Every company has a brand; part of your brand is how you speak to your customers in written form and in person. Your brand can get diluted if you and your team are not using the same tone and style of writing when communicating with your customers. This also can be the case in your marketing messages. If the copy you create on your website, blog, social posts, and ads don’t match your brand’s well-thought-out tone, these assets can feel out of sync with your brand. This can cause your potential customers to be confused and not buy from you.
In Today’s podcast episode, we are doing a Grammarly For Business Review where we walk you through all the great free features of Grammarly and the Business Features that can make sure all the copy you and your team create stays on brand. Some of the features we review are:
- Brand Voice
- Style Guide
- Chrome Extension and Apps
Links Mentioned In This Episode
Products We Recommend
Grammarly – For staying on Brand with your messaging
Story Brand by Donald Miller – Learn how to speak your brand
BANK Course – Learn How To Speak your customer’s language
BANK Book Why They Buy By Cheri Tree
Links to Previous Episodes & articles
Episode 67- Canva For Small Business Design
Episode 51 – Marketing Based On Personality & Values Bank – Interview With Jen Draper
Episode 37- Strong Brand Identity Part 1: The Customer
Episode 38- Strong Brand Identity Part 2: How To Talk To Your Customers For Better Engagement
Episode 39 – Strong Brand Identity Part 3: Branding Visual Identity
Episode 2 – What is Branding?
Best Youtube Thumbnail Maker – Canva VIDEO
What we discussed
- pricing structure
- how Grammarly keeps you on-brand
- Chrome Extensions
Grammarly For Business Review
*Not ready to give this episode a listen or watch just yet? Below is a rough transcript of today’s episode.*
[00:00:00] Grammar, spelling and punctuation are important when sharing your marketing message. You want a clear, easy to understand message. You also want your message to be on brand and reflect your brand style. You may have used or heard of Grammarly for making sure your emails don’t have mistakes. but did you.
[00:00:22] Also know that Grammarly has features to help you and your team stay on brand while you’re creating your marketing campaigns and doing your copywriting. Yep, it does. And that is what we’re gonna talk about today. So today I’m going to do a Grammarly for business review and how you can use it to create effective marketing messages for your brand.
[00:00:45] Okay. So before I get started, I always have my little bit of housekeeping stuff. we are talking about Grammarly today. So there is a link in the show notes for that plus there’s links to articles and other podcast episodes. [00:01:00] And of course the rough transcript for this whole episode in there.
[00:01:03] So definitely go. Check out the show notes. we are partners with a lot of, software companies and tool sets because that’s what we use day in and day out. And so Grammarly is one of those. So when you use our link to sign up, we do get a very small, percentage back, which we thoroughly appreciate.
[00:01:24] we see it, as you saying, thanks for giving you all this great free content and helping you market your business better. Okay. So.We recently did a review of Canva and we’ve gotten really, really good feedback on can and other software reviews that we’ve done. And it’s mainly because when we review software or tool, we do it from the perspective of how to help your business grow, how to market your business better.
[00:01:51] And so,like the example of Canva where, we recently did it, We look at Canva from that perspective, you could be using it, just to [00:02:00] make really pretty pictures to post on Facebook, to all of your friends, or someone could be using it, to make really cool, fun things for themselves.
[00:02:07] But what we do is we talk to you about how to use it, to create marketing for your business, how to use it for social media, how to use it with your. so definitely, go check that out. If you’re interested in something like Canva, graphic design tool. and if you’re interested in our other product reviews, definitely.
[00:02:28] Go to the website, sign up for our newsletter or send me a message and say, Hey, send me all the links to anything that you’ve reviewed. cuz whenever we publish something, we put that out to our, email community to make sure you guys get it. As soon as it’s, ready for a review. okay. So before I get into the nuts and bolts of Grammarly, I wanna talk a little bit about what on brand means.
[00:02:50] It’s a little bit of an industry term from a marketing perspective. So your brand is not just your logo. That is one piece of it. Your brand is. Your [00:03:00] logo, your colors, your fonts, but it’s also how you speak to your customers and potential customers and your company’s values woven into that messaging.
