Yes, I am arguably launching my blog by potentially torpedoing my career.
A lot of my clients hire me because they’re busy: They’re in a growth period, and they don’t yet have enough work to justify the full-time copywriter they intend to hire. Or they’re hoping to start offering a new service and aren’t yet staffed for it. Or they’re slammed and don’t want to have to turn work away. Or their current copywriter just quit to pursue a career in flamenco dancing and the agency needs someone to handle the extra work while they take their time in finding the perfect replacement. Those are bandwidth issues, and when what you need is a warm body, you can really accept no substitutes.
But if you have the bandwidth to write your own web copy, or social media copy, or content, and you don’t feel inclined to hire a professional copywriter (note: Go ahead and do it. It’s worth it to hire a professional copywriter), it’s not something you can’t do yourself.
Why, in God’s name, would I do this? Why would I use my very first post to do this? Because I realize a lot of people aren’t looking to hire a freelance copywriter anyway. Maybe you don’t have the budget to hire one at the moment. (It’s a reasonable concern — a copywriter isn’t someone you want to go cheap on.) Or maybe you still aren’t completely sold on the value of a copywriter, which… yeah, that kind of sucks, but I’m confident you’ll get there.
And the fact is, good copywriting isn’t easy, and not everyone is suited for it. (That’s just how it is — not everyone is good at everything.) But in any case, it’s better to have pretty good copywriting out there than the alternative. So if you’re not going to hire me to do it, here are a few tips for writing better copy than you might otherwise write.
(You may or may not know me well enough to recognize the irony in me saying this. I’ve said for years that everyone with Microsoft Word “thinks they can be a copywriter,” and now here I am, trying to help that along. The world is a strange place full of unexpected things.)
1. Keep strategy in mind.
I was an advertising major in college. (Yes, it’s a real thing. I was surprised, too.) And one of my first classes in my first year of ad school was message strategy. We looked at audiences, goals, objectives, strategies, tactics. We worked with creative briefs. Because advertising and marketing copy in any medium is meant to be persuasive, and that takes a different skillset from straight-up creative or descriptive writing. Do some Googling (I’ve linked some resources to start with at the bottom of this post) to learn how to figure out who your audience really is, what they really want, how your brand satisfies that want, and how you can communicate that.
And you really do need to be brutally honest with yourself while you’re figuring all that out. Brutal honest is actually one of the most important and most challenging parts of any marketing effort. But it’s necessary if you want said effort to be successful. Maybe you wish your audience was someone different than they actually are. Maybe you wish your brand were appealing in a way it actually isn’t. Maybe you think your brand is about you as an individual, but it’s really more about you as a company, or vice versa. (This is a little less important when you’re writing blog posts and articles — a more personal voice can actually be valuable there — but if you’re writing straight-up advertising copy, your brand’s voice is the way to go.) Be honest in your assessment, and then appreciate that writing your copy the right way, even if it’s not necessarily the way you would have wanted to write it, can be an extremely satisfying thing.
2. Sell your benefits, not your features.
There’s an adage in advertising that you’re supposed to “sell the hole, not the shovel.” (This very tip was about to be called “Sell the hole,” before I realized exactly what that might do to my search results and traffic.) The adage means that when a customer is shopping for a shovel, their goal isn’t actually to own a shovel — their goal is to have a hole, and the shovel is what they’re going to use to get there. When you’re promoting your brand, whether it’s a product or a service or anything else, don’t just list your features. Show your audience how those features will give them what they need, and how you’re the only company that provides it.
It’s not just that your shovel has a longer handle — that longer handle makes digging easier, so your customer will have their hole dug more quickly and with minimal back pain at the end. (Or whatever. I don’t know anything about shovels.) Your company doesn’t just offer face-to-face service from a personal client representative — you provide an expert who can help your clients get exactly what they’re looking for with minimal stress or confusion. Because your audience might be searching for a, whatever, on-demand widget 3D printing service, but they really want widgets printed on demand without having to learn about the art of widgetry and spend time constantly checking in on the widget-printing process. And that’s what you provide.
3. Master the mechanics.
There’s a lot of room within the writing field to fudge things like grammar (e.g., basically this entire post), but before you start fudging your grammar, you have to understand the right way to do it. Know your “to/too/two”s and your “there/their/they’re”s and your “your/you’re”s. Know when to use possessive and contractive apostrophes. Get a feel for commas — judicious comma usage can make a huge difference in ease of reading and impact of your writing. And don’t get impatient — take the time to proofread and grammar-check your work before you take it live, and even hand it off for someone else to look over if you aren’t absolutely sure you have it right.
And don’t think you can get by just outsourcing your grammatical understanding entirely to tools like spell check — it can miss misspellings that are still actual words. (My late grandmother could have told you all about a medical history article she accidentally wrote about “public lice.”) At the very least, turn to tools like Grammarly that can pick up on wrong-word misspellings and spare you such embarrassment. But it’s important that you get it right — mistakes like that can damage a potential client’s faith in you even if everything else is on point.
4. Develop a passing familiarity with SEO (but only a passing one).
SEO — search engine optimization — is the delicate art of nailing Google’s moving target of an algorithm to get to the top of search results. It’s a good thing to keep in mind for web copy (although not for print copy, obviously), but it can be easy to wander into ugly practices like keyword stuffing — and enough complicated-verging-on-unreadable information on the subject is available online to make your brain explode. Skim it, absorb what you can, throw in some 101-level stuff if you’re comfortable with it, but feel free to leave the more advanced stuff on the table. SEO best practices pretty much change on the daily anyway, and some hard-and-fast rules are actually neither hard nor fast. (Length, for instance? No, 1,200 words is not a hard-and-fast rule if you’re just writing your Services page. Nor should you force a blog post to be that long if it starts to sound like a high school history paper stretching to make length.)
More importantly, learn a little about web accessibility. It’s not tough at all to make a few little changes that can make a big difference for people using adaptive technology to read your copy.
5. Tell your story.
People aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being sold to, and they don’t like it. The Internet makes it so easy for brands to have a presence online, and their brand story — their authentic brand story, not something contrived — is a crucial way to stand out. Why should your customers trust you? How can you back up the claims you make? Your story — your history, your business culture, your expertise — connects with your audience in a way your straight-up marketing copy just can’t. (Which is not to downplay the importance of well-executed straight-up marketing copy — it just serves a different purpose.)
When you write about the history of your brand, don’t just make it a timeline — really get in there, open it up, and make it personal. Don’t just tell your audience about your product or service — show them the life of a 3D-printed widget, or share a story from a customer whose business was saved because of your widget 3D printing. Use your voice and your personality to connect with your audience, and that will bring them to you in a non-salesy way.
Bonus #6: When in doubt, hire a professional.
Okay, yes, I’m throwing this in there. If you aren’t absolutely certain of your ability to write good copy, hire someone who is. I’ve spent, good Lord, over 15 years learning how to do this right. You might be nervous about shelling out the money to pay someone to use Microsoft Word on your behalf, but remember that you aren’t paying for the Word, or even for the words: You’re paying for the decade and a half that you don’t have to spend getting it right. Give me a shout if that’s something you’re interested in doing.
You? Does anything scare you or stymie you about copywriting? Or, for that matter, about outsourcing? Let me know in comments.
Brava!
Fantastic!