As White House speech writer director Sam Seaborn says in The West Wing: ‘Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place.’ The same is more or less true of business copywriting. Whether working on an effective email sales funnel, a website landing page, or a series of content marketing articles, a good small business copywriter will know that they must captivate their reader whilst balancing a number of objectives.
Let’s take the example of a copywriter creating a series of web articles. Their objectives will include:
- They are using SEO skills to tailor their content to google search demand and generate traffic.
- Once on the webpage, they are keeping them there to improve page performance.
- They are educating or entertaining their readers to build good brand loyalty.
- They are encouraging further exploration or purchase or a call to action.
- They are linking to other content on the website to improve its overall search engine rankings.
- They maybe even generate backlinks from other, reputable sites by creating interesting, original content that is useful to those other sites’ readers.
So, a lot of things happening are at once.
For this reason, good and affordable copywriters are surprisingly hard to come by.
Many people can write and therefore many people think they can write copy, which in turn drives down the price of copywriting. (More about prices later!) Sure, you can pay pennies for some run of the mill writer to give you some (possibly AI-generated) content.
But, if you get writing right, your written communications are huge assets with long-lasting benefits. So it’s worth investing the proper care and budget into finding a good copywriter for small business. And there are affordable options if you know what to look for and what questions to ask.
So I’ve created this guide. I’m going to walk you through what makes good small business copywriting. In so doing, I’ll draw out a list of questions you can ask yourself in choosing a copywriter to partner with.
Then we’ll look at ways you can find potential copywriters. You’ll be able to apply your learnings from the first section to decide who to hire.
What Makes Good Copywriting?
Avoids padding or repetition
The secret to good copywriting is breathtakingly simple: Every sentence makes the reader want to read the next sentence…
The easiest way to do this is to understand what the reader wants so that you can give it to them. If they want to learn something, teach it to them without unnecessary padding. AI tools to date fail horribly at this without specialised fine-tuning. If the reader wants to be entertained, it might be through a gripping story or good use of humour.
The problem is, copywriters are taught that the search engine algorithms favour longer webpages with higher word count. But in the absence of much to say or the desire or skills to research a field in more depth, they pad out their text by saying the same thing three or four times over. This is bad content and a waste of the readers’ time. You get paragraphs like this:
“Your brand is a really key element of your customer relationship. A good brand drives customer loyalty and encourages people to engage more with your business. Long-term brand development will increase sales and consumer retention which all helps your brand…” [vomits over laptop]
(I’m sorry you had to read that: it hurt me to write it.)
So, for example, with this article I’ve been through it with a toothcomb to edit out any repetition. My guess is that, once I’ve said something once, I don’t need to tell you again.
Question: does your copywriter avoid padding out their content with extra word count?
Uses clear and simple language
Copywriting courses often overemphasise this point. They say that many aspiring copywriters are failed fiction writers, who want to show off their vocabulary and beautiful sentence structure. Leave the flowery adjectives to the novelists, they say…
But as you saw above, good writing is simply about finding the best way to keep your reader reading. Sometimes poetic language does the trick. Sometimes not. That said, very often the aim of a piece of web content is to educate, and there you want to give your reader the information they’re looking for as quickly and simply as possible. And so:
Question: can your copywriter explain complex things in clear and simple language?
Draws on good research
Originality.
Readers like it. Which leads to a longer 'dwell time' on page, which in turn means the search engines reward it.
But so much of the internet is a copy of itself. Bad writers avoid doing detailed research so they’ll find similar landing pages or articles and just copy them, changing the words a little to make it “original” (except it’s not) and call it a day. GPT models, necessarily being based on the internet as training data, will simplify amplify this over time.
It’s worth noting at this point that many copywriters place themselves into a niche. E.g. there are finance copywriters, software/tech copywriters, real estate copywriters, and so on. This is their way of showing their deeper understanding of a field. Sometimes it’s genuine (based on real experience in a field). Sometimes it's not (and just a marketing tool).
The most important thing is to gauge through actual examples of their work whether they seem to write detailed, specific pieces that use real facts rather than empty oratory. Padding, seen above, is also good evidence that a writer does NOT know/research their field.
Question: Does the copywriter invest proper time into researching the field they’re writing about. Or do they already know the field in a lot of detail?
To take a specific example, Self (specifically, Michael) created an article comparing different web analytics tools. Michael knows the field in a lot of depth, having spent years using different analytics tools across different roles, and so the guide is specific and has a strong point of view to it based on experience. If you’re looking for copywriting about website growth or analytics stacks, Michael is the one for you (if he were for hire as a copyrighter – but unfortunately not!)
(Also you’ll have noticed I found a natural way to include a link to a different page on our site - this makes search engines happy and should be part of a copywriter’s remit to help with SEO for a website…)
How To Find A Potential Copywriter For Small Businesses
Who writes for the brands you like?
If there are small businesses whose websites you already interact with, read through their web content (especially articles if they have them). If you like the writing, ask them who their copywriter is. Chances are you might be able to hire them too.
The same applies if you find useful articles online and like the writing. If you’re finding this guide useful you’re welcome to get in touch with us about our copywriting services!
Look on marketplace sites
You could use Upwork or Fiverr or more specialist marketplaces for writers like Scripted or Strategically.
This takes more energy, because you have to filter out the countless poor quality writers to find the ones that know what they’re doing. And note some of these platforms rely on AI-generated content, something that might work for mass-produced generalised content but is far less useful if you want detailed, original, well researched pieces.
LinkedIn is not a bad tool; again you can explore your immediate network for good writing and then find out who they used. You get a lot more information about a copywriter’s background and experience; this should help you work out whether they answer the questions from the previous section.
Final bonus note… How much should you pay?
In another piece, I go into a lot more detail into pricing for small business copywriting, as I have many opinions on the subject and lots of advice for you.
For now, to keep it brief, I would avoid copywriting prices based on per hour or (god forbid) per word rates. It’s an obvious point perhaps, but per hour rates are inherently vague and tell you nothing about the copywriter’s effectiveness or researching skill, while per word rates encourage padding and chasing word counts. (Pass me that bucket again please…)
A per project rate (or if you’re hiring them to create SEO articles, a per article rate) is better. First, it provides you with certainty as to what you’re getting and what you’re paying. Secondly, and this point is often missed, it places more focus onto the value of the work to you, rather than the time cost to them.
You should be able to push your small business copywriter to explain what value their writing is providing your business. They should understand your objectives and be able to show how their writing will meet those objectives.
As we saw in our introduction, these could be wide ranging. You may want to re-educated your consumers, or build more web traffic (whilst also converting it to sales or enquiries). Whatever the aim, your copywriter should demonstrate that their value in £ translates to a return on investment.
Thank you for taking the time to read our guide - if you have any questions about it, want to see more examples of our work, or want to request a quote for a project, get in touch!
