Language blurbs; free advertising or damaging to the (web) store?

Written by Jelmer van der Linden on January 26, 2017

You see them come along regularly; misspellings in advertising messages that make you smile. Are they deliberate or did the advertising department really overlook the spelling error? Because the misspellings within the advertising message are sometimes so ingeniously wrong, the advertising message is frequently spread on social media. Therefore, you can also consider that not every mistake is a "mistake," but that the mistake may be part of the advertisement itself. With the goal that the advertisement will then be shared frequently on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, among others.

Deliberate spelling mistakes

There are more than enough examples of advertising messages where spelling mistakes have been made on purpose. One example is a campaign by Lexa, a dating website, which consisted of a series of advertisements full of design-and-talking errors. By doing so, the dating site wanted to highlight the imperfections of daters - and that those imperfections don't matter. Through the design-and-tale errors on billboards,Lexa.co.ukshows that they are not perfect either as well as that no one needs to hide their imperfections. Perhaps you should even celebrate these imperfections? In any case, the campaign led to chaos on social media." [caption id="attachment_63336" align="aligncenter" width="375"]

Discourage singles during Lexa's get-togethers[/caption]

Subconsciously making spelling mistakes

On the other hand, there are also organizations that seem to be led on the language front by a bunch of minions (you-know-those yellow critters-from-that-movie-despicable-me). We will not mention these organizations by name in this blog, but below we will highlight an example: [caption id="attachment_63342" align="aligncenter" width="650"]

Would you like a makeover but don't have the money for it? At kruidvat you can get your face removed for 2.99. If you want to see more Kruidvat spelling mistakes, there's even a whole page about them[/caption].

Do spelling and language mistakes matter?

The answer to that is 'yes', nu.nl already headlined once with 'three quarters fall over spelling mistakes in the workplace'. Do these three quarters write flawlessly themselves then? Well no, (almost) nobody does. But that it annoys us is a given. When a (web)store makes mistakes, it looks unprofessional, which makes it lose trust. Search engines such as Google will also penalize webshops that make frequent spelling mistakes, causing them to appear less high up in search results. The reason behind this is that search engines like Google want to know if a website is valuable. A valuable site also means the fewest possible spelling mistakes in the (product) texts. Therefore, always try to have another person proofread the texts before you publish them. It will never filter out all the spelling mistakes, but it will reduce the chance that you will make major spelling mistakes.

Spelling mistakes in this blog?

Even the writer of this blog is human - and humans make mistakes. If there are any spelling mistakes in this blog, please let us know. We will correct them as soon as possible. Do you have doubts about the texts on your own website? Then you can read tips and tricks inthis blogto do something about it.