Everyone can write, but not everyone can write well. Whether you hire an in-house writer, freelance out individual projects or use an agency to develop your content, having a copywriter working on your content not only ensures work is done to a high standard, but also benefits you in other ways…
1. Time is money
It will take lots of your precious you time to carefully craft a piece of content when your time could be better spent elsewhere. Copywriters can write your content while you get on with your priorities and responsibilities, and can write more quickly and to a higher standard than someone who isn’t a trained writer.
The average time it takes to write a blog post is at least two hours while a typical whitepaper takes 30 to 50 hours to write so the hours quickly stack up. It is worth having someone dedicated to writing so it doesn’t eat into your time.
2. Clean and concise copy
Mark Twain famously once wrote: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Sometimes writing concise copy can be time consuming. But copywriters can put what you said in three paragraphs into a single line of text and still get the entirety of the message across in an eloquent manner. In a world of information overload, you’re far more likely to have customers and prospects read your content if it is quick to read and easy to understand.
According to Chartbeat, 55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on your web page, so it is vital to be able to get your message across in those first few sentences.
3. Style AND substance
Copywriters will know how to write with flair, but still get the key message across. Research is an important part of the writing process, so copywriters will gain an understanding of your company/client so that they can write engaging and persuasive copy for you. The biggest challenge in content marketing is producing engaging content, with 36% of marketers stating this as an issue, according to Quicksprout. If you work in a niche market or need a specialist, there are often industry-specific writers that you can hire to ensure highly technical language is used appropriately.
4. Targeted technique
Content doesn’t just mean blogs and reports: copywriters will employ different techniques for different forms of copy. For example, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a specific skill that requires training, or at least strong experience and knowledge of Google algorithms. Writing for social is also a skill in itself: the brevity of sites like Twitter which limit posts to 140 characters require skill to write clickable content. In general, speaking to your audience is important and copywriters will be able to tap into the key points that need to be communicated.
5. Proofing to perfection
Everyone makes mistakes but a copywriter can catch them before work goes live online, to the printers or out to clients. They are adept at spotting stray apostrophes or misusing homophones like their and there. Then there are the dreaded typos: the average accuracy for a typist is around 92%, meaning they make around eight mistakes for every 100 words typed, so it is worth checking for any misspelt or mistyped words.
Although copywriters will do the majority of writing for your business, important client emails, proposals and presentations will often be written by other team members, so it is important that these are run past a copywriter who can look over them with a keen eye before being sent out into the world.
6. Generates organic traffic and inbound leads
Creating regular content for your website, such as blogs and social media, will increase your organic traffic – copywriters can ensure that copy on the website is enticing enough to keep visitors there and develop an interest in your products and services.
Publishing regular blogs that are of interest to your target audience is a great way to increase traffic, just publishing a post once a week, combined with social media marketing and email outreach can increase traffic by 153%.
7. Copywriters can cement your content marketing strategy
According to the Content Marketing Institute: “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” Writing is a key part of this strategic approach, and according to research, 19% of B2B content marketers cited “becoming stronger writers” as a top five priority for 2016, so make sure you get an agency or freelance writer in place to produce some great articles for you for the coming year.
Whether you hire a content executive to oversee your content writing or outsource specific projects to a freelance copywriter or agency, the advantage of having a professional writer working for you a clear to see. Effective marketing needs effective content, the basis of which is clear and interesting copy.