[00:03:09] So when you have someone build a brand for you, a real branding company is also going to help you figure out how you’re going to talk to your audiences. And then, what we do at Inka mode is we take that even a step further and we identify who your target audiences are. we give them personas so that we know how to talk to them.
[00:03:29] So if you wanna learn more about that, we did a, three episode series on the podcast called strong brand identities. And those links are in the show note. So definitely go give them a listen. So how this ties back to Grammarly, right? If you’re copy the copy that you’re writing, the messages that you’re creating, the social posts that you’re creating, if they’re not on brand, meaning they don’t resonate with your brand’s value and your brand’s messaging, you can create confusion.
[00:03:56] So if someone goes to your website and reads something and it [00:04:00] resonates with them, but then they get an email from someone within the company, cuz. Made contact and it’s not on brand. it creates confusion and confusion stops people from taking that next step. They would rather abandon you than.
[00:04:13] Try to figure out why they feel like, oh, something just doesn’t feel right here unless they really want what you’re going to offer. There is a percentage of people that will just go through that and hope for the best, but a lot of people will stop and put it away thinking they’ll come back to it and they never do so having a cohesive brand, that is on message as much as possible is where something like Grammarly comes.
[00:04:37] And so let’s talk about all the features it provides to help you and your team do this. Okay. I always like to start with pricing first. Grammarly does have a free version, and that’s your basic. set up to make sure you sound, professional. We’ll go over that in a minute premium it’s $12 a month.
[00:04:55] This is where you start getting some of that. branding setup, actually a lot of the branding [00:05:00] setup, and writing styles and that kind of stuff. And then business, which is 15 per person per month. With a minimum of three licenses is where you can add people to your license so that when you create all of these different pieces, we’re gonna talk about here.
[00:05:14] Not only do you get to use it, but then anybody else that is assigned to your Grammarly account with a license, they get to use it too, which is pretty cool. Okay, so let’s go over the basics that anybody that’s maybe experimented with Grammarly understands that it does. So grammar, spelling, punctuation, check, check, check. Really what this baseline feature does is it makes sure you don’t sound like an idiot. And this is so near and dear to my heart because I am horrible at spelling. And, these spell checkers save my life. and Grammarly does the same thing. So this alone is very good for me. It makes sure that your grammar is correct.
[00:05:48] Your spelling is correct that you’ve got punctuation so that your message is clear, and this is important in business, right? Because regardless if you’re talking to a partner, a vendor, a client, you want to sound professional [00:06:00] and this is like the bare minimum, making sure your stuff is spelled right.
[00:06:03] so that they understand you cuz believe it or not, I’ve sent messages through my text message. and in other places where you have a misspelled word and it actually can create confusion. Cause you’re like, what are they trying to say here? and so you don’t want that. So let’s go to the next level up where I think Grammarly really earns its keep.
[00:06:21] and so that’s in clarity, word, choice and sentence rewriting. Grammarly does this stuff for you. So let’s talk about how it does. So having a clear message in your marketing, it’s the most important thing, right? People when they read marketing material and messages, to try to figure out if a product or service is for them, is it has to be short, clear, and concise, and it has to grab them quickly.
[00:06:44] and that’s why this is so important. So Grammarly’s gonna analyze what you’ve written regardless of where you’ve written and they’re gonna make suggestions to word changes or they’ll actually rewrite a complete sentence so that it sounds, concise and [00:07:00] clear. And so our rule of thumb in copyright marketing is that less is more right.
[00:07:05] Use one word instead of three words, to get your point across, you want that little bit of impact and punch and memorability, but it has to be clear first. And so this helps you do all of that. So you do this right to get in line with your brand. first in the, writing style setup area of Grammarly. So you can set up some rules of what’s turned on and what’s turned off around clarity and the ones that we recommend that you have turned on.
