Are you a B2B or B2C business owner or freelancer? Then you probably heard about copywriters and that it might be smart to hire one, especially if you are not talented in the writing department.
Funnily enough though, copywriters seem to be quite bad at communicating what they actually do. And therefore many people are confused about it. Common reactions when you mention copywriting are ‘Oh, ok…’ and ‘Ah, interesting…’, accompanied by a slightly lost and embarrassed gaze.
Some people ask if it has anything to do with copyright. Which of course is not the case.
Are you also left to guess what a copywriter is exactly? Let me enlighten you!
Action
The first thing you should know is that a copywriter writes copy, which is a piece of text of any length, whether one sentence or an article of 1000 words. The next important nuance is that copywriting is aimed at convincing people to take action.
Copywriting examples are:
- service and product pages on websites;
- newsletters;
- blogs, e.g. review blogs;
- social media posts and social media ads;
- landing pages.
This as opposed to content writing, which is meant to inform. Examples of content are blogs with tips, most web pages, and news articles. Of course, content writing will often indirectly be written to make the audience warm for a certain service, company, product… but never directly.
This blog, for example, is a piece of content, not copy. Of course, ideally, after reading this blog, you will check my page with services or my contact page, and ultimately ‘buy’ one of my services. But that is not the main goal of this article.
The main goal is to inform, give value to my audience, and increase the SEO value of my website. In short, I am not trying to convince you to do anything in this article.
For example, I am not asking you to check out any specific service or encouraging you to contact me. There may be a link to my services, but I am not asking you to go check out what I have to offer.
But of course, it’s a thin line, and sometimes it is not 100% clear whether something is content or copy.
What does a copywriter do exactly?
Good copy is written to connect with the target audience of the client – the company, business or organization for whom the copy is written. Figuring this one out is not always a walk in the park for the copywriter. Sometimes the client has no idea who their target client is or should be.
In such cases, copywriters might struggle to find out who they should write to or in what tone of voice. If you catch my drift. Basically, copywriting may seem easy, but there is a lot more to it than you may think. This includes:
- doing topic research;
- SEO: keyword research, link building, image optimization, and so on;
- interviewing people;
- structuring and dividing copy in sensible paragraphs;
- writing (obviously);
- capturing and keeping the attention of the target audience;
- finding good quality and attractive images;
- proofreading;
- researching marketing aspects e.g. customer personas, the ‘why’, the USPs and the services;
- measuring the impact and conversions, e.g. via Business Manager (from Meta) and Google Analytics.
All of the above implies that a copywriter must not only be good at writing, he or she must also have strong empathic skills, research skills, pay attention to detail and be on top of the latest marketing trends.
And here comes my sales pitch – oh yes, this is a small piece of copy. If you are looking for a Dutch or English copywriter, contact me!
