Writing

How To Plan a Copywriting Project

Admit it, you’ve been there.

You approached a freelancer (or agency) over a newly conceived copywriting project, and you sat across the table from them. After a while, the inevitable question came.

“So what exactly is it you need?”

And after a much ‘Umming’ and ‘Ahhing’, some form of agreement was reached. The project had started.

A few weeks later, a draft came in.

It sucked.

And worse, since you weren’t really sure what you wanted in the first place, you couldn’t really argue with it. You couldn’t see how the work you’d been sent was going to help your company, but you also didn’t know how to salvage it.

Plus or minus a few minor amendments, you were stuck with it.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. With a bit of pre-planning, you can make sure you get exactly what you want.

Don’t Suffer in Silence

First things first.

It is (or should be) the duty of any freelancer or agency worth their salt to help you plan your copywriting project. You absolutely should ask their advice, as they may well have valuable insight into how the project can best achieve the results you desire.

Personally, I ask every client the same set of questions at the start of a project, designed to help me understand them, their company, and their specific needs. From there, I take a more tailored approach to follow-up questioning, but I always start from the same point.

But does that mean you shouldn’t prepare in advance?

Absolutely not.

(Don’t) Start at the Beginning

The most common mistake when planning a copywriting project is starting in the wrong place.

After all, isn’t it logical to start by deciding what you want?

Well… No.

The very first thing you need to ask yourself is who you want.

Who will take responsibility for the project? Who will work with the freelancer or agency to outline the project, agree terms, and review the result?

Ultimately, this person is going to have a huge impact on the project. They’ll be responsible for everything the outsider sees and hears from your company, and their ability to coordinate resources, people and communications will be directly reflected in the final result.

Ideally, this person should also be responsible for reviewing the submitted project, and requesting amendments.

“But wait, shouldn’t we have a team to proof the project and decide on alterations?”

No.

Hang on, that wasn’t clear enough.

Hell no.

Have you ever been asked to write a report or business plan as a group? How did that work out for you? I’m guessing it turned out the same way most of these exercises do.

A bland pile of compromises and limp platitudes.

Well, mob-rule editing works precisely the same way: Not at all.

By all means have a small group to proof the project and provide feedback, but ultimate responsibility should be given to a single person. This allows for sensible amendments to be requested, without robbing the piece of style, tone, and entertainment value.

Who Do You Think You Are?

There’s one question I always ask my clients, and they often seem surprised by it.

“What can you tell me about your company?”

I’ve every conceivable answer to this question, including suggestions that I should have spent more time researching them.

Now obviously I do research my clients before I accept work from them, but I’m what really asking is a whole series of questions to which only they have the answers.

What is your core business function?
What problem(s) do you solve?
Who are your competitors? How are you different?
What are you most proud of?
What words would you use to describe your values?

And it’s not only you I want to know about. I also need to know who your audience are.

Who is the intended audience for this project?
What do you know about them? Have you done any market research?
What are their problems/pain points?
How will this project help them?

In order for your copywriting project to yield valuable, engaging results, the person or people you’re working with will need this information. By better understanding your business, your values, and your audience, a copywriter can create a style, tone and format specifically designed to yield the results you’re hoping for.

And by putting it together in advance, you’re getting well ahead of the game.

NOW Start at the Beginning

Remember all those things you wanted to do at the start? Now is the time.

It’s important to crystalize in your mind exactly what you want from your copywriting project. The more clearly you understand and define the project, the more accurately you can assess the first draft and request amendments.

What result are you aiming for? Persuasion? Education? Social Proof?
What format do you want the project to take?
How will the project fit into your wider content plan?

Answering these questions will enable you to discuss the project more thoroughly with a freelancer or agency. They’ll no doubt ask you variations of these questions anyway, and putting time into answering them properly in advance will enable a much more in-depth conversation.

Once you know exactly what you’re looking for, you can start to formulate an action plan.

When will you be ready to start?
What is the deadline?
What is your budget?
Will the project include a design component? Can you accommodate that in-house?

Again, this is a case of preparation. All of these questions will need to be answered before the project can progress, and deciding in advance will enable the freelancer or agency to get underway more quickly, and with a better understanding of your needs.

What are YOUR Terms?

It’s a given that whoever you choose to work with will have a set of terms. Payment, timescales, amendments… the list goes on.

But it’s also important to decide what your terms are.

Will the project require a degree of privacy? Will you need a non-disclosure? Do you want sole use of a freelancer’s time? Are you hoping to get them on retainer? Will they need to agree not to work with your competitors for the duration of the project?

It’s best not to assume anything when it comes to these sorts of terms. You don’t want to go through the whole process of providing information to an agency, only to discover they can’t start work for six weeks.

Equally, as a freelancer, there’s nothing worse than finding out right at the end of a copywriting project that the client doesn’t want it included in your portfolio.

Decide exactly what your terms are, and explain them clearly at the outset of the project.

Don’t Delay

Once you’ve answered all of these questions, and decided exactly what you want, get the project started straight away. You’ve put quite a bit of effort into this project now, and some of your answers may well be time sensitive.

For instance, if your copywriting project needs to fit into a wider content plan, it will need to be completed promptly. Equally, the people, products and audience you have in mind can (and probably will) change.

So whoever you’re working with, if you’ve got a project in the making I hope you’ll find these steps useful. By all means let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.

And if you’re not yet working with anyone, why not drop me a line. I’d love to help.

How Do You Work?

By Pete Hugh Leave a Comment

I try to make life as easy as possible for my clients.

After all, who wants to work with someone who makes their life difficult?