[00:07:34] and this is gonna help you with some other setup stuff along the way, too. are these. Few there’s tons in there. I think there’s like 30. but I’m only gonna go over these few around clarity. So there’s adding transition words for clarity. avoid long, hard to read sentences, avoid noun strings.
[00:07:51] And then for my friend out there, Jen Draper, you can avoid passive voice. So even if you don’t know what passive voice is, it’s gonna. Make [00:08:00] suggestions on how to correct it. and then sometimes there’s ways that we write that are just ingrained from childhood. We use certain words over and over again, or we use the wrong words.
[00:08:10] but colloquially, they seem right, but where we’re at. So these are just like bare minimum things you can put in place to get that clarity and conciseness. in place now there’s also other areas, covered inside the writing style too, like inclusive language, so that you can feel. like your messaging is inclusive, if that is important to your brand, that would be a huge one to turn all of those on.
[00:08:34] if you don’t want inclusive language, for whatever reason, you can turn them off. There’s formal language settings that you can even set it up where citations are in there and structured properly for APA. If you’re an educational based business and you have citations, but if you don’t want formal language, then you turn those off.
[00:08:52] so go through all of the options when you’re setting. Your account, the next area is brand tone. So Grammarly has this cool little wizard that [00:09:00] they walk you through to really clarify your brand’s tone and they give you examples to read and you pick them and then it puts together. a basic brand tone and it tells you what tones are on brand for what you’ve chosen and what tones are off brand for what you’ve chosen.
[00:09:16] and then after you see this, you can actually go in and add and delete on brand and off brand tone groups. so for my brand, for Incaa, and for marketing masterminds, we wanna sound conversational. but we don’t wanna sound formal. and we don’t wanna seem too overconfident. So when I went in and I picked and choose, and it pulled a bunch of stuff in there.
[00:09:37] it’s a good way to show tone without having to understand all of the background and psychology behind writing this kind of stuff. So it really makes it easy. So that’s what you would go and you would, set up next is the. and then this combined with your writing style rules that you’ve set up, you are just gonna get better and better [00:10:00] suggestions when you’re writing things.
[00:10:02] Grammarly’s gonna suggest things differently, like use this word versus that word, and it’s gonna grade you and what you’ve written. so that it’s on point with what you’re trying to. the next area is the style guide area. Writing style is part of the style guide area. So we already covered that. But the other part of the style guide is the terms section and what this is, is you can add words that you use frequently that they may not be grammatically correct.
[00:10:28] they may be spelled different than what you’re used to like your brand name, right? Your brand name may be totally spelled different than what, is grammatically correct. You can actually put those in there. so for your brand, let’s say your brand is the first part and it’s hyphened. And then it’s the second part.
[00:10:43] And maybe it’s a combination of words that aren’t normally put together. you can put in the original and say, if you see this, then change it to this and that way your brand name or anything as part of your brand is always done the way you want it to. So let me give you an example. I have a client who [00:11:00] capitalizes the term senior citizen.
[00:11:02] They make it a proper, no. grammatically speaking. It’s not a proper, no, but I’m not the grammar police. So if they want it capitalized in all articles and emails and everything that goes out, that’s what we do. And so we have it set up in there that senior citizens with all lower case should really be senior citizen, upper case on both words.
[00:11:21] And then there’s places to put acronyms too. Like they have acronyms in their industry. That they wanna convey when they are trying to, hire people. There is a certification called C H H H a. And that’s what they’re called. a C H H H a. And so we put rules and stuff in there so that when they’re writing, when we put that in there, Grammarly doesn’t go, no, you can’t use that.
[00:11:42] and it lets us just get through things faster. . And so speaking of getting things done faster, I’d love to introduce you to my friend in Grammarly called snippets. So if you don’t know what snippets are, I think when you do all of this, they’re gonna become your very, very best friend. They’re one of my [00:12:00] best friends.
[00:12:00] So do you ever find yourself writing the same thing over and over and over again in an email, in a text message? if you’re writing copy or if you’re writing, a newsletter, I do. And so snippets save time because you write all of this stuff. Once you put it in there as snippets and you label it and then you can use those when you’re actually creating that content.
