4 tips to help you hire a great copywriter
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Hiring a copywriter is hard and stressful for two reasons.
First, the barriers to entry for copywriting are low. Super low. Anyone with a laptop can call themselves a copywriter, and anyone with a spare afternoon and a Squarespace subscription can knock up a professional-looking website.
This means that the market is absolutely littered with copywriters asking for your business. Some are great. Some are medium. And some are very bad.
And it's very hard to tell which one's which.
Second, hiring the wrong copywriter is really expensive!
The best case scenario is that you end up rewriting or not using their work.
The worst case scenario is that you go live with some copy that isn't up to the job. If that copy's job is to drive sales, the cost of running bad copy can very quickly run into the thousands of dollars in the form of lost opportunities.
This has been on my mind because I helped someone hire a copywriter last week (I was too busy to take on their project). Spending some time on the other side of the hiring table helped to clarify some of my thinking around what to look for in a copywriter.
I boiled that down to four tips you can use when you're hiring a copywriter for your own business. Take a look:
1: Ignore the samples
Samples look really nice and professional, especially if they're laid out in a well-designed portfolio. But there are lots of things that a sample doesn't tell you:
The constraints it was written under
The objective of the sample - and whether that objective was achieved
The process the writer followed to produce that sample (more on that in a second)
The number of revisions it needed to get to that point
Whether it was delivered on deadline
And so on, and so forth.
An example of something is great for when you're buying a finished product. If you're buying a laptop, it's useful to play with the one in the store; the one you buy is going to be identical to the one you play with because they both came out of the same factory.
But copywriting is a service. You're not just grabbing a finished product off a rack. You're buying a finished product and the process of building that product from scratch. Samples only show you half of that equation.
2: Take results with a grain of salt
Case studies with quantifiable results like "increased conversions by 10%" are more useful than samples, but they aren't perfect. They're just pieces of a larger story, and you'll get a better view of your potential copywriter's skills if you can get a better view of that larger story.
Here's an example. Early in my career, when I was still an in-house copywriter, I wrote an email to a SaaS company's trial users, with the objective of turning them into paid users.
It was a pretty standard email. I wrote some nice persuasive copy about the benefits of the product, and we included an offer of a month of the product for free. Nothing special really.
A whole heap of the recipients took us up on the offer and turned into paid users. I ran the numbers, and found that my email had brought in an extra $60,000 or so of revenue! I felt great.
But when I reflected on it (years) later, I realised that my copywriting had not been the windfall that I had initially thought it was.
In reality, a significant portion of people who are trialing software already intend on paying, but just haven't gotten around to it yet.
I couldn't claim credit for every new paying customer who came in through my email. I could only claim credit for the hard-to-quantify, but definitely much smaller set of customers who were on the fence, but got pushed over the edge by the email's offer and persuasive copy.
Having said all this, I should be very clear: results are good! But don't take them at face value. Scratch the surface a little bit, and find out the whole story.
3: Ask about process
A conversation about process is going to give you a ton of insight into what kind of work a copywriter produces, and how they produce it.
Some copywriters' process is as simple as "take your brief and write up some words that read well."
Others have a more research-driven process. They might use tools like surveys and customer interviews. They might get into your website's analytics. They might carry out internal interviews, talking to people like your sales team.
There's no "correct" process. Lots of copywriters don't really have one at all. And this isn't a bad thing! These copywriters are a great fit for the projects that don't need a process.
For example, if you just need your monthly internal newsletter punched up to make sure it reads well, then there's no sense hiring a copywriter who's going to want to start from scratch and do in-depth research to find the best topics, the tone and word choice that will resonate with your staff, and so on. It would be using a hammer to crack a nut.
Conversely, if you're redoing your website that gets 100,000 viewers a day, then you are probably going to want to hire someone who follows a more in-depth, formalised process to make sure they're highlighting the right details and using the right language (I wrote about this a few months ago).
Asking about process will flush out what kind of projects a copywriter is suited for - which will in turn tell you if they're suitable for your project.
4: Take a look at the testimonials
Every copywriter you speak to is probably going to have some testimonials from happy clients. These are a great tool to use to figure out if the person you're talking to is worth working with.
You can get more value out of these testimonials by looking closely at what each testimonial is saying. Good testimonials will be specific and they'll support that copywriter's value proposition.
Bad testimonials will say something generic that could apply to anyone. Something like "He did a great job!"
This is worth doing because testimonial selection is actually a (very difficult) form of copywriting. You have to ask someone the right questions to get the right level of detail. You also have to pluck the best sentences out of a much longer email or phone call.
A copywriter's ability to get really solid, specific testimonials is in and of itself a testimonial about their copywriting skills. So take a deep look at any testimonials they have, and really think about what they're telling you.
Wrap it up
Think about these four things next time you're looking for a copywriter. To reiterate:
Ignore the samples
Take results with a grain of salt
Ask about process
Take a look at the testimonials
Try putting these into action next time you hire a copywriter. Then let me know how you go - and if there's a fifth thing you swear by, hit reply and let me know.
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