With that in mind, I’m going to be as clear as possible about how I work, and what you can expect if you decide to work with me.

Usually, after contact is made, projects look like this:

1) Brief discussion of needs

2) Quote

3) Thorough discussion of needs

4) Fact finding/research

5) Write & submit

6) Amendments

Simple enough, right?

The first two steps can usually be completed very quickly. A simple phone call or short email exchange is enough for me to base a quote on, and once that’s agreed we can press on with step three.

At this point, I’ll be looking for a more detailed understanding of your requirements.

If you have a formal specification that’s great, but don’t panic if not. We’ll discuss and agree your requirements before moving on, and I can make recommendations if desirable.

This is the time to really hammer out precisely what you need from me. Although there will be the opportunity for revisions once I’ve submitted your project, we won’t be talking about complete overhauls.

Long story short: We’ll make sure we agree on exactly what you need, so there are no nasty surprises for either of us later on.

We’ll also agree precisely when I will start working on your project, and when you can expect to see results.

Step four is where the fun really starts.

If I’ll be writing a case study, this would likely be a three-way teleconference between myself, a representative from your company, and your delighted client. I’d be looking to find out precisely how you solved their problems, improved their processes, and generally made their lives better.

If it’s educational writing you’re after, such as an e-book, autoresponder series, white paper or article, this stage will usually be a bit more involved. I’ll be asking you for every scrap of information you can get your hands on, from product specs and sales material to instruction manuals, mission statements and customer reviews.

The same goes for sales pieces, such as landing pages, product pages, and email content. You’d be amazed how much information can be distilled into a concise, compelling sales message.

And I’ll also conduct my own research. I’ll interview your product champions, engineers, and visionaries. I’ll look at your competitors, alternative solutions, and anything else I can find that helps me to understand why your products and services are the best.

Anything I can do to better understand your business, I will. Collecting all this information can sometimes take a bit of time, but trust me.

More is more.

Once all this is complete, the final stages are simple. I complete your project, and submit it to you by the agreed date.

Our agreed project cost includes two sets of revisions, to ensure you get precisely what you need from me. These revisions will be discussed, agreed and completed within 30 days of the initial submission, so you won’t be left twiddling your thumbs and wondering what I’m up to.

And that’s it, really.

If that sounds good to you, go ahead and get in touch.

Who The Hell Are You?

By Pete Hugh Leave a Comment

A fair question, and one I’d like to take a few moments to answer.

My name is Pete, and I have two major interests: Writing, and Tech.

I’ve written about pretty much everything in my lifetime. As a child I enjoyed creative writing more than anything else at school.

In my teenage years I wrote more journal entries than was probably healthy.

As a young man I started writing non-fiction on a variety of largely unlinked subjects that were interesting only to me.

At college I studied Business, Economics and Politics, which involved – you guessed it – lots of writing. Nothing changed significantly in the three years I spent gaining my business management B.Sc. from the University of Surrey. They loved essays too.

In the following years I worked variously as a data analyst and project manager in the fields of Adult Social Care, Procurement, Finance, and IT. My combined love of writing and tech led me to write all sorts of things, including:

Project Documentation
Tender Documents – Invitations to Tender (ITTs) & Tender Responses. (I also designed the tender evaluation model used throughout Hampshire County Council, and evaluated more tender submissions than I care to remember)
Social Media Campaigns
Bids and Proposals
Copy for over a dozen websites, including Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

And all manner of reports, business cases, newsletters and whatever else needed writing.

Scintillating stuff, I know.

Technology was something I came to from an altogether different angle.

One day, when I was young and minding my own business, my father came home with the most amazing thing I’d ever seen: Our first computer.

Now I feel I should give the whole story, so here it is. This computer had actually belonged to his employer, but one night when he was working late he accidentally spilled beer over the keyboard. Unperturbed, he found someone to do the necessary repair job, and paid for it himself.

It looked something like this:

Oh yes, it was a laptop.

It ran Windows 3.1, and was good for little more than playing Minesweeper or Tetris. It also looked a bit like a Fisher Price kiddies toy.

Nonetheless, it was my portal into the magical world of technology.

I won’t bore you further with the details, but as my life went on I’d continue to be fascinated by tech – Everything from mobile phones and e-readers to servers, programming languages, and office software.

Over the past 5 years I’ve spent well over a full day (yes, 24 hours) discussing Microsoft Excel, and its various competitors, with my Father.

Dad spent most of his career working as an Accountant, and was lucky enough to be one of the first users of Visicalc – The very first electronic spreadsheet.

You can imagine how quickly everyone else leaves the room when we get started.

In my spare time I like to write about my interests – usually technology, but also including personal development, diet, exercise, sleep, and learning. At one point, well before I’d had any formal writing training, I created a whole website devoted to the selection and use of office software.

Although not in my hands, the site is still going, and if you’re as much of a geek as I am you can still find an old article I wrote about using the VLOOKUP function in Microsoft Excel.

So.. Copywriting?

Some time ago I realised that, though I enjoyed the work I was doing, I’d much rather be working for myself.

Not only would that mean I could spend more of my time doing what I really enjoyed – Writing, learning about tech, and working directly with business clients – it would also give me the freedom to do things my own way.

Oh, and cut out 2-3 hours of commuting each day.

So I quit my job. I undertook every copywriting course I could find, studied every piece of direct mail that came through my letterbox, and pored over every assignment I could get my hands on.

After years of education and increasingly responsible jobs, I’d finally found what I wanted to do. And I was good at it.

So without further ado…

My name is Pete Hugh, and I help tech companies attract more clients and grow their business.

For more info on how I do that, check out my About Me page, or keep reading my blog.