Good grammar has amazing power, helping you build credibility and persuade your target market. Do you give it the attention it deserves?
Grammar gravitas.
When you communicate, you want people to listen. You want them to take you seriously. You want your opinion to count.
In the world of written business communication, your words represent your organisation and good grammar gives you credibility.
Why does grammar matter so much?
Business operates in an environment where written language lags behind the spoken, and there’s one rule for speaking and another for writing.
Yes, some people argue that we shouldn’t place so much importance (conscious or otherwise) on grammar in writing. They want the grammar-sticklers to lighten up a bit, take a chill pill, go with the spoken flow — so what if we don’t structure our sentences perfectly if people get the gist?
However, we’re just more forgiving of lapses in spoken language: sometimes our brains can’t cast the optimum sentence before we start speaking and minor grammatical mistakes happen. Using ‘me’ where you should have ‘I’, or saying ‘who’ instead of ‘whom’ are just verbal hiccups. People might notice, and slips like these might interrupt their understanding momentarily, but they don’t linger in memory as the conversation moves on.
Written errors, however, hang around like a bad smell. We consider them avoidable and make judgements accordingly about the writer’s capabilities and trustworthiness.
Raspberry ripples.
Think about an important face-to-face business discussion: there’s no way you’d deliberately scupper your chances of persuasion by suddenly blowing a raspberry. They’d think you childish and question your suitability as a business partner. In the written sphere, poor grammar is the equivalent of that raspberry — it puts your capabilities under the spotlight. After all, if you can’t use grammar correctly, what else can’t you do?
Craft carefully and win confidence.
You put your heart and soul into winning business, so you’d be daft not to make the most of every little thing that could tip the balance in your favour. Your written communications have the power to persuade your target market to believe in your abilities and to say ‘yes’ to the sale. Using grammar correctly builds business confidence — and that’s why it matters.
Our writing team lives and breathes grammar (and air); it’s a vital part of creating copy that gets the job done. Do get in touch if you’d like us to pitch in with your written communications.
Make sure your words don’t fail you. Follow our five proofreading tips to help your business create accurate copy.
Does this sound familiar?
Nowadays, it’s easy for businesses to publish as much copy as they like. Blogs, tweets, posts, emails — they can all be written, edited, and sent from something as small as a smartphone (if you don’t mind taking ages about it).
But, as always, there’s a catch. Your copy is representative of your business — and, as harsh as it sounds, people will judge you by it. So if your written content is full of mistakes, you’ll give a bad impression to potential customers.
The consequences of poor copy.
Knowing this, you’d think people would be careful with what they put out there.
You’d be wrong. The internet’s crammed full of examples of cringeworthy copy mistakes. If you’re going to have a billboard about education, for example, you’ll want to familiarise yourself with the difference between their, they’re and there.
To be fair, when you produce a lot of written content, proofreading everything carefully and effectively is no walk in the park. If it were, then professional proofreaders would be out of a job. It takes time, concentration and commitment.
Thankfully though, there are things you can do to make it easier for you to stop those frequent copy faux pas.
Proofread like a boss (or a professional proofreader).
Based on our experience, here are five steps you can take to help you seek out those errors.
- Change the font to make it easier to spot mistakes.
The more obnoxious the font, the better. It should make you feel like someone else wrote the text — and that you don’t like them at all. Basically, if it doesn’t read easily — that’s what you’re looking for. We suggest this proofreading font.
- Read it once to check that the story works.
The first time you read your work, don’t worry about mistakes — just make sure that it makes sense as a story.
- Read it aloud.
Sure, reading a document out loud in the middle of your office might make you look a bit odd. But look on the bright side — you’ll hear the mistakes and dodgy phrases that your eye would normally skip over.
- Read it again to check for accuracy.
Make sure you have those rowdy full stops in the right places (especially when it comes to bullet points). And remember to check for contractions and apostrophes as well.
- Now read it backwards to check individual words.
This sounds kind of mad, but it’s much easier to spot spelling mistakes and typos when you look at each word without the context of the sentence around it.
Have a little patience.
Remember: cutting the errors from your copy takes time, patience and a lot of hard work, so don’t expect instant results. But stick with our five-step process and you’ll get there in the end.
And if you do want any extra help, we’re here for you. We can write you copy that’s proofed and ready to go — stuff that your business can be proud of.
By Kate Hayden, Designer.
The infographic — get it right and it’s a stylish way to get a message across; get it wrong and you’ll be left with a dog’s dinner on your website.
