Whether you’re hiring a copywriter or writing copy in-house, your approach to the copywriting process will have nearly as big an impact on your success as the words you ultimately put on the page or screen.
For starters, your approach to copywriting has to be broader than writing engaging prose. As obvious as it sounds, your copy has to have a purpose if it is going to succeed as part of your marketing.
That purpose cannot simply be descriptive – “this is who we are, this is what we do.” Not only does nobody care about that information (at least not early in the buying cycle), but descriptive copy too often does little to differentiate you from your competitors, and hardly ever helps in convincing your prospects that they should engage further.
The old marketing truism about selling benefits not features applies here. As I say over and over, your clients don’t care about what you do, they care about what you can do for them. So your copy needs to reflect and illustrate how your products and services can help them build stronger, more profitable businesses.
Another mistake we see marketers make in their copy is a reliance on flowery language as a substitute for proof. This is particularly true in industries where impacts and outcomes can be harder to measure.
That’s all the more reason to find concrete ways to demonstrate the value of what you do, even if you lack hard data.
In those instances when quantifiable data is hard to come by, you need to step back and think about how you can make your impact more measurable. Most likely, this will require you to work with your existing clients to assess the work you’ve done and the impact it has had on their businesses. Are there ways you can align your interests with your clients’ so that they will share that data?
That can be a scary prospect if you’ve never done it before – what if we’re not having an impact? But it can also be incredibly powerful. Because once you can prove you’re having an impact, once you can quantify what that impact is, not only will you have an easier time winning new clients, you’ll have rabidly happy current clients who want to do more of what you’re doing.
And, of course, this also makes your copywriting job a whole lot easier. No more fluffy language. Now you can create a convincing case in favor of your products and services with an appeal that is both emotional and empirical.