[00:12:23] so things like, your core branding messages you could put in as snippets your tagline, you could put in as a snippet. so if you’re creating a social media post inside of social pilot, and you wanna put your tagline in there, you can then just add the snippet from Grammarly and to do this, you just hit the back slash key.
[00:12:40] That’s their default shortcut key, and it’s gonna bring up the menu of snippets and you pick the one you want. The great thing is that if you wrote your snippets correctly and they’re spelled right and they’re grammatically correct. and it’s exactly the way you want it phrased and the way it looks, it’s gonna look that way.
[00:12:57] Every time you use the snippet, which is pretty powerful. Okay. [00:13:00] The other thing they have for snippets is intelligent snippet creation, and this is creating snippets on the fly. So let’s say you’re writing something and you create two sentences that you’re like, wow, I wanna use that over and over again.
[00:13:12] From wherever you’re writing it, you can hit the control S key, and then it will ask you, do you wanna save this as a snippet? You highlight it and then you save it. Give it a name and then you can use it over and over again. So you and your team can then create snippets and use them wherever you need to.
[00:13:28] And this works across the browser extension. I didn’t find a way to get this to work on my phone. I might have to play with that a little bit more, but honestly, the majority of content creation that I do that my team does, we’re all on desktop. Anyway. And then with the business account, you have the ability to create snippets that only you can use.
[00:13:45] So if you’re using them for your personal email and you don’t want your team using them, they’re in a different section and they can do the same thing too. And then you can have ones that are created. Everybody to use. And that’s where your, core branding messages and your [00:14:00] tagline can be part of that community of snippets that everybody gets to use.
[00:14:04] So this is why it’s such a huge time saver. And then your messaging is more accurate because of this too. because of a team member uses a snippet that has been reviewed and approved by you from a marketing perspective, you’re gonna know that it’s. and yes, I did mention Chrome extensions. I’m a big fan of Chrome extensions.
[00:14:23] If you listen to any of the other podcasts with tools, if the tool has a Chrome extension, I’m willing to give it a shot. so I use Chrome. they do have extensions for safari and Firefox. I don’t know how well they work. So if you use those browsers, you’ll have to check that out.
[00:14:38] So in order to use all of these great features that I’ve been telling you about, you don’t have to write inside of the Grammarly tool. Yes, you can. Right? They have a place for you to write. It looks like a word document. You do your thing, but. if you’re like me and you use Gmail or another email system, if you use Google docs, any type of, sheets or presentation, or [00:15:00] if you write directly into your social accounts or you use things like, social pilot to write your.
[00:15:06] Social media posts for outgoing. the Chrome extension for Grammarly will make it so that all of this will work inside of those particular online applications. And it even works inside of WordPress. I write all my blog articles directly into WordPress and having Chrome sitting there alongside with me is invaluable.
[00:15:25] It makes it so much easier to get through a 2000 word. And make sure that it sounds the way that I want it to. And if you use desktop applications, Grammarly does have you covered there too. They do have applications that you can download and use with, desktop. So if you’re a Microsoft office user on the desktop or you’re using, Mac tools like writer or, keynote or something like that, it’s supposed to work with that too.
[00:15:51] I haven’t tested it out. Because everything I use is online because I need it in my pocket with me, the majority of the. And to that point [00:16:00] is Grammarly does have an app for phone and tablets. I use iPhone and I have an iPad. And what it does is it, when you set it up correctly, it actually integrates with the keyboard on the device so that it can help suggest word changes and not just spelling changes.
[00:16:17] Cuz you got a lot of built in spelling changes, but the, all the other stuff that you can. hopefully I have intrigued you in giving Grammarly, a try for helping when you’re creating your marketing messages. So now let’s talk about the next steps you should take in order to really implement this tool with you and your team.
[00:16:36] So first and foremost, if you don’t have Grammarly or you didn’t realize that it could do all these other things besides spell checking, please go to the show notes and click on the link and create your account. You can start for free kind of like figure out where you’re going. they do have seven day free trials for, the premium version.