Turning the information into graphics.
I love an infographic — and that’s lucky because creating them makes up a fairly hefty chunk of my job as a designer here at asabell. I’ve worked on infographics about everything from cybersecurity, to breakfast… to the history of infographics themselves. So I think it’s fair to say that I know a thing or two about what makes (or breaks) a successful infographic.
Working on such a variety of infographics has really highlighted to me why these punchy little visuals are so popular nowadays. Because they’re a simple, quick and fun way to get a message across, they’re great at cutting through the ‘noise’ on the internet and helping you to connect with your customers.
Use them, but use them right.
So yes, you’ll definitely want to use infographics in your B2B communications, that much is clear. But you can’t just pull a great infographic out of a hat. You need to get it right; because your information deserves the best representation you can provide, and because sticking a failed-attempt-at-an-infographic up on your website will reflect badly on you.
To help you create an infographic that earns pride of place among your content, rather than becoming an unsightly waste of space, here are my three top tips for a crafting an infographic that works:
- Be consistent.
When it comes to the design of your infographic, consistency is important. Remember: infographics are about clarity — getting your message across clearly and simply. If your design is messy — with photos here, logos there, and vector graphics all over the place — then you’ll only take away from your message. If you’re working for a big brand, it’s likely that you have brand guidelines — sticking to these is essential and an easy way for your infographic to maintain a consistent style. - Typography is your friend.
It’s all too easy to let your infographic get bogged down in text, but that’s something you should fight. Boil the infographic’s copy down to as few words as possible, and then use whatever typographical tricks you have up your sleeve to make that copy more visual. For consistency, stick with one font (changing the weight or colour if you want to add some flair). - Chuck charts in the bin.
When you’ve got some data that needs visualising, the first thing that comes to mind is probably creating some kind of chart or graph. My advice is to do what all responsible designers do — take your first idea and throw it in the bin. You want your infographic to be compelling, unique and memorable — not the equivalent of what a 13-year-old could do with Microsoft Excel. Take your information and get creative with how you represent it; make it fun, clear, memorable and, importantly, something that’ll resonate with your target audience.
Where to go from here.
Following these three tips will give you a good place to start, and get you well on the way to creating an awesome infographic. But it’s not the whole story. I could waffle on about how you should make sure your infographic is designed so that you can chop it into bits, for use on social media. Or why you need to focus on quantitative information, not qualitative. But I don’t have time for that here.
Get in touch though, and I’d be more than happy to talk your ear off about infographics. Or I could even create them for you (with the help of our lovely copywriters). Either way, I’d love to hear from you.
By Jenny Harbour, Head of Social Media.
Employee advocacy is a vastly underrated tool for B2B businesses in the battle to get their messages to the right audiences. Here’s why I’m all for it.
The power of employee advocacy.
Employee advocacy is getting employees to use their personal social networks to spread their organisation’s messaging, and it’s the fastest-growing means of building brand engagement. By encouraging employees to be ambassadors for your brand, you generate discussion around topics to do with your company that reach far beyond the people your company could normally make contact with.
This ripple effect is extremely valuable; instead of your organisation pushing out the same messages (again and again), the information spreads outwards more organically, from person to person and from group to group. I’ve helped clients to make this happen in their organisations and I know it works. One client, for example, found their bylined thought-leadership blogs shared by employees across their networks got nearly 70 per cent more views than standard ‘company’ blogs.
Advocacy really works…
And there are wider stats to back this up: research shows that a formal employee advocacy programme helps to shorten the sales cycle. Plus, over 60 per cent of people involved in an advocacy programme believed that it helped to attract and develop new business, and nearly half agreed employee advocacy had created new revenue streams.
…so why isn’t it happening?
In an ideal world, employee advocacy would be in the DNA of your company. All your people would integrate thought-provoking, work-related comments across their social media channels —without being asked. And any new joiners would understand that following suit was part of their contract.
But that’s not the norm. It might be that today’s large organisation has put so many rules in place to protect its brand and tone that it’s scaring people off from mentioning their work on their personal social media networks.
Or, perhaps it’s because digital natives are not yet senior enough in the organisation to be able to lead by example. Plus people may be reluctant to mix their personal and work lives too much. However, creating and maintaining a profile purely for work purposes easily gets around that.
Making employee advocacy a reality.
Today, employee advocacy has to be consciously introduced to a company through a carefully-thought-out programme of training, encouragement and ongoing support.
