Why Hire a Professional Copywriter?

By Schalk Lubbe

Quality Communications: How Good Are Yours?

Nowadays your company's reputation is more important than ever. It takes very little for customers to lose faith in a company and to go elsewhere. And it takes long (sometimes very long) to win them back ... if ever.

With the advent of social media like Facebook™, one negative comment about your company can (and will) be seen by hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people within the space of a few hours!

This is why the quality of your communications has to be top notch.

All your communications should build towards your overall content marketing strategy and plan. This includes online copywriting like your website and e-mail campaigns ... but also offline communications like advertising and even letters to customers!

Quality Has to Be Pervasive

Every single piece of communication that a customer sees has to be of the highest possible quality - from advertisements to e-mail communications to letters to web pages. Every piece of text a customer sees is a representative of your company, and therefore each has the task to uphold - no, to improve - your company's reputation.

Your company's website. It is no longer acceptable to put some quick text up on your website just for the sake of "having something up on the internet." In the beginning, when the internet was still new, one of the most important considerations for business owners was at least to have a web presence, while the quality of the content was not that important. Customers considered a company with a website as "progressive."

Today, with more than 800 million websites on the internet (and growing daily), customers have become a lot more discerning.

A site that doesn't measure up to your customer's expectations will have her click away in a second. Quality is now one of the most important considerations when building a website.

And so is relevance.

This, interestingly enough, is true for your site's human visitors as well as for the spiders - both look for quality and relevance.

Other communications. Although we mentioned your website above, that is not the only place where you need to have high quality, professional writing! It is a requirement for all your business communications -- at every single contact with a customer.

Many Fail This Test, However

Not a day goes by that I don't see examples of customer communications with language and / or spelling errors or ambiguous messages.

These things immediately create an image in your customer's mind of a company that doesn't care about quality. This leads to your customer (or potential customer) wondering whether s/he should even be doing business with you.

Their logic goes something like this, "If they don't care about quality, what quality could their customers expect from their customer services team?"

Gone are the days when you could "quickly get something written," whether it is a web page or some other customer communication. Every single customer interaction has to be of the highest quality.

Value of Your Company's Reputation

There is a saying, "How well you write says a lot about you as a person." In the business world, unfortunately, your customers won't think "Ah, this is a poorly written letter from [your company]'s marketing department." No, they are more likely to think that it is a poor letter from your company, with a resulting reduction in your company's reputation in your customer's mind!

Companies that are serious about their business, and serious about the quality of their service, realise that they have to weigh up the cost of hiring a professional copywriter against the cost of watering down the company's reputation.

It is very easy to put a price sticker on the cost of hiring a professional copywriter -- you simply ask for a quote.

But how easy is it to put a price on lost credibility or lost brand value?

You cannot easily measure the cost of one customer who is lost because s/he has lost faith in your company. And it is even more difficult to calculate the ripple effect impact of that customer telling her friends and family that she took her business away from your company because she thinks your quality is not up to scratch.

Although difficult to calculate, the following are all potential results of poor business writing:

• Miscommunication 
• Reduced teamwork 
• Damaged reputation; and 
• Lost credibility 
• Lost revenue 

Going Beyond the Obvious

It is easy to sit down and write some text.

However, presentation, clarity and professionalism are all just as important - if not more so - than the actual words that are used. Together, they all play a vitally important role in the perceived quality of your communications with your customers (and potential customers).

Professional copywriters are trained to know what works in which environment, so the work they deliver to you is guaranteed to be more effective than "just any old writing."

Your business strives to deliver the best to your customers. If not, you won't be in business for very long... Can you then be complacent about the quality of your communications?

Conclusion

Seeing that you do strive to deliver the best to your customers, don't you agree that it makes business sense to get your copywriting done by a professional in order to enhance your company's reputation?

Contact us today to discuss how AlbaNZ Communications can help you keep your communications at the highest possible level of professionalism and quality.

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