What does a copywriter do?
Content marketing and copywriting are two skills needed by most high-value service and product brands – either maintained in-house or outsourced. A content marketing copywriter will help you maintain your visibility online by writing regular case studies, articles, EDMs and social media posts to enhance your marketing strategy and demonstrate the customer value you create.
Understanding what a copywriter does is about knowing exactly how they help you achieve your business goals. So, what are the benefits, results, and return on investment?
There are copywriters, and there are copywriters
Let’s start by defining who we are discussing in this blog, as there are many different types of copywriter.
Firstly, copywriters are writers, but not all writers are copywriters. In other words, copywriters are distinct from journalists, fiction writers, poets, and bloggers.
Unlike the writers above, copywriters write for businesses. More specifically, they write business copy
However, even within this definition, there are various types of copywriter. Some examples include advertising copywriters, technical copywriters, and medical copywriters, as well as copywriters that specialise in writing reports, resumes, and more.
The above titles give you an indication of the types of content that copywriters produce, e.g., advertising copywriters write the text you see on billboards or hear on the voiceovers of ads you see on TV. However, it is not just the subject matter that differentiates copywriters. It’s also the objective of the text they produce.
Advertising copywriters, for example, aim to get people to take action. Usually, this is to make a purchase, but it can also be to make a booking, request a quote, visit a showroom, or arrange a meeting.
What about the focus of this blog – content marketing copywriters? In simple terms, content marketing copywriters write content that is published on the internet. Let’s now go into a bit more detail.
The type of writing that content marketing copywriters produce
Content marketing copywriters write content for the internet that aims to inform, educate, and/or entertain the target audience of their client. Therefore, the content they produce rarely (if ever) has an explicit sales message. We leave that to advertising copywriters. Content marketing copywriters take a more subtle approach. Here’s an example:
Advertising copywriting – social media post highlighting an upcoming sale or discount offer at a bike shop.
Content marketing copywriting – social media post telling cyclists the top three things they need to do to prepare their bike for the winter.
Both are relevant to the copywriter’s client (in this case, a bike retailer), but they are very different pieces of content in terms of style, tone, and objective.
The type of content marketing copywriters produce:
Blog posts
Company news stories
Email newsletters
Case studies
White papers
E-books
Social media posts
Website content
More on the objectives of content marketing copywriters
Understanding the objectives of content marketing copywriting is crucial to understanding the whole concept, even though they are not always as obvious as other types of copywriting. Five key objectives are worth highlighting:
Thought leadership – establishing the client’s business as a thought leader in their field.
SEO – content marketing helps with search engine optimisation in a range of ways, including increasing the number of keywords the business can rank for.
Attract website visitors – content marketing attracts new and returning visitors to the client’s website from social media, email marketing, Google search, and more.
Generate leads – once visitors are on the client’s website reading the content created by the copywriter, there is the potential for them to become a lead.
Brand building – content marketing also helps increase the exposure of the business’s brand.
A summary of the above is that a content marketing copywriter will help you win more business and generate sales. It is not direct response marketing like running ads, where you show people ads with the aim of getting an immediate response. Instead, it is about building leads and, ultimately, sales over the long term.
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Key tasks that copywriters perform
Common tasks that content marketing copywriters perform include:
Doing research to find new topics and content ideas.
Creating content plans that set out topics and ideas in advance.
Developing and implementing content marketing campaigns – because writing content alone is not enough to help the client’s business. The content produced by the copywriter has to be promoted, and that involves posting blogs to the client’s website and promoting those blogs on social media, through email marketing and other activities.
Writing content for a client that is published on a third-party website can also be part of a content marketing strategy. This strategy involves a range of additional activities, including identifying potential websites that will publish the content, pitching ideas to editors, reviewing style guidelines, and tailoring the content to meet those style guidelines.
Researching specific topics when creating a new piece of content. This task can involve reading a variety of sources on the internet, watching videos, conducting interviews, etc.
Writing – but even this task has a number of elements, including deciding on a structure for the content, the actual writing part, including keywords for SEO, and formatting the text so it is easy to read.
Proofreading to make sure the content is free from spelling or grammatical errors.
Editing the content to incorporate comments or revisions from the client.
Measuring the success of each content piece and the overall strategy for reporting purposes and as part of continuous improvement efforts.
The qualities of a good content marketing copywriter
Writing abilities – while writing is not the only thing that content marketing copywriters do, it is a key component, so they need to be good writers.
Research abilities – research is a significant part of content marketing copywriting, so skills in this area are essential.
Internet marketing skills – this includes knowledge and experience of SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.
Fast learners – content marketing copywriters have to be able to write about a range of different topics, but they can’t be knowledgeable about them all. Therefore, they need to learn fast.
Agile – a content marketing copywriter could be writing about a personal finance topic in the morning and then the importance of data security in the medical sector in the afternoon. Another example is the audience. Content you write one day could be aimed at individuals, but the next day the audience for your content could be c-suite executives – CEOs, CTOs, CFOs, etc.
Adaptable – all writers have their own writing voice, but content marketing copywriters have to adapt that voice according to the client they are working for.
Minimal egos – content marketing copywriting is not about getting your name up in lights. Most projects involve ghost writing, where the copywriter writes content that is published under the client’s name.
The importance of quality when hiring a copywriter
It is not that difficult to find and hire a content marketing copywriter. As in many industries, however, the quality of content that is produced can vary considerably from one writer to the next.
Content marketing copywriting is not an area where you hire the lowest bidder. Publishing low-quality content is worse than doing nothing at all, as it can damage the reputation of your business or your rankings in Google.
Therefore, if you do decide to add content marketing to your sales and marketing strategy, make sure you hire a skilled and experienced copywriter with a track record of success.