Copywriting
Copy about the reader’s problem, not about your company
Most business copy fails the same way: it describes the organisation instead of the situation the reader is in. Copywriting is the discipline of finding out what is actually true, then writing it so specifically that a competitor could not put their name on it.
The usual failures
Four reasons business copy does not persuade anyone
Copy rarely fails because the writing is poor. It fails because of decisions made before a word was drafted — about what to research, whose language to use, and how much specificity the review process would tolerate.
- The page is about the company, not the reader.
- It opens with founding dates, team size and a mission. That order feels natural internally because it is the order the business thinks in. The reader arrived holding a problem and has to translate a capability list into an answer for themselves, which they will not do. The fix is structural: establish the reader’s situation, then the consequence of leaving it, then what you do about it.
- Adjectives are standing in for facts.
- Innovative, dedicated, trusted, comprehensive. These appear when the writer was not given anything concrete. A number, a named process, a stated limitation or a real example does more work than any of them, and cannot be copied by a competitor without lying.
- The review process removes everything specific.
- Each reviewer adds a qualifier and nobody deletes one. Six rounds later the claim that was interesting has become a claim that is safe and unreadable. Deciding at the start who owns the final call, and what the legal boundary actually is, saves more copy than any amount of rewriting.
- Nobody agreed what the page is for.
- A page trying to attract search traffic, reassure an existing customer, brief a journalist and convert a buyer will do none of them. The clearest single improvement in most rewrites is deciding what one thing a page must achieve and letting the other three go elsewhere.
The test we apply
If a direct competitor could paste your copy onto their site and nobody would notice, the copy is describing a category rather than a business — and no amount of rewriting the verbs will fix that.
We run this test on every page before it is signed off, and on every page we are asked to improve. It is unusually good at finding the problem quickly, because it does not ask whether the writing is good. It asks whether the writing is about anybody in particular.
Passing it requires facts the competitor does not have: how you actually do the work, what you decline to take on, what goes wrong most often and how you handle it, what your customers say when they explain the decision to a colleague. Those are research outputs, not writing outputs, which is why the research comes first.
What changes in the edit
The same claim, written vaguely and written specifically
| Dimension | What the draft usually says | What it says after the research |
|---|---|---|
| Opening line | A leading provider of integrated solutions for growing businesses | You have three quotes for the same job and no way to tell why one is double the others |
| Capability | Comprehensive end-to-end service delivery | We do the survey, the install and the annual inspection, so no one can blame the other trade |
| Reassurance | Trusted by businesses across the country | Every job is signed off by the engineer who quoted it, not by a manager who never saw it |
| Objection handling | Flexible pricing to suit every budget | Below about a certain project size we are the wrong choice, and we will say so on the first call |
| What the reader can verify | Nothing | A named process, a stated limit and a claim someone could check |
| Could a competitor use it? | Yes, unchanged | Only by describing a business they do not run |
Method
Research first, drafting fourth
The proportion of time matters. On most engagements more effort goes into finding out what is true than into writing it down, and that is the ratio that makes the writing easy.
Interview the people who talk to customers
Sales and delivery hear the real objections, the real comparisons and the language buyers use. Twenty minutes each, recorded, produces more usable material than a week with the existing website.
You get: Recorded interviews and a pulled quote bank
Listen to how customers describe it
Where we can speak to recent customers, we ask how they explained the decision to a colleague. That sentence is usually the strongest line available, and it is almost never the one the business would have chosen.
You get: Verbatim customer language, sourced and attributed
Agree the job of each page
One page, one job, stated in a sentence before drafting. This is also where we agree the claims boundary: what can be said, what needs evidence attached, and what will not survive review so should not be drafted.
You get: A one-line purpose and claims boundary per page
Draft in the voice, with the structure visible
Headings first, so the argument can be checked before the sentences are polished. If the headings alone do not make sense read in order, the page has a structural problem that better prose would only disguise.
You get: Structured draft with the argument readable from headings alone
Cut, then have an expert check it
The editing pass removes qualifiers, replaces adjectives with facts and shortens sentences. Then one subject-matter expert checks accuracy — accuracy only, not style, because style feedback from six reviewers is how specific copy becomes generic copy.
You get: Edited copy with a single named accuracy reviewer
The work
What we are usually asked to write
- Homepage and core service pages, written individually rather than from one template
- Landing pages matched to the specific campaign sending the traffic
- Product and feature pages for technical products that need translating
- Pricing pages, including the parts most businesses would rather not write
- Email sequences, onboarding messages and lifecycle copy
- Sales decks, proposal language and one-page leave-behinds
- Case study write-ups where a real client has agreed to be named
- A voice guide built from real sentences, with do-not-write examples
- Editing passes on drafts written by your own subject-matter experts
Questions
What clients ask about the writing itself
How is copywriting different from content strategy?
Content strategy decides what should exist: which topics, which pages, what to stop making. Copywriting decides how a given page reads once that decision has been made.
They are usually bought together and they answer different questions. If nobody has decided which pages deserve to exist, a writer will produce well-made copy for pages that should not have been commissioned.
Our product is technical. Can an outside writer get it right?
Yes, provided the writer interviews the people who know it and the draft is reviewed by one of them before publication. We do not expect to arrive as experts in your field; we expect to extract expertise and put it into readable order.
What breaks technical copy is not the writer’s lack of background. It is a review process where three people add hedges and nobody removes anything, which turns a specific claim into a safe one that says nothing.
What do you need from us before writing?
Three or four short conversations: someone in sales, someone in delivery, and ideally two recent customers. Plus your lost-deal reasons and whatever your support team gets asked repeatedly.
We also want the constraints: claims legal will not sign off, terms you are contractually required to use, and anything a regulator expects. It is far cheaper to know those before drafting than to discover them in round three.
Will you write in our voice or yours?
Yours, and we build the voice guide out of sentences your own people have already said rather than out of adjectives like confident or approachable, which every company chooses and no writer can act on.
A usable voice guide has real examples of what you would write and what you would never write, plus rules on specific things: whether you address the reader directly, how you handle humour, how technical you are willing to be on a first page.
Do you write for search engines or for people?
For people, with the search demand understood before drafting rather than sprinkled in afterwards. Knowing the language people actually use changes the words we choose; it does not change who the sentence is written for.
Copy that repeats a phrase to hit a density target reads badly to a human and is not what search systems reward either. We would rather write one specific sentence than five keyword-bearing ones.
Can you edit copy our team has written?
Often the better arrangement, especially for teams with subject-matter experts who write well but not persuasively. We edit with the reasoning visible, so the same person writes better unaided next time.
Where the draft is fundamentally arguing the wrong thing, we say so rather than polishing it, because line editing cannot repair a page built on the wrong premise.
Send us the page you like least
On a strategy call we will read it out loud, apply the competitor test to it, and tell you whether the problem is the writing or the research underneath it. Those need different fixes and different budgets.
Related
Where to go next
- deciding what should be written at allStrategy chooses the topic; copywriting decides how it reads.
- the messaging framework underneath the wordsVoice and positioning are set before any page is drafted.
- landing pages built around the copyCopy and layout are drafted together or neither works.
- testing what a rewrite actually changedThe only honest way to judge a new page.
- writing that has to survive an inbox
- how we handle claims and sources
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal