If you’re the type of person who hates being asked a million questions…
You might not enjoy working with a good copywriter.
Anyone can write. Not everyone can write the words that will win you loyal fans, convert your fans into customers, and light a fire under your sales.
Copywriters that can deliver on those things have invested a lot into learning the techniques and strategies to make it all happen.
But it’s not magic.
It’s time spent collecting. Collecting and analyzing information that allows us to write the kind of copy that gets results.
Onboarding with a copywriter
When you start working with a (good) copywriter, they will go through a series of questions with you, that at times, may feel more annoying than your toddler asking “WHY?” for the hundredth time on the same subject.
That’s because we need to strategize how to target your audience and turn in a piece you love.
Otherwise, we’ll spend hours spinning our wheels and guessing what will make your copy net enough sales for a solid return on your copywriting investment.
Writing without the content brief in place makes it a lot more likely that the work we turn in will feel clunky, unpolished, unfocused, or “off.” You may not feel like the piece was written in your voice, and you won’t like the results… or lack thereof.
Or worse, you’ll love it and think it sounds fantastic, but it’ll do nothing to drive traffic, increase conversions, or close sales.
What information will be a professional copywriter gather before they start?
For starters, we want to understand the assignment at hand. What does the project entail?
Sometimes, clients are envisioning something different from what they ask for. If you say “landing page,” and really mean homepage (the storefront of your website), but we’re picturing the page where traffic goes to sign-up for your offer (sales copy), the confusion has already set in.
This type of information will be gathered in the discovery call stage, but you better believe we want to verify in the strategy call phase, too.
We also gather information about your audience. A lot of it. Because if we don’t understand WHO we’re writing to, the project may sound great, but it’s unlikely to produce results.
We ask questions about your brand voice, your competitors, if you’ve ever done a similar project, what the outcomes were of the project, and so on.
And speaking of outcomes, we gather information on what you’re expecting from the project, too. We make sure everyone is on the same page with realistic expectations.
Other really important aspects to cover include information about you or your brand. Some projects, like a full website rewrite or about page, may require you to be “interviewed” to gather background on your history, beliefs, and goals in order to write a compelling story about you or your business.
Your copywriter should always tailor the strategy to your specific goals.
What kind of questions can you expect?
Here’s a brief overview of the topics that will likely be covered to develop your content strategy:
- Who is the target audience? What do we know about them? What are their behavioural patterns? Do they know you? Do they know your offer?
- What is the ONE thing we want the audience to do? Is there a secondary objective?
- What are the benefits to this audience? What problem do you solve for them?
- What are the features of your offer?
- Who is the competition? How are you better or different from them?
- Are you making a free offer? What are the details of it?
- What are the business objectives? What outcomes are we hoping to achieve? Do we have existing metrics to compare?
- What is your brand voice? Is there a brand voice guide? *If we’re creating a brand voice guide, this will include a more extensive interview process.*
- What are the deliverables? Are we doing more than one version to test?
- Has your competition done anything similar? Have you ever done something similar? Do you have examples/links/screenshots?
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the questions you may be asked — depending on the scope and the depth of the work to be done — but it gives you a rough idea of how much goes into developing your content brief when you onboard with a copywriter.
Set your copywriter, and your business, up for success
Now you should better understand why the content brief/strategy/kick-off call can be so extensive.
Writing copy that achieves your goals is nearly impossible without a thorough grasp of all the above elements.
By gathering as much information as possible, in the beginning, we prepare for success writing your piece, and we set you up for success meeting your goals when you put your new copy to work.
Need some answers to your own burning questions? This post should help.
Eager to play (at least) 20 questions with a copywriter and get the results you want out of your copy? Get in touch here.
