After quality copywriting, quality proofreading is the best thing you can do for your message.
The breakneck speed of marketing and the pace of agency life make it a breeding ground for mistakes that no one catches in a piece before it’s published, printed, pitched or (gasp) presented to a prospect in person.
But then it happens. And when leaders go looking for answers, these are some of the more common ones:
- “Our account managers or junior creatives review the copy before it goes out, so I’m not sure why there was a mistake.”
- “Enough people look at the copy while it’s being crafted, so I don’t know why this happened.”
- “We use spellcheck and AI. Those aren’t supposed to make mistakes.”
- “No one reads copy anyway, so who cares….?”
Let’s look at objections to each of these excuses:
“I have account managers or junior creatives to do the proofreading.”
The ability to give copy a quality proofread is an acquired skill. Like with any role requiring expertise, assigning it to an untrained person is ill-advised. It’s not the same as thinking someone good at Call of Duty would make a strong soldier, but it’s in the same ballpark. And mistakes that slip through can be a massive strike against you.
“Enough people look at the copy while it’s being crafted.”
While they look at the copy, do they make little changes without tracking them or telling anyone about them? And are the reviewers trained to look for errors that most casual readers miss? The hawkish readers out there will find them. And if one of those readers is your ideal prospect. you’ll have shown them that you don’t care enough about your own material to make sure it’s the best it can be. So why should they believe you’ll care enough about their material?
“We use spellcheck and AI.”
Good for you. But neither of those tools are built to add nuance or check to make sure you’re saying what you think you’re saying. Human proofreaders can do that.
“No one reads copy anyway, so who cares…”
David Ogilvy said, “Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them; and sometimes it’s an ad.”
Quality proofreading can be that final check on the quality of the message you’re putting out there. And this is important because if your message isn’t landing, nothing else matters.
How to Invest in Quality Proofreading
You can look externally or hire internally. Regardless of how much material you need proofed every month, looking for an outside parter for quality proofreading is the answer. Three reasons for this:
- Objectivity: Someone outside your ranks isn’t influenced by internal politics or worried about offending the wrong people. An outside proofreader is 100 percent focused on the messaging.
- Time: When you have a dedicated external resource for quality proofreading as an extension of your team, your internal people have more bandwidth to do what you hired them to do. — and they’re not out of their element.
- Protection: Writers can move at breakneck speed to bang content out and know they have expert support watching their backs and keeping them from embarrassing you.
Once you’ve selected your quality proofreading provider, give them samples of work previously done. This will familiarize them with the tone, manner and style of the copy. And if you include a style guide along with the samples, calling attention to the important preferences, you’d be doing them and your reputation a favour.
Finally, it’s critical to find time in your process for quality proofreading. In most cases, your external proofreader will tell you how much time they need to do a good job for you — which is what you want.
Quality proofreading doesn’t take long, and it isn’t expensive.
It’s cheaper than reprinting an entire run because of an error that could have been caught. And it’s way cheaper than managing the PR/legal nightmare of a mistake that led to a misuse of your product and a slew of negativity.
Thinking about an investment in quality proofreading?
Let’s talk about how we can help your marketing department invest in quality proofreading.