A while ago, I received an email from a potential copywriting client, the CEO of a mid-market IT consulting firm and she asked me what my copywriting rate was.
After some thinking, I told her that my rate was most definitely higher than her accountant's and most probably higher than her lawyer's.
She was a bit shocked but also smart enough to ask me how I could justify charging more than an accountant or a lawyer.
So, I asked her how much revenue her accountant had generated for her firm. She said zero, and quickly added that her accountant helped her to minimise her firm's taxes.
Then I asked her how much revenue her lawyer had generated. She said zero, and quickly added that her lawyer helped her to comply with the law and stay out of prison.
Then I asked her what inspired her to start her business. She said she wanted to help her clients (medium-sized manufacturing plants) to build and maintain reliable IT infrastructures that best support their manufacturing processes and growth.
Then I asked her how her clients had benefited from her paying low taxes and staying out of prison?
She looked at me puzzled.
Then I explained that based on what she had told me, realistically, her business mission was to minimise her firm's costs and taxes and to stay out of prison. Her mission had nothing to do with her firm's or her clients' success.
All in all, she was playing the great game of business not to lose money and to stay out of prison. She must have an exciting business and a fulfilling life.
Then we established that although a copywriter couldn't minimise her taxes and couldn't keep her out of prison, a good copywriter could help her firm to generate revenue.
Yes, for some people cutting costs and staying out of prison are the pinnacles of running a successful business, but I hope there are some poor souls out there for whom generating revenue, well, profit really, is even more important.
And they will find this literary masterpiece a bit more useful than a knitted condom.
The main impetus behind this article is that IT SMEs spend the king's ransom on hiring non-essential staff on a full-time basis and by the time they want to hire essential staff, they're so low on money that no self-respecting professional is interested in their over-scoped and underpaid job offers.
So, let's take a closer look why it's so important to hire a good copywriter as soon as you can and hold back on hiring some other, more fanciful and impressive-sounding, staff.
Many people believe that a good brand is really a logo and a colour palette and all you have to do is repeatedly expose your logo, and people come and throw large sums of money at you.
Some people argue that this is how big corporations have done it and have gained tremendous traction. Yes. And it's taken them decades and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Can you match that?
Amazon.com started in 1994 and, after having invested hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing, first turned a profit in 2001.
Can you match that sum of money and the ability to wait seven years?
How can graphics-based image marketing play out in a small-and medium-sized entrepreneurial business?
Well...
Imagine that Fred is looking for a wife.
So, he flies to a big city where exceptionally beautiful women live.
He turns up in front of the local high-end hairdresser shop, shuts his eyes, drops his trousers, flashes his manhood (a.k.a. logo), pulls up his trousers and flies back home.
Then he keeps repeating his image marketing act as often as he can afford it, hoping that one day someone runs out of the hairdresser shop, throws herself to his feet and begs him to marry her.
No takers so far and Fred is running out of money faster than greased lightning.
The reality is that, especially when you think of emails or the phone, words sell every day without images.
You can send a 12-page snail mail letter to qualified buyers and your letter gets read and acted upon. You end up with new sales.
But what happens to 12 pages of masterfully composed images?
Nothing? Maybe 12 more pages in the rubbish bin.
Yes, the best bet is to have a copywriter and a designer work together, but if you have to compromise on the copywriter because you insist on hiring a top-notch graphic designer, then you are in a losing game.
To learn more about how copy and design can work well together, get Colin Wheildon's book Type And Layout: How Typography And Design Can Get Your Message Across.
SEO experts can get your website to the top of Google. Well, great!
The problem is this.
What happens when your website is on the top of Google's first page and people start visiting it in large numbers?
Nothing. Not a sausage?
Since there is nothing that would engage them, they leave.
The same content with the right keywords attracted Google's attention and has got the page ranked, but visitors are human, and they operate slightly differently.
And that's the expertise of the copywriter.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is all about using those tiny ads to bring qualified traffic to your website.
And when people click on your PPC ads, they are in search mode for something specific. They are not merely surfing the net. They are on a mission to find something specific.
And that "specific" is the landing page where your PPC ad sends people.
Can that landing page engage those people?
Are they likely to stay and read the copy on that page?
Are they likely to do the action the page calls for?
Clicks are getting more and more expensive, be it Google, Facebook or LinkedIn.
And there is no point in paying for all those clicks if they end up in a black hole, wasting your money.
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, Stephen Covey writes that we should begin with the end in mind?
What is the last step of your PPC campaign? And the previous step?
Step backwards and see where you need kick-arse copy before you need a PPC expert.
The main job of social media is to bring visitors to your website.
And what happens when people arrive at your website?
They are excited by your social media post and expect something similar on your website.
But instead of engaging and compelling copy, they get hit by something as boring as the tax code.
Social media consultants remind me of Y2K consultants before 2000.
Most of them were computer salespeople who recognised a problem and started solving problems that they knew nothing about.
Today, every Tom, Dick and Harry is a social media expert. And maybe this is the reason why those social media experts can justify their existence to their clients without being able to show quantifiable return on their investments.
Yes, there are great social media consultants.
But before you hire one and ask her to bring traffic to your website, make sure your website is in good "copy-shape" and when she floods your website with visitors from your social media platforms, they actually stay and start consuming your content.
Blogging is part of your content marketing. But no matter how much of a blog expert you hire, if you don't have engaging copy for your blog, you're more doomed than a house mouse at a cat convention just before lunch.
