Why Your Business Needs a Copywriter

What is copywriting?

You’ve likely heard of copywriting before, but perhaps you don’t know its purpose. Since starting my copywriting career nearly a decade ago, I’ve heard some unique assumptions about what it is—everything from copyright law to copying someone else’s writing (yes, I’ve literally had people ask if I plagiarize professionally).

As you’ve likely inferred, both of those assumptions are incorrect, but I understand the confusion. If you aren’t in the world of corporate America, and you aren’t familiar with marketing, copywriting might seem niche. So, allow me to quickly explain: In a nutshell, copywriting is the profession of writing marketable texts. You’ve been surrounded by copywriting your entire life—it’s the description of a product you buy online, a promotional email, online advertising, or maybe a viral blog post. Copywriting drives customers to finally make that purchase they’ve been considering. It tells the company’s story or explains a product, and inspires you to finally click “Buy Now.”

It’s more than the words on the page

Now, maybe you’re thinking that your business doesn’t need to hire a copywriter, after all, it’s just writing, right? On a foundational level, we all know how to write, but the reality is that not everyone is skilled at writing professional, actionable copy.

Consider, for a moment, the last time you had to write a report or craft a thorough email. How long did it take you to put all of the pieces together? Did the result meet your expectations? Were you able to confidently convey all of the elements as you intended? How long did it take you?

Your document may have turned out great, but think of how much time you would have saved by allowing a writing professional to complete the task. A professional copywriter can create effective documents and articles in less time than it would take you or another team member, and the copywriter can ensure that it is correct and optimized for your audience.

Search Engine Optimization

When creating website copy, it’s important to consider search engine optimization, or as it is more commonly known, SEO. Blogs and articles that are written with SEO in mind will rank higher on Google, increasing the traffic of your business and, in turn, boosting sales.

SEO takes a lot of time to learn and is a field that requires ongoing training and certification. Rather than cannibalizing your team’s efforts by single-handedly learning SEO, while already balancing your heavy workload, you can hire a copywriter who is trained in search engine optimization.

Any good copywriter follows current SEO trends and tracks relevant changes within popular search engines and social media outlets. Armed with their extensive knowledge, your copywriter can incorporate current best practices to make your web content as visible as possible. 

ROI Increase

According to Hubspot’s 2018 State of Inbound Report, 82% of marketers who blog see a positive return on investment (ROI) on their inbound marketing strategy. If you want to increase your organic traffic to your website and see higher engagement with your brand, you need to have website copy that answers your customers’ content questions. Your customers have a lot of questions that need to be answered, which is why you need a large web presence. According to Hubspot.com, a new, small business should create 1-4 blog posts per week, and a large, established business should be creating blog posts daily or if your business is large enough, multiple times per day, creating both new posts and optimizing old ones to fit current SEO trends.

Now, I don’t personally know what your business and operations look like, but do you think that you or your team members have this kind of time to create that many blog posts on top of your already busy workload? If you don’t hire a professional copywriter, instead opting to craft your own posts, you are effectively cannibalizing your team’s time. 

Hiring a Copywriter

With any luck, you’re now considering the importance of hiring a copywriter, which is great! There are some things to consider when finding a copywriter to get the best results.

Finding Your Copywriter

There are so many resources online to find good copywriters, ranging from job boards to agencies, LinkedIn, and word-of-mouth. Also, you may find a variety of heavily trafficked content mills online. Here is where I get on my soapbox: if you are a professional business and you respect your employees and freelancers, I hope you wouldn’t turn to a cheap content mill. Websites like Fiverr, Upwork, Contently, etc. may offer dirt-cheap services from freelancers, but you aren’t going to get the quality of work your business is looking for. This concept returns to the old adage that you get what you pay for.

Now, this isn’t to say that you have to pay through the roof to get high-quality writing. In fact, there are lots of talented writers on those content mills who are just hoping to make some extra money. Still, it is likely that you will be working with an inexperienced writer who writes the same generic content for every client.

Furthermore, the rates at which content mills pay their freelancers are absurdly low. Writers on Fiverr, Upwork, and Contently are getting paid less than minimum wage for a tremendous amount of work, but we will get into that more in the next section.

Paying Your Copywriter

Remember what I mentioned earlier about content mills? Here is where we delve deeper into the topic. Consider, for a moment, the last time you hired a consultant or partner for your business. What did you pay them? It probably is safe to assume that you didn’t hire that professional consultant for $8-20 per hour, right? Why would you pay a writer, who is also a business consultant, for such a low rate as well? 

As I mentioned earlier, there is an assumption that just because we all can read and write in the business world means that we all can be copywriters, and therefore, writing is considered a less valuable skill. This is, of course, incorrect. It’s about specialization. Writers have studied and worked their entire lives to become skilled writers. They have worked tirelessly to continue to hone their craft while at university. Those writers have invested time and money in continuing education courses. All of these aspects have made copywriters specialists in their field. You are a specialist in your field, and writers are specialists in their field. Please, pay your writers as such. 

That being said, allow me to take you back to the content mills. At a content mill, you pay a writer between $0.01 and $0.20 per word. If you pay $0.01 per word and ask for a 1000-word blog post, you are paying $10 for many hours of work. You are paying less than minimum wage for work that can bolster life-changing sales to your business. Again, would you pay a business consultant $10 for one day of work?

Now, you may be wondering, what should I pay for copywriting? Although there isn’t a set answer and every copywriter will give you a different response, you should expect to pay at least $100 per project, and that’s at the low end. For large-scale projects, you can expect to pay a thousand or more. Remember, this is an investment in your business and its growth.

Personally, I’m not a fan of pay-per-word or pay-per-hour projects, and I know that most other copywriters feel the same way. The reasoning is that every business and every project is different. If you want a blog post on a topic that your writer is familiar with, it’s easy for him or her to write very quickly. However, if you want the writer to write on something they are unfamiliar with (and most writers are happy to do that, by the way), it will require research on the writer’s part, which needs to be factored into the fees. A product description is shorter than an article, but can require just as much time to carefully craft as an article. Paying per project protects you as the business owner and protects the writer as well. 

Work directly with your writer to determine the scope of the project. Help your writer understand what is being asked, your budget, and when you want the delivery. Together, you and your writer can find a mutually beneficial solution. 

Conclusion

There you have it—the basics of what you need to know about copywriting and why it matters to your business. I hope this was beneficial to you. If you have further questions or if you would like to discuss working with me as your copywriter, feel free to send me a message.