I have the same conversation with my dad about once a month. 

Him: How’s work?
Me: Oh, it’s good! Pretty busy right now. 
Him: That’s good. Are most of your clients from Austin?
Me: Some are, but I’ve got some across the country and I’ve worked with people around the world. I worked with one restaurant in New Zealand!
Him: Wow, how do they find you?
Me: Mostly through my website. 
Him: And you’re writing…what exactly?
Me: Websites, emails, brochures. You know, general marketing materials. 
Him, not absorbing a word: Well that’s neat, and I’m proud of you for starting your own business and making it work. 

And scene. 

I love my dad, and I appreciate him asking. But no matter how many times I tell him, he’ll never quite get what I do for a living. 

So we will repeat that conversation nearly verbatim ad infinitum. 

He’s not alone. When I tell people I’m a copywriter, they either look at me blankly or say “like legal copyright?” 

So it makes sense to explain…what is a copywriter?

The Basic One-Line Overview

Here’s my definition of a copywriter. 

Copywriter: A person who writes marketing or sales language (also known as copy) with the purpose of getting the reader to take an action. 

OFTEN that action is making a purchase. But it could also be…

• Signing up for an email list
• Signing up for text alerts
• Subscribing/following a social channel
• Signing a petition
• Making a donation
• Answering a question/surveys about demographics, product features, or customer experience
• Leaving a review
• Attending a webinar
• Downloading a lead magnet, like an ebook
• And anything else you might ask a prospect or customer to do

Types of Copy

So where can one find this special flavor of action-oriented writing? I’m so glad you asked.

Here is a partial list of the places that copy shows up:

• Websites
• Product descriptions
• Sales sheets
• Emails
• Sales/marketing brochures
• Online ads
• Billboards 
• Print ads
• Direct mail
• Sales and product catalogs
• Press releases
• Sales presentations and pitch decks
• Trade show materials
• Coupons
• Commercial scripts
• Radio ads
• SMS/Text marketing
• In-store signage
• Event invitations
• Fundraising letters
• Referral program sign-ups
• Video descriptions

That’s…a lot of copy. 

What about blogs?

Some copywriters draw a hard line at blogs, considering them “content” rather than copy that asks people to take an action. 

But I (and many others) consider blogs to be more of a hybrid between copy and content. Yes, the bulk of the blog may be informational or entertainment-focused. But most blogs also include a call to action, like shoppable links throughout the blog or an invitation to sign up for an email list in the footer. 

Personally, I think they’re part of the greater marketing strategy universe, and I’m happy to write them. 

And social media content?

Like blogs, social media captions live in the nebulous in-between. Some are just for brand building or information, but others ask readers to take a definite action. 

And if you already have a copywriter helping with your marketing, it promote a more cohesive voice and strategy to have the same person write social media captions. Just keep in mind that social media strategy is its own unique beast, and many copywriters (like this one) are not experts that particular area.  

Even more types of copy-adjacent content

Like blogs and social media content, there are other places where this kind of hybrid content appears, and which you may wish to outsource to a copywriter (or at least get them to audit it for clarity, voice, and effective calls to action). 

These are your…

• White papers and case studies
• Video scripts
• Industry or annual reports
• E-books and lead magnets
• Explainer videos
• User guides
• Podcast show notes and descriptions
• Chatbots

How the Sausage Is Made

So we’ve clarified what the end product of copywriting is. But how do we get there? 

There are many steps between hiring a copywriter and getting your deliverables back.

The Research Stage

Every copy project starts with research. 

The type and amount will depend on multiple factors, like how established a brand is, how familiar the writer is with the market, and how long the client and copywriter have been working together.

But here’s what might be included: 

Client Interviews and Questionnaires

There’s no better expert about a brand than the owner. 

Video interviews and questionnaires let the copywriter get at the meat of who your brand is and what you do better than anyone else. It also gives us valuable background information into your business origins, your flagship products or services, and your values. 

We’ll also discuss your customers, looking for key insights into your customer demographics, pain points, and stages of awareness. And we’ll talk about brand voice and tone, so that the language feels authentic to your business. 

This is the starting point for every new client project I do! 

Customer Surveys and Interviews

While the owner or manager will have valuable information, the owner is not the intended audience. Your prospects and customers are. So next, we need to talk to them. 

There are multiple ways to do this, like thank you page surveys, email surveys, social media polls, and one-on-one interviews. 

Talking directly to the target audience is the best way to understand who they are, what they want, and how your brand can provide it. 

What if you’re a brand new business that doesn’t have any customers yet? In that case, we can seek out people in your anticipated target market and offer them something small, like a discount on a future purchase or a few dollars on a gift card, in exchange for answering questions about a hypothetical good or service. A well-targeted social media ad can be great for this! 

Review Mining

This is another excellent source of information from your customers. 

Reviews give you an unfiltered view of what your customers think of your brand, product, and services, in their own words. 

