What is copywriting, anyway?

What is copywriting, anyhow?

We call ourselves copywriters because we’ve worked in the ad industry for a long time and that’s what writers are called in ad agencies. And when we write words, we call it copy. So, we don’t really think about it, although it does seem to cause some confusion for some of our clients.

Many people don’t associate copy with words at all. One (ex) client seemed to think that we were charging him for copyright, at least that was his reason not to pay our invoice for copywriting his brochures.

Others ask for professional writers, scriptwriting services, creative writing or business writing, all of which is fine by us. Whatever anyone calls it, it’s all copywriting to us.

Yes, but what do they actually do?

Mostly, we take the information provided to us and turn it into writing, or words, that will convey information in an interesting manner – that will inform, sell, educate, persuade, depending on the project. Needless to say, a business document will be written quite differently to, say, a sales brochure. It’s our job to set the right tone and manner for the appropriate target market/customer.

However, we don’t just write words. Our agency marketing experience ensures that we tend to start with what we call, a creative concept, or you might call a “big idea”. This tends to dictate the overall direction for any given job.

Copywriters also write headlines that capture attention. This is a very specific skill, learned from writing print ads, posters and brochures that demand attention to be effective. Nowadays we could be just as likely to be using these same skills for writing websites, blogs or twitter.

Another “skill’ we copywriters take for granted is that we always try to convey information with the minimum number of words. Enough to convey the required message effectively, without ever being verbose. When writing, we assume that the reader may ( most likely will!) have a low threshold of boredom. So, we believe, in getting in there, making our point and getting out.

This is the opposite of the approach taken by clients when they write about themselves, or what they do. They take the view that the world wants to read the complete book on their specific profession, be it cement making or conveyancing. Unfortunately,  having an understanding of your job, doesn’t mean you’re the best person to write about it.

They’re very good, whatever they are

Sometimes our clients just fail to grasp what we do completely. We once worked for a very pleasant and intelligent lady who had been appointed the marketing person for a very large financial firm.  She had briefed us on many different projects over the course of two or so years, including brochures and a national print ad campaign, which had all proven successful.

We were about to start work on another project when she announced that she’d hired some professional brochure writers to work on the job, to help us out. We sat there nonplussed, before we pointed out that was exactly what we did for a living, so we didn’t really need “help”.  She seemed genuinely surprised, although I’m not sure we ever did discover what she thought our day jobs might have been.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether people understand what copywriters do, as long as they find us useful, and pay us now and then.

Posted by Ian Minter