Copywriters, talk to your clients!
The annual ProCopywriters Survey dropped last week — and it makes for some pretty eyebrow-raising reading.
Its most shocking revelations for me?
Was it that 69% of survey respondents say they’ve used AI in their work?
Was it that, depressingly, the gender pay gap has widened, with male copywriters now paid 21% more than female copywriters?
Was it that, despite that gap, 38% of respondents say they believe gender plays no role in earnings?
No, the figures that shocked me most were these:
A massive 83% of copywriters prefer to present their work to clients, colleagues or stakeholders by email
Only 11% of copywriters like to get feedback over a web call, with 55% preferring to receive inline comments and 24% emailed notes
Maybe it’s the strategic nature of the writing we do at Broom & Moon, but we never click “Send” on our copy and hope for the best.
We also know that, apart from being the most demoralising form of feedback, asking for written comments means you’re missing a trick. An opportunity to demonstrate your value, your smarts, and all the hard thinking that’s gone into your copy.
So, yes, we always set up a web call, where we walk our client through our approach, step by step (admittedly, 65% of copywriters do say they do this too).
Let me share an example.
Recently, we helped a client articulate their vision for a part of their business. The work involved:
interviewing multiple internal stakeholders
immersing ourselves in the language of their customers’ feedback
digesting lots of internal strategy decks
considering their own previously co-created options for possible vision statements
conducting desk research, including into competitor vision statements
All of which fed into our final recommendation for a 12-word vision statement.
Had we simply sent over that 12-word vision statement, our client would quite probably have been bemused by what we’d produced.
That’s because our suggested statement was so different in tone — and, to some extent, content — from their own attempts. (This is exactly why you bring in an outside specialist for this kind of work, by the way).
Our vision statement was perfect and true. But, still, we knew it needed to be advocated for.
And email is not a great format for advocating for your copy. Especially with the rise of AI summaries, meaning your carefully crafted arguments may not even get read in full.
So, no, we didn’t email our proposed 12-word vision statement and hope for the best. We presented it over Zoom.
And before we unveiled that vision statement, we walked our client through 21 slides that explained our research findings and our thinking. This included:
a summary of everything the internal stakeholders had told us — and observations about the language they had used
the customer comments that had inspired the language of our proposed statement
the disconnect between 1 and 2
Those 21 slides weren’t simply designed to persuade our client that the words we’d chosen for them were perfect. Every slide also built drama and excitement before the big reveal.
And after that big reveal, we still weren’t done.
We went on to present a further 4 slides that broke our proposed statement down piece by piece into its constituent parts. Our goal was to show where every word had come from. To demonstrate how every single word had earned its place.
We knew one of those words in particular would be a little contentious. And would have been dismissed outright had it been staring out at our client in an email.
But we were able to make the case for that word and have a conversation about it. Our client eventually agreed it was perfect.
So, copywriters, ditch the email and talk to your clients — you may be pleasantly surprised at what they have to say.
Postscript 1
Of course, the process outlined above is really only an option if you’ve put in the hard thinking work and are proudly presenting work that’s you’re own. It’s not going to be an option if you’re among the 69% of copywriters who are outsourcing the writing and the thinking to AI.
Postscript 2
A further benefit of our approach was that we could share our presentation with our client to use internally. Having sold our work to them, we gave them what they needed to sell the work to their wider group of stakeholders.
A win for us and a win for them.
