Poor grammar on websites scares 59% away customers. This is what you can do about it.

Hello, my name is Jim James, and welcome to the Speak PR Podcast. This is a show for entrepreneurs who know that they've got value locked up in their own business. If they can just find ways to communicate that. On this podcast, I'm going to share some tools and some tips, and some theories that will help you to unlock the value in your business by using some of the technologies that companies use around the world. And I should know because I've run my own public relations firm for over 25 years, but I've also run 8 other companies around the world. Today, I'm going to talk about the impact of grammar. And a 2013 study showed that 59% of all people would not buy from a company that has bad grammar on its website or in its marketing materials. The good news is there is some software that can help you to fix it. And today on this show, I'm going to talk to some examples. That we can all use on how to get better grammar. Now, the study in 2013 in the UK showed that 59% of Britons would not use a company that had obvious grammar or spelling mistakes on its website or in its marketing materials, and that 82% would not use a company that had not correctly translated its material into English. So for example, if we're importing product into the UK or into the US, and I think that number is the same if you are exporting, if you would be translating your materials from English into French or German or Spanish or Chinese. It's for sure that if we've got materials, we need to think about making sure the grammar is right. But of course, we're not all writers, and I was thinking about this because my wife, who's from Shanghai, has just started a business and she asked me to look over her website, and she started an Etsy site, and she's importing products from China. In fact, she is working on a company called Teapots Oriental, and it's a beautiful website. Etsy does a wonderful job, and she's been hard at work translating the Mandarin descriptions of these products from the suppliers in China into English, and she asked me what I thought. Now, I couldn't help, because it's an occupational hazard, but to point out one or two grammatical errors, which of course didn't go down well. I was asked to give a positive opinion, not necessarily an honest one. So quickly I withdrew from the situation, but I did introduce her to a service called Grammarly. And Grammarly, it was founded by 2 people, Alex Shevchenko and Max Litvin. And it was founded back in 2009, has become now the staple for many companies, including my own, for grammar checking. Now, these 2 young men, one has an MBA from the University of Toronto. And prior to that from the Vienna School in Austria. And the other one, Litvin, has an MBA from Vanderbilt, but also is originally from Ukraine. He has a degree from the University of Kyiv. These 2 gentlemen have set up a business which now can be embedded into your browser. And into your computer, a Mac or Microsoft-based. And Grammarly helps really to remove the most basic of errors in our text. It can also, though, go further and go deeper depending on the package that we buy. Now, the very basic one can be added onto a browser, and it can check the tone of a message. Before you hit send. I have it now actually in my social media browser bar. It can actually start to send and has little icons to say whether it's a positive or negative or a neutral tone, which is quite nice. Now it also has features where it can, for example, now on the iPad integrate with all the other apps that we use and also on the phone. Which means that the old problem of typing on the pads or on the phones on the go and leaving bad grammar actually can be eradicated. Grammarly enables you to check and to offer alternatives to the way that we've written something. So if we're doing Gmail or Twitter, there's no need anymore to cut and paste it into the application, and it automatically does it. This is new. On Grammarly. So there's a free version which I've been using, and my wife is now using to great effect. It works in English, but there are also features available for business customers. And this I thought was very interesting because one of the issues that I faced as I've worked with clients is that companies will have their own style guides. Just in the same way that they will have their own, for example, colour and design guides for use of logos, companies will have the same way of, for example, capitalising their company name or how they'll write a product. Is it an uppercase or lowercase or half uppercase and half lowercase, for example? Now, this in the past, as I've worked with clients around the world, has led to many a rewrite of words in press releases As especially software will try and automatically autocorrect words. Now, Grammarly for Business enables a company to standardize in the way that one would, for example, colors, standardized text, but also sentences and certain expressions. And it can offer customized and real-time writing suggestions to employees And interestingly enough, with the business and the premium edition, it's even checking for elements like plagiarism, formality, and inclusive language, which I understand now in America is becoming really an issue. Now, I've realised as well that for many companies that are working across borders, You can find yourself with different people in different countries writing, and I certainly find this when mainland Chinese are then accommodating their non-Mandarin-speaking partners, clients, and teammates. They're writing in their own vernacular, and sometimes things are getting lost in translation, and And Grammarly can help with the internal communications as well as the external communications. One of the issues that we face, especially in business-to-business communications, is that technology often has its own terminology and how a company addresses a certain phrase or a certain business problem can sometimes actually be proprietary to that company, because maybe it even owns patents, for example, has a particular way of expressing the way they approach a problem. So with Grammarly Business, it's possible to actually create what in effect becomes a lexicon for the company that's shared via the web with all the members of the company around the world. Make sure that, for example, company names, product names, trademark names are spelled properly and capitalised properly. This works on Gmail, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and even on Zendesk and Slack and Zoho