With backing from senior management, you first need to persuade your people that it’s a good idea. Focusing on the value advocacy brings to the sales process is a starting point. And you can back that up with the research that shows an impressive 86 per cent of people who took part in an employee advocacy programme felt being a brand ambassador on social media had had a positive effect on their career.
The next step is to make sure your people are proficient on social media and have appropriate profiles. It’s important at this point to be clear about how to grow connections, how and what to share, and how to stand out from the crowd. It takes so much more than just hitting the ‘share’ button. You need your people to understand how best to spark discussion, and how to handle themselves if their opinions prove a little controversial.
Plus, you need to get people to understand that they’re in this for the long haul; there are no quick fixes. In fact, whenever I run training to get an advocacy programme started, I seem to spend a lot of time stressing the importance of regularity, regularity, regularity!
Find your experts.
Every organisation has an untapped, rich resource of subject matter experts who are perfectly placed to spread your word across their networks. Often, though, these individuals don’t realise their own expertise; you may need to seek them out and make sure they are equipped to start sharing. In fact, these subject matter experts may need support in getting their point across with ghost-written profiles, blogs and social media comments. Then, over time, they will become more confident and undertake more of the advocacy themselves. When working with companies, I’ve seen (and supported) a whole range of competencies and levels of confidence.
The time conundrum.
Once your employee advocacy programme is ready to go, the final hurdle you have to get over is making sure your people have time to do it. Initially, this can feel a bit strange — giving people the freedom to go on social media during working hours. But if you think about it, what you’re aiming to achieve is a fluid mix of personal views about work subjects. So encouraging your people to check in on their social media throughout the day, and to take the time to comment or share is a natural consequence. It shouldn’t be a crime! In fact, for an employee to create and maintain a valuable presence on social media, I recommend allowing a minimum of five hours in the working week.
Are you ready?
So, is your organisation ready to fully embrace employee advocacy yet? If you’d like to bounce some ideas around about this, or find out what services we offer to support advocacy, then do get in touch.
Over the next year the number of articles out there, sitting on B2B blogs, is going to soar. Which means your organisation’s content is going to have to work even harder to reach your target market of business decision makers. So, how can you make your articles the ones that get the attention?
- Find out what interests your audience.
Ask your salespeople and customer service staff about the common questions and concerns they hear from prospects and customers. Listen, and find out what information might appeal to your target market and match it to what your organisation offers. - Use your internal resources.
Your people know your target market best, so it makes sense that they should play a big part in ‘speaking’ to them. Pull together a team of contributors who can use their expertise to connect with customers. - Guard against blogging for blogging’s sake.
Make sure every article puts across a clear point; don’t be tempted to post something that’s all puff and no substance, just because you’ve got a schedule to meet. Satisfied readers who feel they’ve got something out of your article will return for more. - Have a plan.
Step back and think ahead. Make strategic decisions now about what you’re going to be blogging about over the next six months. It’ll make you think objectively about what you’re putting out and it’ll make sure you never get caught short. - Be dependable.
Try to post strong content regularly; this will make checking your blog a good habit for your readership — giving you regular opportunities to ‘speak’ to your audience. Try getting blogs written ahead of schedule so that other commitments don’t get in the way. - Spread the word.
Promote your articles online to support your content. Make the most of your social media platforms to reach your audience wherever they are.
A flourishing blog is a great channel of communication with your target audience and is an important part of our four-phase approach to content marketing. We’d love to have a chat about what a blog could do for you, so feel free to get in touch.
We’ve got an important blogging question for you: why did the Avengers assemble? Obviously, it had something to do with the ruddy great dimensional hole spewing hostile aliens into the sky over Manhattan. But why bring a team of superheroes together? Because they couldn’t tackle the problem alone. Together, they had the right mix and variety of powers to bring down the bad guys and save the day.
Take your pick of the powers
Yes — writing your blog is essentially the same as managing the Avengers, just like Nick Fury (bear with us). You want to capture your customers’ imagination, but you can’t do that with just one type of post. To win the fight against boredom and keep your audience reading, you need to inject variety into your posts and bring together all of your blogging powers:
- Articles
The Tony Stark of your outfit, articles do pretty much most of the work for you because of their versatility. One way or another though, you use them to tell a story. You could announce some great news, show off your expertise or write up a review. Articles also give your subject matter experts the ideal space to jot down all of the really useful stuff they have rattling around their brains. - Listicles
Listicles give your audience a clear, simple way to process all the knowledge you hurl their way. Think Buzzfeed and its ‘27 things only Brummies will understand’ type headlines. Except you can fill these lists with the handy content your audience wants to see, like top tips or ways to solve particular problems they might have. - Infographics
If infographics came in a tin, that tin would say exactly what they did on it. A visual (or graphic if you like) that presents information, like statistics or a how-to guide, in an interesting and easy-to-understand way, an infographic gives your customers the important facts. Probably the Thor of the group because they hit home like a hammer. - Curated content
Sometimes you can show your audience just how much knowledge you have without even typing a word (well, almost). Put together a list of links to content on a particular subject that you think your audience needs to see and you can demonstrate the expertise in your industry that customers read your blog for.
