The thing that is perhaps the most overlooked by companies when developing a new website or online marketing campaign is the copy that will be used in the project.

In many cases, companies leave writing to an employee who has another set of job responsibilities, but can also write a bit. Sometimes this works out fine (and has with many of our clients); Other times, the results can be disastrous. Having the wrong person write the copy for your project can hamstring you before you even start.

It’s odd that it ends up working out that way. Companies hire web and print designers, photographers, PR firms, etc. to do work in their specialty areas. Perhaps that’s because they’re seen as experts with skills that don’t readily exist in-house. Perhaps these companies don’t see writing as the same kind of skill. After all, everyone has to write most every day, right?

Well, maybe.

An example of the importance of having a professional write your website or marketing copy came to my attention this week. It involves LRMR Marketing, a marketing company closely associated with NBA star LeBron James.

LRMR, according to its website, is “[changing] the sports marketing prism through leveraging sports celebrity and corporate infusion of partnerships.”

Maybe you’re starting to see the problem. That sentence’s clarity is hazy and its grammar jagged.

And the problems mount: “In today’s global watchdog public, it’s easy to have a PR blunder.”

There are other problems with the site’s copy, of course, but my point isn’t to put LRMR down or make fun of them. The site’s text could probably be raised to an acceptable level with just a few hours of work.

My point is that having these kinds of problems undermines LRMR’s credibility, their professionalism, and, since they’re a PR/marketing agency, their ability to market.

My point, also, is not that we all need to be perfect. We don’t and we can’t be. There will always be spelling errors in websites to be caught, areas where phrases could be leaner or clearer, grammar mistakes that get missed (in fact, if you look hard enough, you’ll probably find them in our site).

The point is that you reduce that overhead, and start further ahead of the pack, when you employ a professional writer to work on text for your site or marketing pieces.

3000K has a staff writer for this purpose and works with external copywriters because we strongly believe that excellent site text is one of the details that separates a good website from a great one.

You may not be able to immediately recognize a site that’s been written by a professional, but man can you ever tell the ones that haven’t been.

Thanks to Henry Abbott at True Hoop for catching this one first.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 10:51 am and is filed under Deep Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.