perspective to the project.
Maintain consistent quality with checklists
Creating checklists of items that need to be confirmed or reviewed is one of the best strategies for avoiding errors in your marketing materials. Your checklists will vary based on the type of piece you are producing (you need to check page numbers in a printed piece and links in an email, for example), but here is a basic list to get you started:
- Document is free of errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation (don’t rely on Word’s spell-check or grammar-check to find all the mistakes for you)
- Punctuation and capitalization are consistent
- Names are spelled correctly
- Professional titles and designations are correct
- Dates and times are correct
- Phone numbers are correct
- Mailing address is correct
- Website URLs and email addresses are correct (test to ensure they click through properly)
- All numerical values are correct
- All links work
- Correct logos are used
- Photographs and images are appropriate for the piece
- Page numbers are correct
- Fonts, colors and other formatting are consistent with your firm’s brand
- Email subject lines are correct
- All necessary disclosures are present
This is by no means a comprehensive list. But using those procedures will help you consistently produce error-free marketing materials that make you and your firm look great.
Megan Elliott is the senior copywriter with Wealth Management Marketing, Inc., a firm specializing in outsourced marketing department services to Registered Investment Advisors and fee-only financial planning firms. For more information, visit www.wealthmanagementmarketing.net.
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