Write with a purpose (or two)
Next time you sit down to bash out a blog post (or write it carefully — whichever really), think about which of these layouts suits what you want to say best. And be willing to copy and paste a bit.
Just because you’ve written an article doesn’t mean you can’t take any stats you’ve used to make an infographic as well. Repurposing your content adds variety and helps you put your point across. It gives you several different ways to use your superpowers (yes, they’re super now) to build the best blog possible.
Creating varied blog posts gives you a great source of regular content to connect with your customers.
Most companies create a video case study because they want their customers to say great things that help them sell their product or service to other potential customers. With only minimal planning the best you’re going to achieve is a showreel of customers saying nice things about you. This isn’t bad but it isn’t great — and you want to be great, right?
Start by choosing your angle and then stick with it.
We recently did a video case study for a large catering company with the aim of winning them more business. But, instead of shouting about how good its food is, (which was the obvious choice), our client realised it would be more effective to get to the heart of the real challenge facing prospective customers — the transition of its people over to the new service provider. So, they took an HR angle and used the video to reassure potential customers of the support available to them when they signed on the dotted line.
Choose a technical partner you can rely on.
It’s difficult to find the right partner to work with when it’s the first time you’ve commissioned a video case study. My advice is to ask to see plenty of examples of work the prospective partner has done for other clients, and judge for yourself how clearly they’ve got the point across. Look at the production values and make sure you’re happy with what you see.
Get the right interviewees for your video.
I know it’s debatable but having a natural, unscripted conversation with interviewees can lead to a more genuine video case study. Choosing confident, bold, positive people can make great footage, but making sure you’re speaking to the right people in the right positions is equally important. When it comes down to it, try unscripted first and then offer a script if the interviewee is really nervous.
Build a strong and complete storyboard.
It’s often a difficult place to start but a storyboard is essential for your technical team and your own sanity! It physically maps out the messages of your video and makes sure your story flows well and hangs together. If you’re holding unscripted interviews you may feel that they can be difficult to fit into a structured plan; knowing what you’d like to come out of each interview will help sculpt both your interview questions and your storyboard.
Location, location… locations?
How many locations you film at depends on your budget, the availability of your interviewees, and how necessary it is that you show several locations. If you’re filming at one place make sure you get the most out of it — record footage at a variety of places, inside and outside. Remember you don’t necessarily have to film at multiple locations to get all the footage you need — if you want people to watch your video, you don’t want it to be much longer than three minutes anyway — so if you film at lots of locations, you’ll end up with wasted footage (and potentially a bigger bill with the amount of time it takes to edit!).
If you’d like to know more about how video case studies can help you uncover and nurture opportunities then give us a call.
Thought leadership — done properly — has the power to do more than ‘just’ win you business. Here are our top five reasons to give it all you’ve got.
- It makes you the voice that’s heard.
When you provide consistent, high-quality content that’s relevant to your audience, they’ll recognise it and they’ll listen to what you have to say. At the most basic level, people want an easy life and, if you’re serving as a useful resource, why would they look any further? - It keeps you close to your audience.
Being a thought leader involves giving value to your audience and this draws positive attention to what you’re doing. It’s a simple chain reaction: value gets attention, attention prompts response and — bingo! — you’ve got interaction, so you can find out what they really think. - It helps you start the right conversations.
Good thought leadership is the ideal resource to support your interactions with potential customers. When you’ve got a point you want to support you can reach into your thought leadership portfolio and pull out something to back up what you’re saying. - It builds your reputation.
Part of working to position yourself as a thought leader is putting in the effort to share all the positives about you with your audience. This means that any hiccups of negativity are less likely to hurt you. - It helps your SEO.
Good thought leadership output fits very neatly into Google’s new algorithms that recognise quality content. Produce and share things useful to your audience and watch your rankings rise.