The Art Of Copywriting

by Paul Grimsley

It is an interesting discipline, one that disguises itself as writing, but isn’t quite the same thing. I am, here, thinking about a specific kind of copy-writing — that being the kind where you generate SEO-rich content for websites.

You get given an assignment — a certain number of pages with a certain number of key words that you want to capture, so that the client will rank better in searches for those areas. And sometimes they are in an industry that you really don’t have that much familiarity with.

From experience it seems that the industries which seem to have the most money to spend on marketing are the service industries — specifically those industries that couldn’t be outsourced overseas, because they need to be in the same geographical location as their customers, in order to provide a service that generally has some degree of physical work involved with it. This would be something like a plumber, an electrician, etc, who has to be on site to do the work. Or maybe a healthcare practitioner, who needs to lay hands on the patient in order to do what needs to be done.

So, you are probably going to have used a service of the kind you are writing about, but it may be a very cursory or surface knowledge you possess. I won’t say that you have to process data pretty quickly, but if you have a deadline, you really do. You have to be able to read through some of the more technical and industry specific data that you have to digest, and then you have to churn it out in a more digestible pre-chewed food manner that your layman can understand.

You’re fine if you’re writing for a site that is business to business, and the clientele of your client has an equal comprehension of the subject matter in hand, but in some cases even B2B doesn’t mean seller and buyer are on an equal footing in terms of their expertise. So you write to the end user, while satisfying your client with accuracy rather than a demonstration of technical understanding. Either way, you have to get what the hell it is that you are talking about.

I never had much interest in engines, and I never thought of myself as mechanically minded, but I had to write about power take-offs, and as I was dressing up in the clothes of the client for a day, and being their mouthpiece, I needed not to embarrass either of us. I used to study technical drawing, so I knew that I could understand the way something worked if I could draw it — same is true if I can build it in Lego. So I drew an exploded diagram of the drive shaft and the power-take off (a way of redirecting the power from the drive shaft to something like a baler that would be attached to a tractor for instance, or maybe a crane on the back of a truck) and we were good to go.

Sometimes the client will give the writing the once over and flag up any major outpoints, but often, just getting the viewpoint of the end user that you are writing for means that you naturally hit the right tone and the right depth of information that you need to convey. Never write down to a customer, but also don’t hit them with a whole bunch of words that are going to make the writing seem like word salad to them.

I love writing about some of these more difficult subjects, because if you can navigate your way through them, and turn out work that communicates the key concepts to the end user while making the client happy, you have really achieved something. Now, when you go to a simpler subject you are more familiar with, or you are just getting to write creative fiction, for instance, it feels like you are able to run a 3 minute mile.