What makes a successful businessperson?
Aside from having good organisational skills, guts and ample knowledge about the industry, a successful businessperson is usually a highly effective communicator.
For business people in multilingual societies like Singapore, this can be an even greater challenge.
But in a highly competitive business setting – at home or abroad – you will have the advantage over your competitors if you can communicate effectively. This is true of your communications with your own team as well as with your clients.
Even rank-and-file employees – the leaders of tomorrow – can benefit from polishing their grammar.
It makes them more reliable and effective in the short term. Long term, it might just be the key to that promotion..
1. Good grammar starts to connect you with international clients
You might have the kind of mastery of the English language which means you have impeccable grammar.
It’s a great start – and you will instantly be ahead of your competitors who don’t have this skill.
But if you want to really connect with your international customers, you also need to create copy which is appropriate to your target market.
It’s the kind of error you’ll often see with the over-literal translation of content. The message becomes distorted – with strange structures and a word order which make it obvious that it wasn’t originally written in that language.
It’s the reason why you should be localising your marketing materials rather than directly translating them.
2. Good grammar creates trust
A sentence which is poorly constructed and littered with grammatical errors is like a rickety bridge.
If your customers visit your website and they spot several grammatical errors on each page, they might form a negative first impression of your business and won’t want to travel with you any further.
After all, if you were in their shoes, would you really trust a company which doesn’t know the difference between “their” and “there” or “its” and “it’s”?
Before posting a blog, sending out marketing materials or even just replying to an email, make sure that you proofread first.
Keep in mind that even the simplest mistakes can make you lose a customer.
3. Good grammar helps you build authority
Becoming any kind of authority figure in your chosen industry makes you look more reliable. Once you gain your customers’ trust, they’re more likely to buy your products or services.
One of the ways to build that authority is to provide detailed, creative and accurate descriptions of your services and products.
With properly constructed sentences, you prove to your customers that you are highly knowledgeable about your niche.
4. Bad grammar can hurt your search rankings
Bing, in particular, meticulously weeds out pages which are full of errors so that well-written posts can be seen more easily by online readers. Poorly-written articles rank lower than those which are grammatically correct.
Although Google’s ranking system is different, one should still be wary of bad content and spelling mistakes.
Keep in mind that high-quality pages offer a better user experience and are much more likely to be shared through social media networks than those full of poor grammar and spelling errors.
Good business communication
Running a business is not just about learning how to manage your finances.
If you want to gain more loyal customers, you also need to learn how to communicate with them efficiently.
Whether you’re communicating in English, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil – or targeting a foreign market or business partner – good grammar is always going to be the key to success.
Do you need to know more about effective business communication in any language?
Contact us 24/7 or leave a comment below to start the conversation.