For Leckerlee, a Colorado–based seasonal bakery that makes delicious German-style lebkuchen for the holidays, I found review after review that raved about how the cookies weren’t overly sweet. This was clearly a benefit among lebkuchen-lovers, so I made sure to include that in the home page hero section. 

Competitor Research

No brand exists in a vacuum. We’re all part of a larger market, and competitor research helps us to understand where your brand fits into that ecosystem. 

Competitor research involves analyzing the offers, messaging, and voice of other businesses in your industry to see what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. It can also include looking at their customer reviews to see where they’re excelling and where they’re missing the mark. 

This can open up huge insights. 

We might find that your wedding venue’s main competitor emphasizes their all-inclusive services, from coordinator to catering to decorators all in-house. Unsurprisingly, this comes with an all-inclusive price tag. So we could differentiate your venue by highlighting that couples can bring in their own more affordable vendors or even DIY parts of the wedding. 

Or maybe we’ll learn that the online check-in for that modern hotel down the street is a glitchy nightmare. So we can focus on how you offer old-school customer service—including real people at the front desk. 

Analytics Review

Most copywriters are not analytics experts, but we can take a look at what’s going on under the hood to assess what’s working and what isn’t. 

That can include looking at your Google Analytics to see where people land on your site, what they do when they get there, and where they leave. It can also include looking at your email metrics to assess open rates, click through rates, and sales from email campaigns. 

Of course, this assumes that you have your tracking set up! We can’t analyze data that hasn’t been collected. 

The Planning Stage

After the research stage, the copywriter has tons of data. Now it’s time to sift through it all and use it to create a strategy blueprint.

Where is the prospect now, and where do they want to be in the future? This informs our primary, above-the-fold messaging.

How aware is the prospect of the problem we solve, how it can be solved, and your brand? This is their “stage of awareness,” and it directly impacts the amount of education we have to do about your product or services. 

What benefits or features are most important to your prospects? This is how we establish a messaging hierarchy. 

And how do you provide those benefits? What questions does the prospect need answered before they are ready to move forward?

All of this goes into a page plan, a framework that we’ll then fill in during the writing stage. 

Which leads us to…

The Writing Stage

Holy cow, it’s finally time to write something. 

This is where the framework from the planning stage is filled in with actual words. And this is the deliverable that you’ll actually receive. But as you see, there was substantial background work to complete first! 

Depending on your project, your copy may be provided in a wireframe. A wireframe is a simple page layout, showing you how the copywriter is envisioning the page. I like to provide both a Google Doc and a wireframe for webpage copy. That way the client can easily share feedback in the Google Doc, but they can also see where I’d suggest pictures, proof bars, videos, and more to guide readers through the page. 

Designers may have other layouts in mind, which is why it’s great to loop your copywriter and designer both into the planning process, so they can work together. If I had to choose, I would say copy comes first. But ideally, copy and design can be created in collaboration.

Part of a wireframe I created for my client Element Ranch

Also keep in mind: what you get is not everything that was written. There could be dozens or even hundreds of headlines, phrases, blurbs, bits of microcopy, and entire paragraphs that got cut throughout the process. 

Every successful project is built on the bones of a copy graveyard. 

The Review/Editing Stage

Home stretch! This part of the process is going to be a collaboration between you, the copywriter, and possibly the design team. 

In my ideal world, every piece of copy that I handed over to a client would be 100% perfect, no notes. But since this is reality, and not Kate’s Dream World, you’re going to have some thoughts! So this is where you’ll get the chance to provide your feedback on the language and messaging. 

It’s your brand and your marketing, so don’t be shy! If something isn’t quite right, let the writer tweak it until it is. 

Copywriters are happy to go back and forth for a few days to make sure you love your copy. But they also want to feel confident that it’s going to do the job you need it to do. So hear them out! If they have good, evidence-backed reasons for a particular message, even if it’s not the one you would have picked, you may want to give it a try! 

What we don’t want is for you to say it’s great and you love it…only to see on the live page that you slashed the most important messaging section because you didn’t like it or didn’t realize its significance.

Then the page doesn’t convert and no one is happy! 

Testing and Tweaking

Copywriting is, to an extent, putting hypotheses into practice and testing them. We start with data, but we don’t always know how something is going to perform. 

So test it out! Try alternate subject lines, calls to action, or two entirely different emails with A/B testing. Send prospects to multiple versions of a landing page to see which performs better. Run several Facebook or Instagram ads and track conversions. 

It will cost you a little more time and money, yes. But if the B-version of your Facebook ad has 15% higher conversions and brings in thousands of extra dollars, it can be worth it! 

So…yeah

Copywriters do a lot more than what you’ll see in the Google Doc they send you. So when you’re thinking about working with one, ask them about their research and planning strategy. If they stare at you blankly, then that’s not the right writer for you. 

But if they come back with a list of research options, steps for planning it out, and thoughts on design and implementation? That’s copywriter gold. 

Questions about the process? 

I’m all ears! Leave a comment below or send me a personal note.