A new suit won't make you a better salesperson
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Imagine you're a sales manager. You have a couple of people on your team who are just not good at the job.
They don't listen to customer needs. They talk about things that customers haven't highlighted as important. They ask customers to commit too much, too early in the process.
Suffice it to say, they're not doing well.
So you have three main options here:
Fire them and hire someone better.
Give them some training, to help them do a better job of articulating the right benefits.
Go out and buy each of them a new wardrobe.
Which one are you going to do?
Companies make this mistake every day
The above parable has a very obvious answer - option 1 or 2, but never 3. Yet, every day, companies are choosing option 3 when they produce, edit or review written content.
For example, they find that their website isn't performing, so they undertake a redesign. They go through a huge process, and eventually unveil a new, beautiful website....where the copy on that site is essentially the same as it was before.
It's the same sales team, wearing different clothes.
Lots of blame to go around
This is as much the copywriting community's fault as it is the organisations neglecting the copywriting in the first place. As a copywriter, it's very easy to eyeball a brief and give a quote based on how long it takes to just bang out some words. That quote's going to be pretty affordable, because there's really not much to it when you approach the work like this.
But this does the project a massive disservice. Any content that is talking about the wrong things, using the wrong language, is very close to worthless - no matter how nice the words sound, no matter how clever the turns of phrase are and no matter how flawless the grammar is.
Make it about the customer
To solve this, you need to figure out what your customers care about and what kind of language they use. This means you need to put in work before you start writing. The amount of work you put in is really up to you - you can do as much or as little as you want.
Like most things, this is a spectrum. On the light end of the spectrum, you might just sit and think about these issues for a few minutes. Further along, you might have a brainstorm with your team. Further along, you might interview some internal stakeholders. You could then add some interviews with external customers. Then you might might look at some data. You can go as far as you want to get the information you need.
The heavy end of the spectrum
As an example of how far this approach can go, and the value it can add, take a look at this post on the Hubspot blog.
It's by copywriter Joel Klettke, and it talks through the process he and Josh Garofalo went through when they refreshed Hubspot's entire website a couple of years ago.
Before they did even a tiny bit of writing, they did all kinds of background research:
They figured out what wasn't working by interviewing Hubspot employees
They analysed and simplified the customer journey
They audited the existing copy
They undertook customer research - both through surveys and interviews
They segmented their audiences
They analysed their research
They wireframed where they thought the various messages should go.
Then they started writing. This is a ton of work, but it paid off - the new website converted nearly twice as many leads into customers as the old one.
Where do you fit?
Like everything, you'll have to decide how much work you do based on how valuable the project is and the resources you have available. Re-doing your entire website is probably going to merit more research and analysis than a quick blogpost about an event your team went to.
But make sure you do some thinking in this vein. More importantly, make sure the amount of thinking you do is a conscious decision based on the benefits and tradeoffs of the work involved. Otherwise, you're just rolling out the same salesperson in a different suit.
Photo by Ruthson Zimmerman on Unsplash