Desk. In other words, it's not just in the word processor because all of us are taking the words that we're writing and, and we're publishing them, self-publishing them internally across groups to meetings, for example, in Zoom meetings, but we're also publishing them externally. And we're sharing them with partners. So this seems to be a pretty amazing opportunity to, first of all, correct grammar problems, but secondly, to start to standardise them across the business and the business units. Now, how much does that cost? The business package for Grammarly has a minimum team of 3 at $1,250 per month or $37 per team. So you're looking at just over $400 US for a team for the year, but that's not a big price to pay for having consistency of grammar. And as we said at the very beginning, if 59% of customers will be scared away by poor grammar, then that has to be a good investment. Now, Grammarly also has a free package, the one I'm using, but if you want to just have a premium package, it's $11 a month. There's another one called Ginger, ginger.com, as in the root, which just costs $7.49 a month, and it's a great Grammarly alternative for Mac and other users. But it doesn't have features like the plagiarism tool, which helps online publishers to fight against duplication. So you want to make sure that if you're writing content, that people around the, around the world are not copying it. Okay, there is an app on ginger.com in the App Store for Macs. It has a 4.4 star rating, but there are only 7 ratings. So Ginger is a much reduced package, but for many people, it might just do the job. There is another one called theprowritingaid.com. That's just $20 per month or $79 a year. So if your concern is mainly pricing, But what you're not getting, again, for example, are things like the plagiarism, the formality, and inclusive language. You're getting more the view whether you've got your spelling right, whether you've got your syntax right on your sentences. There are about a dozen other companies that are offering AI-assisted technologies for helping us to write more efficient and more effective communications. Now, this could be very, very helpful for writing, for example, press releases, if you're not, first of all, a great writer, you're not confident. I have noticed on LinkedIn some people writing either hurriedly or without giving it to a second set of eyes, and I've noticed on LinkedIn some people who are quite senior writing some posts that are plainly poorly written. And it really leads us to the issue of why 59% of people don't trust a company or a person that writes incorrectly. Of course, it's judgmental because somebody could be perfectly well-educated and perfectly well-qualified to do a job but just not be good at spelling. They could be dyslexic, for example, as so many great entrepreneurs have been. But considering how specific the English language is, first of all, it's actually easy to misinterpret if someone's miswritten something. Actually, it could have multiple meanings. So I guess ultimately it comes down to one of trust. It may be a judgment whether we, for example, would work with that dentist or that surgeon or that accountant. That writes things incorrectly, because we may see them as not paying attention to detail or being ill-educated. That's one part of it, but I suppose the other part of it is our sense that if this person is not taking full account of how to write about something, what are they going to do when it comes to things like, for example, the contracts or the product spec? Or the features? Do they pay attention? So it's a question, I suppose, of not only could they write this properly in the perfect world, but have they really paid attention to what they're writing? In other words, it may just be that they're being sloppy, and this may be the fundamental underlying issue why people don't trust companies that are not writing accurately. So with all the technology that's available, it's quite possible to use a product like Grammarly either as our own for free, like my wife is doing for her Etsy account and frankly saving me a lot of domestic grief. We can use this on our browsers or on our desktops. It's quite possibly worth the investment if you're writing across a team, and especially if you're writing across geographies. But just looking at social media and the volume of content that we now write, it's extremely easy to get it wrong. And because spell checkers— and for me anyway, the autofill— will often write things that actually I didn't mean to write, So sometimes the computer is interfering with what I've written, and Grammarly, whilst not perfect, at least creates another checker. In the old days, we might have had a second person to read our copy before we sent it. Certainly that was the case in the old days, back in the mid-'90s when we wrote a press release. We'd always have a second person to read it, but that's not always possible now for issues of time and money. So technology is coming to our aid once again, or sometimes it may not feel like an aid, it may feel like a hindrance. But for sure, we have to make sure that what we write is well-written, both attractive and search engine friendly, but also is grammatically correct. And what I should say there about search engines, of course, is that if our If our grammar is incorrect and our spelling is incorrect, then the search engines will not find us. You write the word rid instead of ride, leave out the E, and if you've got a horse ridding school instead of a horse riding school, you have a very different proposition. So take time to write, enjoy it, But think about the value of checking it. But certainly before you hit publish on anything that you write, whether it's on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, an email, take the time to make sure that you're representing yourself and your company and your team with the best possible grammar. So that gives me a little bit of homework for the show notes to make sure that we've got our grammar correct. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and you can find this and all of our other podcasts at eastwestpr.com. We also have a weekly newsletter which you can subscribe to, and we have a program called Speak PR, which is a mastermind to help business owners to learn how to manage their own PR And to do so cost-effectively without the need for an agency. My name is Jim James. Thank you for listening, and until we do so again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on writing and using maybe a grammar checker if you need it.