What is a copywriter?
A copywriter is not an author. If you’re not sure what a copywriter is, your first thought is probably about the legal protections of a book, magazine, sound recording, or other intellectual or creative property. We’ve all opened books to the first page with the © symbol and said “oh, here’s the copyright.”
Copywriting, on the other hand, is something else entirely on its own animal. Copywriting, with a “W” and not an “R” is a writer who creates “copy” or advertising and marketing materials. Those materials can take many different forms, such as web content, brochures, or sales letters. Some copies can be as small as a title or tagline or as large as a 45-page white paper. Other common forms of copywriting can be Facebook, Twitter, or various social media content. Copywriters write copies for the big Fortune 100 companies for the neighborhood plumber and everything else. If a company has some type of marketing material, it has a use for copywriting.
There are a multitude of reasons why any business owner or operator using logic and reason to make decisions would choose to hire a professional copywriter. Here are just 3 simple reasons found on the back of the napkin:
Reason # 1
You are not a professional, experienced, or talented writer by nature
Writing is a developed skill that requires constant, repetitive practice before any valuable material begins to flourish. Can’t write it yourself? Sure, of course you can. You can read and write. You’ve probably been reading and writing for twenty years, but does that mean you should or are you good at it?
Let’s say a carpenter wants to start marketing his services. First, you will need a web page and that site is not going to write itself. Of course he can write it himself, but is this the best and highest use of carpenters’ time? He’s not going to write better material than I can hang a ceiling fan (I wouldn’t even know where to start if I had to hang a ceiling fan). What happens when the writer crashes? How are you going to know what to write? Does this material sound good? Will readers understand what I am trying to say? These are all problems that copywriters deal with all day, every day. It’s a developed skill, and if you haven’t developed it, you should consider outsourcing it to someone who can tackle creating your content more efficiently and effectively. Imagine that both a carpenter and a copywriter charge $ 50 per hour, the copywriter can create a website landing page in 3 hours instead of a carpenter doing the same writing himself and takes 2 full days, and the Copywriters will be more effective. And after 2 days my fan will probably fall off the ceiling!
Reason # 2
Technical jargon.
Have you ever heard someone who is over-educated or above your level trying to sell you a product or service and you had no idea what they were talking about?
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created Apple Computers together. One of the factors in its success was that Jobs knew how to connect the dots between the customer and the product. If Wozniak were on stage giving a keynote speech for a new product, none of the journalists in the audience would have any idea what he was saying. His thoughts would have been lost on transistors and circuit boards.
Most of the money spent on advertising goes to Big Pharma and car sales. When these companies write your copy, they don’t use doctors and engineers to do it. If they did, the amount of time and money wasted would be unimaginable because no one would understand the copy and the copy would not lead to sales.
Reason # 3
Disconnect emotionally and reconnect with an audience
Ask any licensed professional real estate agent and they will tell you how difficult it is to close a deal on any property that is for sale by the owner. A main reason for this is how the owner perceives the value. An owner who has raised a family and created years of memories and emotions in a property will value it very differently than an impartial freelancer.
If you are trying to sell a product or service, you may not immediately perceive the intentions of customers to buy it. As Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked my clients what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.” Copywriters are very good at determining the reasons why a customer would need a commercial product or service and exploiting those reasons by filling in the copy with the correct words that the customer will identify as appropriate to their needs.
Every business and every sales starts with a good copy. If you don’t have an effective copy, your clients won’t know it exists and they won’t know why it exists. Copywriters are really translators. They know the right questions to ask a customer, to burn words into a copy that will connect with customers. A good copy turns into more profit.