Every business relies on copywriting and copy editing in order to navigate the online market landscape. It is an essential element in telling your story, growing your brand, and making potential customers become actual customers. However, despite its importance, it is an easy element to overlook when drafting your business plan.
What is Copywriting? Copy Editing?
We should differentiate between “copywriting” and “copy editing,” both of which are important to your business.
- Copywriting is writing with the sole purpose of advertising and marketing. I.E., to write catchy copy that will “sell.” This is different than “Content Writing,” which is more about “telling” instead of “selling.” Both are important, but we’ll focus on copywriting for now.
- Copy Editing is editing the written content for readability, for punctuation, and for purpose. A copy editor might change a word so that it has a greater impact. They may also rewrite clunky sentences to read easier, thereby ensuring audience engagement
As you can see, both elements are very important and complimentary to each other. But how (and why) should you focus your attention on these elements? Let’s take a look.
You Want Audience Engagement
Audience engagement is all about keeping your readers reading. The second they click away you have lost a potential client. This rings true no matter what medium you are displaying your text, whether it is a blog article, an advertisement, a social media post, or even white page and eBooks. The ultimate point is clarity and engagement.
This is where having a creative spin on your copy is important. Boring and overly technical copy will coax your readers to yawn and turn away. Of course, there are times when this sort of writing is necessary, but when it comes to advertising and growth, even just a little creativity can carry you a long way.
You also want to make sure that what you are presenting is not overly complex, especially with sentence structure. As with anything, there is a time and a place for complex writing, but first impressions are huge, so it is best to keep it simple and easy to read. The easier it is to read the more likely your readers will read everything. This is where a copy editor is crucial because they will know exactly how to edit the content for your purposes.
Quality Over Quantity
Now, it is very easy to want to put out as much content as possible, but is this advisable? Most likely: no, it is not advisable. But why? If you are generating a lot of content (i.e., quantity) then it is safe to assume that the content is being generated quickly. Each individual piece of copy is not getting the attention it deserves and therefore will suffer.
It is far better to make sure your content is perfect (i.e., quality) so that when it goes out into the world you will know, for a fact, that it is good copy that will engage your audience and drive traffic to your business.
When you take care of these elements yourself it is far more likely that the copy itself will suffer. This isn’t because you’re necessarily a bad writer or editor, but because you have so many other things that need your attention that you don’t put the energy into the writing that it deserves. Remember when Old Navy forgot an apostrophe on one of their t-shirts? They had to reprint all their shirts because they wrote “Lets Go” instead of “Let’s Go.” That one apostrophe completely changes the meaning of the phrase in question.
Professional writers will know exactly what to do to tell your story. They will work with you to create a product you will be happy with. A potential customer could come down to a single word choice or a piece of misplaced punctuation. Little errors like these will create an unsophisticated appearance, which is never a good thing.
So the next time you’re thinking about writing an ad, or any copy at all, consider a copywriter to write it for you, or a copy editor to look at what you have written and polish it into something special. Remember, the editing tools that come with word processors (such as autocorrect or those blue lines indicating grammar) can only take you so far. These tools cannot know your intent, they can only know what you write. And even then they can get it wrong. It’s better for a person to look at it physically because they will be able to add intuition to the process.