[00:16:55] So if you wanna check that out too, you. but really to take advantage of like the [00:17:00] writing styles and all the other stuff you’re gonna have to upgrade and then go in and make sure that you set up your writing style so that your clarity is there. Whether you want formal writing or not, make sure you go through that entire list and process it shouldn’t take you that long.
[00:17:15] It’s really user friendly to do, but that’s just gonna make using it out of the gate, seem so much better, Cause just out of the box without sending any of that. It’s just gonna give you the basics. And then also, if you’re gonna do brand tones and terms, make sure those go get set up too, because again, the tool is more powerful.
[00:17:32] The more input you put into it. And then I do recommend that you install the extensions and you, the apps on your phone Because you never know when you’re going to need to, write something really critical on the fly and need, all of that at your fingertips on your phone.
[00:17:48] So here are my final thoughts for you on this subject, how you speak to your customers and the potential customers that are looking to buy from you. It’s really, really important. It’s one of the [00:18:00] most important things out there. it’s what makes your brand stand out. It can differentiate you, if it’s done, right, it’s really powerful.
[00:18:07] Like people can fall in love with your brand. Just by doing this, type of work, like making sure that everything is on brand. And so for us, our clients rely on this to do them for them. it’s important to us. I harp on it with all of my clients. It’s like our messaging has to be, cohesive.
[00:18:24] The brand has to be on point. And so we use Grammarly to make sure. that that happens, right. as much as possible, I’m not saying that some stuff doesn’t come through and every once in a while, things go out there, butwe are writing thousands of words every day and the majority of it is clean.
[00:18:41] And on point. So make sure you listen to the branding podcasts that I have in the show notes, to understand why all of this is important. Cuz I really dive into that deeper there’s four podcast episodes on branding. That’s how important this is. And then I also put in some resources on how to create that brand voice into this show [00:19:00] notes as.
[00:19:00] So that if you really wanna take this on and do it yourself and understand it, the resources are there for you to do it. And I highly recommend you do that. Grammarly’s not gonna do that for you. You’re gonna have to have that knowledge. And then you’re going to have to set up Grammarly to work the best way you can for you.
[00:19:15] but it’s not gonna tell you what your brand voice is. And it’s not gonna tell you how to be on brand. You’re gonna say this is on brand and this is not on. so if you’re not sure you can do this, or maybe you’re like, I don’t wanna do this reach out to me. it’s one of the things that I really love to do is figuring out branding and customer personas and who target markets are.
[00:19:35] And then we can do all of that for you. And then we can set up your Grammarly account for you to make sure what we created for you is in there. and then you can take it from there if you want to, or we can continue on and do it on your behalf, whatever works best for you. so here at INO, we love to give back to the business community and we are always trying to find new and different ways to do that.
[00:19:57] And so we have quite a few. in place [00:20:00] right now, you can do a 45 minute consultation with me. and we can talk about your brand voice. What on brand is we can talk about specifics of Grammarly, whatever you wanna do for that 45 minutes, or you can talk to us about doing all of that for you. So you can get back to doing something else.
[00:20:14] Just go to the website and kuba.com. That’s I N K yma.com and click on the schedule, a marketing evaluation. pick your date and time and we will be together. We have a contact form on almost all of the pages. And so you can fill that out. You can ask a question, you can make a suggestion. That can be where you say, Hey, Audrey, sign me up for one of these emails.
[00:20:37] So I don’t miss any of these product review podcasts. we have marketing masterminds, our most recent, Blog site, it’s a pure blog site. It’s to help you figure out how to do all these things. We go more in depth on how to use these tools, the whys behind it. A lot of articles, a lot of videos, and we’re adding trainings in there too.
[00:20:57] So you can sign up for all of that. so [00:21:00] hopefully. You found this episode helpful. And if you did, please share it with other business owners. our purpose here is to share as much of this, with business owners so that we in the business community can all grow and thrive together. Thanks so much for listening and have an amazing day.
