It's an incredibly downplayed and undervalued profession.
We have to battle to prove that what we've produced is better than what the developer or product/marketing manager has written.
Why are we needed? Well, because not only are we wordsmiths who craft sentences to increase conversion, but we can also be:
Creatives
The most obvious is that we're a creative bunch. We can think of great ideas, not just to succinctly talk about your product to appeal to your target audience and fit that particular channel, but also for content itself.
I always say is a mark of a good copywriter is in their ability to write about any subject (convincingly) for any channel while considering the customer journey and touchpoints. This is no mean feat. I'm sure any copywriter reading this has huffed at the thought of getting siloed channels to coordinate.
However, I've written about art galleries in Madrid while in rainy England, I've written about life in colonial India and I've written entire sales campaigns about football, rugby and cricket - despite knowing nothing about these sports. This is all down to creative prowess.
Just because we don't do the colouring-in, doesn't mean we don't visualise what it could look like. Just because we follow a brief doesn't mean we can't think of great experiential campaigns. Just because we know about products, doesn't mean we can't conceptualise content.
Go ahead, give us a chance.
Strategists
Copywriting doesn't just mean writing a text message or a product page, it means strategising content, this means we can:
- Look at E2E customer journey and major touchpoints to maximise the customer experience - so where have customers come from, where are they going, are we enriching their experience or repeating it, are they able to understand what's going to happen next, does it all hang together. God, it's a minefield! Thank god for copywriters, eh?
- Monitor content so it's evergreen - nothing's worse than finding an out-of-date offer on an old page riddled with misleading info. This is a painful process of a site/lifecycle audit, taxonomy, analytics and continuous improvement.
- Be SEO experts so your H1, metadata and keywords are bang on, when all you need is score high on SERPs, achieve a Google snippet, get as many of those lovely links and optimising long tail keywords.
- Define style rules and messaging matrix for consistency and use across channels.
- Guardians of the brand and governance so the content is always of the highest quality, that everyone is adhering to the rules and staying focused on objectives or KPIs.
Analysts
Most copywriters balk at the idea of being an analyst. We're words, not numbers. And it totally proves the right brain v left brain theorem.
The problem with the neoliberal world we live in is everything is binary. It has to be measured. If we don't measure it, how will we know it works? What we've done or continue to do could be a massive waste of time and money or it could be the thing that smashed KPIs and delivers us a massive bonus at the end of the financial year.
I love to argue how not everything is binary, so this is where qualitative research and user testing comes into its own. We can all sit and pontificate about language, behaviour and structure all we want, but if it's subjective and doesn't produce results, then it's just telling, and not showing.
And as copywriters, we know this. We write for conversion. If what we're saying isn't converting, then we need to change it. That's why we chomp at the bit when presented with data that either backs up our argument or knocks us for six when we're wrong. So, we live for:
- AB or multi-variant testing
- Google Analytics to measure traffic, bounce rates and conversion
- SERPs
Psychologists
This might sound like an odd one, but 90% of our job is empathy.
There's the basics - we need to consider what a customer's level of brand and/or product awareness is, what their pain points are, where they've come from and how they behave. It's all about the art of persuasion.
A shift in consumer behaviour means copywriting is no longer the Mad Men concept of "BUY. BUY. BUY", but the Edward Bernays concept of making it acceptable for women to smoke by turning cigarettes into a feminist symbol.
And by using language we can change perception, for example, Apple used to be the brand for computer geeks who lived in their mothers' basements and now it's a must-have aspirational brand, simply by changing the language from what Apple can do for you to how it can add value to your life.
Switching the messaging from functional to emotional is a powerful tool - products don't sell, lifestyles do.
Look at Innocent Drinks. It's an orange juice. Pretty uninspiring, right? Well, with its groundbreaking tone of voice it became the premium, hipster brand we all know and love today. It was socially conscious and it spoke to us - a bottle was having a one-to-one conversation with us.
That's why we need a deep knowledge of the world around us, to know what people are talking about and how they're talking about it, even if we're not interested in it. Our finger needs to be on news and cultural pulse. Social media has made it easier than ever for us to access what's trending; month on month, day by day, hour by hour.
With all these strings to our bow, don't come to us simply because you need a text written or your email subject lines aren't increasing your open rates. Come to us to look at the physical and metaphysical journey, to steer the brand in the direction you need it to go and above all, convert visits into sales.
