What is a copywriter?

It’s nothing to do with copyright ©. It’s nothing to do with copiers. It’s everything to do with writing.

According to my dictionary, a copywriter is “a person whose job is to write the words for advertising material.”

To be honest, that definition feels a little old-fashioned in our multichannel world of digital content. (And there’s a whole other blog to write about constitutes advertising these days.) As Jacques Seguela of the French ad agency RSCG once wrote, “Don’t tell my mother I’m in advertising – she thinks I play the piano in a brothel”.

But ultimately, a copywriter is someone who writes words on behalf of clients, ultimately for marketing purposes.

It’s a job as old as civilisation.  People have always had something to sell, and the more seductively, the better.

 

A copywriter might write two words for a billboard, e.g. “Hello boys” (but they’d better be good words). Or they might write thousands of words for a website or white paper (which of course, need to be good too).

What connects them all is a requirement to connect with people. To sell in such a way that they’re convinced and motivated to buy a product or service, without feeling they’ve been hit over the head with a sales message.

Good copy is:

• Clear – you’re in no doubt what’s being sold, and what it is or does
• Concise – it uses no more words than are strictly necessary
• Compelling – it gives the reader a reason to act

People often refer to these rules as the ‘Three Cs’. But the real skill of copywriting is for the reader to feel it flows naturally and that these cunning techniques aren’t in the least obvious. You can always tell when someone has written copy according to some self-help guidebook. Following a formula seems smart but if it’s super-obvious it feels clunky.

And when it comes to inhuman, ‘copywriting’ with the least warmth or emotional connection is the sort that’s churned out by AI, without any human intervention.

AI is a useful tool, but it takes a human to click with another human by using the AI’s output as raw material to shape.

 

A good copywriter is someone who can write a paragraph you’ve read before you’ve even decided you want to. That slips down so easily and leads you from sentence to sentence so naturally, that before you know it, you’ve read the whole thing. Devilish isn’t it?

A bad copywriter is one who starts off in one direction and then, did you know that the word Edam is ‘made’ backwards? And uses syntax what is clumsy and before long you give up and wander o… 

A good copywriter is someone who appreciates AIDA (attention, interest, decision, action). These are the steps good copywriting takes to connect with a reader, to take them on the journey to a sale.

Attention is crucial because if you don’t hook people straight away, the rest is academic. Interest is about a style of writing that maintains interest as well as about relevance to the reader’s interests.

It’s often said that people don’t read marketing messages; they read things that interest them, and sometimes they happen to be marketing messages.

 

The decision is the part that sells hardest in any copywriter’s work. But like all these four stages, it shouldn’t be obvious but natural. Like a form of inexorable logic that leads the reader on a journey they’re keen to see through. And finally, action is about what to do next. Without it, all your efforts could be in vain. The customer might be convinced but do they know what to do?

So what is a copywriter? They’re a gun for hire, a seducer, a marketeer and – in the best cases – an evil genius.

We’d hate for these evil geniuses to turn their powers to world domination, which is why we strongly recommend you engage their services whenever you need persuasive marketing copy.

Without a talented and experienced copywriter on your side, you’re taking a big risk.