Old Dog Digital

Digital Marketing Consultants in South Florida.

Category: communication

  • One exclamation mark is enough!

    One exclamation mark is enough!

    Grammar and proper punctuation are extremely important not only because they will make any text in your ads readable and thus understandable to your audience. They are also very important because your ad could get banned by whichever platform you are using for poor grammar.

    No, I’m not kidding. Any ad can be banned due to poor spelling, a syntax error, or excessive use of punctuation signs. Most people think they are excellent at grammar, but they’re not. There are a lot of “rules” spreading around that are incorrect.

    Remember, simple is beautiful. There is no need to use complicated wording when you can say the same thing more simply. At least not when writing ads. A simple text will convey a message more effectively than a complex one. So no fancy wording, please.

    The dictionary is your friend. Use it. We have many tools on the internet that can help us do this. Most of them are free. If you’re not sure what a word means, look it up. Better make sure that you’re saying what you think you’re saying.

    Also, learn how to use punctuation marks. Everybody thinks they are an expert and they are not. A lot of people repeat “rules” they heard somewhere for the use of commas and semi-colons, but most of them are wrong. Don’t do that. Look it up. It just takes a few seconds.

    The most common mistakes people make while writing an ad are using too many exclamation marks and over-capitalizing words. There is no need to use three exclamation marks on one sentence, in the same way not every word needs to start with a capital letter.

    The dictionary is your friend. If you’re not sure about something, look it up.
    Photo by Nothing Ahead on Pexels.com

    Think about how people will look on Google for your products or services. What words would they use? That’s how you should write your ad. Simple natural language is way more effective than over-complicated text.

    You’re not writing a novel or a technical essay, you are writing a piece of advertisement and it should be simple because you want it to be read and understood by the most people possible. Keep your messages simple and effective. Don’t try to say everything in one little sentence.

    If you want people to visit your website, talk about that. If you need people to take a look at your new products, say so. Whatever your objective is, keep it simple. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Clear objectives make better ads and better ads give better results.

    That’s it! Use simple wording for your ads, check your grammar, and don’t over-use punctuation signs and capital letters. Google and Facebook will ban your ad if you do that. If you want to find out more about this, read their policies.

  • Don’t be afraid to ask

    Don’t be afraid to ask

    The other day, a friend of mine was telling me about the kind of conversations he had with his social media person, and he was saying something about not understanding half of what this person said to him. He thought he knew all the terminology, but now he wasn’t so sure.

    He said something about needing more “conversions”, but I realised that what he meant was that he needed more engagement when he explained to me that he would like to have more likes and comments on his content. He was confusing these two frequently used terms.

    Engagement is the amount of time people spend interacting with your content. That includes likes, comments, shares, and all the other possible interactions anyone can have with any kind of content on the internet.

    A conversion is when people perform a predetermined action that we asked them to do, like when somebody clicks on the subscribe button of our YouTube channel, adds an article to their shopping cart, or hits the download button to get our app.

    It’s easy to be confused about these two concepts, but it’s very important to know the difference, especially when establishing the objectives of a digital marketing campaign. Do we want to get more likes on our Instagram account or do we want more subscriptions for our newsletter?

    If you don’t know what something means or you’re not sure how something works, ask your team. They are there to answer every question you mught have. Photo by Katerina Holmes on Pexels.com

    Many times people pretend to understand what you’re telling them because they don’t want to be seen as someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but this is the wrong thing to do because it will only lead to many misunderstandings down the road.

    If you’re not sure about what something means, don’t be afraid to ask. There’s nothing wrong with asking. It’s better to make sure that everybody is on the same page than to later find out that everybody on the team had a different idea of what was the goal.

    Even when everybody knows all the concepts and terminology, sometimes things get lost along the way like we said on a previous post, and people end up understanding something completely different than what was said. Mistakes happen all the time, and you need to be ready to make corrections.

    Is like going to the market in a foreign country, trying to buy some apples and getting oranges in return because you didn’t know the right word for them. You can imagine the frustration anyone would feel in such a situation.

    That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t know something or don’t understand enough about how something works, ask your digital marketing team. They should be there for you, not only to do their jobs but to also answer all of your questions and clarify every little detail.

  • What do you mean?

    What do you mean?

    Sometimes we take a lot of things for granted, like the meaning of words. We think that everybody knows what one word means, but to our surprise, it is not always like that. Each of us could have a different meaning for the same word, which could lead to misunderstandings.

    Think of the word “house”. What’s the picture in your head? Do you imagine a one-floor or a two-floor building? Does it have a garden and a fence? What’s the color on the outside? Each one of us creates a very different image inside our heads. Each one of us gives a different meaning to it.

    Another thing that happens is that we all think we know the meaning of a word. We believe we do, but when we look for it in the dictionary we find discrepancies; most of the time it’s about slight variations, but sometimes we find that words mean something completely different from what we thought.

    This phenomenon becomes very relevant when you’re writing a book, an article for a newspaper, or an ad. Are you sure that everybody will understand whatever it is that you are trying to say? Will the picture inside their heads be the one that you want it to be?

    That’s why you have to do your research. Make sure that you know what you’re saying and that everybody will understand the same thing. Some companies do this for big corporations, but since we don’t have that kind of budget, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

    Words mean different things to each one of us and that can lead to many misunderstandings or even cause conflicts. Make sure you know what words mean. Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

    Ask your friends, your neighbors, or anybody around you that you can get to read your ad and that might help you make sure that your message is very clear and understandable to anybody who reads it. Of course, you will make some interesting findings if you do this.

    What do we do then? You can’t get inside people’s heads and change the way they think or what they understand, but you can change other things. Choose another wording, use a synonym, or add another word that makes it even more clear. Control what you can control.

    I know about a campaign that fell apart after the agency discovered that they were using a word that people didn’t understand. And it wasn’t the case of a little-known word with a strange meaning, it was just that people understood different things. The word was “tolerance”.

    Words are concepts, and each one of us has a unique concept for them. That’s why dictionaries were invented, so we could all agree on the meaning of words. Sometimes we need to use images, font faces, colors, sizes, and layouts to make our message clear. But we will talk about this some other time.