If you’ve spent any time at all working in marketing, or learning about how to manage your organisation’s marketing yourself, you’ll be no stranger to the word “copywriting”.
But what IS copywriting? What does a copywriter do? And what is copywriting used for?
If you’re asking any of these questions, you’re in the right place. In this blog, we’ll explore the important role of copywriting for marketing projects of all kinds, from physical collateral to digital content, SEO copywriting and beyond.
What IS Copywriting?
Copywriting is the process by which written content is crafted for commercial use. As a marketing agency, we’ll be focusing on copywriting for marketing projects.
However, the question “what is copywriting?”, requires a deeper answer beyond the term’s fundamental definition.
In short, it’s how your organisation connects to your audience, and how you communicate in a way that generates a response or action from the reader.
Copywriting isn’t “just writing”, it’s a skilled process or service, which requires specialist expertise, a deep understanding of markets and how audiences digest an array of content types. This is why, when it comes to copywriting for marketing projects, trusted copywriting services aren’t just beneficial, they’re essential to marketing success.
And this only scratches the surface.
What Does a Copywriter Do?
By analysing the role of a copywriter, we can further answer the question “what is copywriting?” more conclusively.
A copywriter develops and safeguards the voice of your organisation, they work to drive connection between businesses and customers/clients, and drive an action across a range of content types.
They are experienced writers, with a deep understanding of form, style and technical best practices, and work to strike the perfect balance of creativity and technical skill, understanding and experience for each project, in order to drive the reader to conversion.
Without their work, your organisation is voiceless (or lacking a consistent, reliable voice), without expert guidance in perhaps the most critical and fundamental skill you need to drive conversions, and at the mercy of whatever your internal teams have cobbled together and think will work – all the while likely driving fewer leads than you otherwise would.
But what does a copywriter DO – in real terms?
Copywriting for marketing projects could be as broad as:
- Business fundamentals: Branding (tag lines etc)
- Physical collateral: Brochures, catalogues, leaflets, guides, outreach/comms etc
- Physical advertising: Magazine/newspaper ads/articles, posters, billboards etc
- Digital content: White papers, digital brochures and catalogues, digital ads, digital PR content, online articles (external or internal Linkedin) etc
- Websites and blogs (or SEO copywriting): Optimised website content, optimised blog content, guides and resources etc
In essence, if it’s written down, the task should lie with the copywriter. Our exception, at The Marketing Optimist, is traditional social media posts, which are produced by our skilled social team.
Due to the wide span of applications, if you ask a room full of copywriters “what is copywriting?”, you’ll get a slightly different answer depending on their specialisms. Some don’t touch optimised copywriting, as they don’t have the remaining SEO skills, while some specialise in technical writing, and others in very soft-touch blogging.
At The Marketing Optimist, our copywriter has worked on a huge range of B2B and B2C clients from wildly varied industries (from interiors to technical commercial services), and is also our SEO manager. This means, whether you have a creative copy project, a highly-technical one, or require SEO copywriting, we’ve got you covered.
SEO Copywriting
While each of the copywriting applications listed in the above section have their own unique best-practises, forms and styles for copywriters to consider and implement to drive the best results, we’re going to zone in on SEO copywriting for websites and blogs as it is a more multi-faceted process.
Without effective optimised written content, your website is tantamount to a closed store with nobody inside to serve the guests. Without an optimised website, your organisation is invisible, digitally speaking, and you can’t optimise a website without optimised copy.
The Marketing Optimist’s Approach to SEO Copywriting
1. Like any of the copywriting applications covered above, optimised website and blog writing, requires planning. The first stage of “copy strategy” requires us to think about the audience for the content, its purpose, the goal it aims to achieve, the topics it covers, and of course the voice of the organisation as a whole.
2. The second stage of planning is essential to writing effective optimised content: keyword research, search landscape analysis, and competitor content analysis. You can learn more about this critical stage (and much more) in our Guide to Keyword Research.
3. When it comes to copywriting for marketing projects, planning the piece is key. We conduct competitor content research (to know what we’re trying to beat in terms of quality, what topics are being covered and how, and to enable us to assess how better to serve the user) as well as client discovery. Learn more about planning and more in our Guide to Content & Page Optimisation.
4. A key part of answering the question of “what is copywriting?”, is to explore the actual writing. Armed with direction, selected keywords, competitor research, a plan and a client-filled-out discovery, our copywriter has to consider: the organisation’s voice, the goal of the content, and page-level (architecturally), the knowledge level of the users using the associated keyword(s), and either the form of content already established for this page-type, or to develop one appropriately.
A writer of optimised content has to bring all these above mentioned considerations together, while condensing and summarising key messaging in a way that speaks directly to the needs of users, and drives them towards conversion.
However, what separates SEO copywriting from other copywriting, is that a writer skilled in this area has a deep understanding of content optimisation for both traditional and AI search, rankings, and how content impacts web metrics. This knowledge enables us to write in order to facilitate and implement its best practices and achieve optimisation success, while creating user-centred copy that converts.
5. Another stage of the copywriting process unique to optimised (SEO) writing, is page optimisation. We cover this topic extensively in our Guide to Content and Page Optimisation, but in short, this is the stage where we add linking structures (internal and outbound), apply appropriate subtitle formatting formatting, alt tags, SEO titles and meta descriptions, slug optimisation and more.
6. When each page is published, we track and label the keywords associated with each, so we can report on its performance.
7. We explore how we report on the effectiveness of our SEO copywriting conclusively in our Guide to SEO Reporting. But, in short, we provide monthly keyword rankings reports, and website metrics reports, enabling you to see how your content is performing in the wider search landscape, and more importantly, the impact it’s having on site in the form of conversions, engagement, total users, total sessions, average session duration etc.
8. Content update and adaptation to remain competitive over time. You can learn more about this in our handy guide on this same topic.
Your Partner in Content
So, we started out with the goal of answering “what is copywriting?”, and a whole while later, we think we’ve done just that, and more.
If you’ve gotten to this point and feel we’ve done such a good job at demonstrating the importance of copywriting, and its many applications that feel you need some help, contact our friendly team today.
Beyond copywriting for marketing projects, we can also support your organisation with:
