Capital Punishment for Small Businesses

Did the headline intrigue you?

I thought it might.

“So what is he talking about here?”, I hear you say.

No it’s not a new policy for some right-wing political manifesto in the run up to the general election. This article is about small businesses who are inadvertently punishing themselves and their sales figures.

Let me explain with a simple demonstration…

Pick up your local newspaper and turn to the classified advertisements; you know, the section with all the ads for plumbers, gardeners, aerial installers and handymen. Make a quick mental note of how many of them have advertisements with everything, or almost everything written in CAPITALS. Now open your national newspaper and find a few advertisements for large, High Street brands. How many of those large companies are using CAPITALS to the same degree in their advertising?

My point here is simple; research has found that as human beings, we are able to read lower case text quickly because our brains remember the shapes of words – we see words and recognise them very quickly, simply because of their physical shape. However, when something is written in capitals the shape of the words is lost; they all become uniform. The result is that we find it much harder to read them and as a result, our reading speed and concentration levels both drop dramatically.

Think about it… if you owned a business, would you want people to read your advertisements quickly and assimilate what you have to say easily, or would you want to make it as hard as possible for them to comprehend your message?

OK, so that’s a no-brainer.

So, for all you small business owners out there, do yourselves a big favour and learn a trick used all the time by big business (and one they are using right under your nose); – write your advertisements in lower case text. Using a capital letter to start a new sentence is OK, and so is capitalising the first letter of each word in a headline or attention grabber, (though neither are 100% necessary when writing advertising copy), but the rest should all be lower case. It will improve readability, improve comprehension and make reading your adverts quicker for potential customers. In turn, this should reflect in your conversion rates and ultimately, your bottom line. 

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