Who are you?
Your copy should represent who you are as a business. As a business owner, you will come to know your brand as an extension of yourself. Good copy should synthesise your goals, uniqueness and message, and translate this into a recognisable brand voice.
The right copy will have all eyes on you. ‘Copy’ can be content for your socials, sales, website blogs or whichever platform best suits your needs – when you need words, a copywriter can weave them.
Know your brand as a friend
If your brand were a person, who would they be at the party? The loudest voice in the room, perhaps? The wise, relaxed friend staying sober and making sure everyone keeps hydrated? Maybe your brand would stay home for a much-needed night of not-much and catching up on sleep. Your copy should reflect your brand’s personality, and provide a voice with character to which your audience can relate.
You should be able to get inside your brand’s head. If your brand were a person, how would they speak, walk, dress? Try picturing them as a person with values, skill and opinions. With practice, your copy can reflect your brand identity like second nature (or your other personality).
Build an arsenal of reliable words which you feel reflect the tone of your brand and messages. For example, will you write with lots of contractions, or spell out full words for a more formal tone? Will you use modern slang like ‘lit’, or will that go over your audience’s head?
Become an expert in becoming an expert
Your copy needn’t be limited by what you don’t know yet. Learning to research will help you produce relatable and relevant content. Maybe calendar events are coming up, like International Women’s Day or Father’s Day. Think about what your brand has to say about cultural events, and use them as an opportunity to connect.
Educate yourself about your audience’s interests and needs, and research the things most important to them. It can be great for reach if your copy can contribute to the conversation around the issues which matter to your audience, in an informed, respectful and engaging way.
Copy has many faces and many facets. Your copy should be intimately interrogated and rigorously researched. Pair this with a strong grasp on grammar and spelling, and any rock of information can be polished into a beautiful opal of copy.
Client, meet Brand. Brand, meet Client.
Copy needs to bend and mould to fit the needs of each client. Your brand’s identity should be absorbed and injected into all copy, purifying your message into postable content. Copy involves decisions around word choices, sentence length, and punctuation to achieve the right tone. Brand-copy needs to be nuanced; between your vision and your copywriter’s skill and wordly-intuition, you can communicate with a unique target audience.
Much like you need to get to know your brand, you must know your target audience. You should be able to picture your ideal client in your mind. What do they do in their spare time? What’s their average income? Their values? Their vocabulary? Relatable content is crucial to your campaign; it draws your audience in, makes them feel understood, and therefore more likely to see your products or services as valuable to them. If you’re using words or examples that your audience won’t connect to, you could be alienating your customer.
Copywriters must separate themselves from their content. Egos and internal voices step aside to make room for the voice of the brand at hand. They’re a filter, the middle man between brands and their audience. They take the fabric of what you want to say and sew it into a comfortable and attractive outfit for your comms.
At Social Motive, we are proud to speak on your behalf, but will never shout over the top of you. Think of us as a trusted conduit between your vision and your audience; we’ll never lose sight of your goal, because it becomes our goal, too. As Lain Broome so eloquently put it, ‘To be a copywriter is beyond definition, but it’s fair to say that one thing binds us together: we all work with words on a daily basis.’
If you’d like a hand making your brand’s voice heard, get in touch! We’re here to hear you.