And by engaging copy I don't mean some intellectual drivel that shows you some tactical steps.
What I mean is something that spurs you to take the action step at the end of the post.
And this is where you have to choose between a content writer and a copywriter.
A content writer writes to inform; a copywriter writes to influence and sell.
Information is good. I read an article and move on to the next article. Then to the next. And to the next.
Influence is different. I read an article and take a specific physical action that's outlined in the piece.
If the mission of your business is to inform people for the sake of keeping them informed, then keep informing them.
But if it includes something along the line of income-generation, then you're better off influencing your readers and converting them into clients.
What I find amazing is that when you download some gated content from the websites of some great content marketing proponents (Marketo, Salesforce, etc.), a super-aggressive tele-peddler is on you trying to hard-sell you the company's software.
And if the tele-peddlers can't reach you, then you start receiving the emails.
All in all, they practise the complete opposite of what they preach.
When you have salespeople, they can go after sales one by painstakingly one.
When you have a copywriter, everything changes.
Your copywriter writes a sales letter sequence (amateurs try this with one single letter and keep biting the dust) and you start sending it out to a database of, say, 10,000 target prospects.
With a good letter sequence and offer, you can expect 2,500 sales appointments and 1,000 sales.
How big a sales force and how long time do you need to connect with 10,000 target prospects?
Consider that people are much more opened to reading a letter than meeting salespeople. One reason is that when you read a letter, you control the process, but when you meet a salesperson, he's in control of the process.
Also, when you read a letter, you're open-minded and your guards are down.
But when you meet a salesperson, you're much more sceptical, cynical and suspicious, and your guards are up.
Call me lazy, but I love selling against very little or zero resistance. And this is what sales copy does.
A sales force just introduces unnecessary resistance.
And in the worst case, if prospects don't respond to my letter sequence. No big deal.
I can target the same prospects 1-2 months later and they don't remember me.
But they do remember the salespeople from whom they didn't buy 1-2 months ago.
All, in all, I want to use a non-memorable marketing process which then I can soon repeat without running the risk of being recognised.
There are two things accountants can do.
They can count the money that your business has made and advise you on minimising your cost of running your business.
To count the money, you need people who know how to make money. No, accountants don't know that.
Not knowing marketing, accountants can advise you to cut valuable investments. For them, everything is a cost to be minimised or eliminated.
They can advise you to eliminate that $5,000 a month magazine ad that brings in $25,000 worth of clockwork-like new business because it's too expensive and you can get a "similar" ad for $1,000 in another magazine.
Another problem with accountants is that many people confuse them with finance experts and employ them as chief financial officers.
But there is a difference.
Accounting is a rear-view mirror job, meaning that accountants report and make lagging calculations on what's already happened, what's the company has already earned (the past).
Financial management is a view-forward job, meaning that CFOs plan and make leading calculations on what the business would like to happen and what's likely to happen (the future).
But no matter how good your accountant is, without good copy, the company can't earn a bean and there is nothing to report, calculate and pay taxes on.
And what happens in the future is highly dependent on your copy. There are three major contributors to your revenues...
But if your business mission revolves around "Running my business at the lowest possible costs and without paying taxes", then hire an accountant and no one else.
See the accountant syndrome.
Lawyers can keep you out of prison but no matter how good they are, they can't generate revenue for your company.
Using soccer lingo, while a copywriter is the striker on your team, your accountant and lawyer are the defence.
And, as the business owner, you have to decide whether you play the offence of generating revenue or the defence of cutting costs and being legally careful and staying out of prison.
So, if you're an offensive business owner, you go with a good copywriter and enjoy your profits.
But, if you're a defensive business owner, you go with a good accountant and lawyer and enjoy every day of your business run on the fumes of money and outside prison. Great mission accomplished!
Life is full of situations that look impressive to the outside world but useless to the parties in the situation.
This is the difference between martial art and military hand-to-hand combat.
Martial art looks impressive to spectators because of the high-kicks.
Thinking of my combat training in the military, instead of the spectacular high kicks, we were taught to kill with breath-taking effectiveness.
The dichotomy of impressive vs. effective.
A graphic designer can impress viewers with great images and amazing colours.
A SEO expert can bamboozle onlookers with high page rank on Google.
An accountant can dazzle people with all sorts of tax deductions.
But what they also have in common is that they can't sell anything. When it comes to revenue-generation, they are roughly as useful as nipples on a breastplate.
I may be an idiot, but in my view, regardless of what business you're in, profit-generation should be the very first order of the day. Once you have money coming in, you can plan for the future.
But just as you can't steer a stationary car, you can't project the future for a dysfunctional business.
And if your goal is profit-generation, one of the first professionals you should seek out is a copywriter possibly with subject matter expertise and hands-on experience in your industry, so you can start generating revenue pretty quickly.
If you don't have great copy, you don't have a business because you can't engage your target market.
And if you can't engage your prospects and have your copy make them respond to your calls to action, well you don't have a business.
Yes, you can have an army of peddlers dialling for dollars and roaming the land, but that's a rather sad state of affairs.
It's obscenely costly and nipple-piercingly ineffective. Besides, while buyers are as keen as mustard to read well-written collaterals, they are as keen as a whole mustard factory to avoid talking to salespeople until they like what they read in your collaterals.
In George Orwell's Animal Farm, the pigs declare, "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than the others".
We can also declare that all professionals are equal, but copywriters are a tad more equal because they bring home the bacon, not your attorney, accountant or SEO expert.
At least, that's how I've heard it.