Qualifications To Look For When Hiring a Copywriter

This article was first published on Magic.

Successful digital marketing campaigns need to publish informative content on the platforms where their target audience hangs out. Hire a copywriter who can bring forth the right messages in the ways that the company wants them presented. These messages can be in the form of blogs or landing pages published on the company website. Others are placed on brochures, digital ads, videos, social media, and email messages.

Find a copywriter who can tailor content to your brand voice and style. In addition, present useful content including how your target audience can benefit from your company’s offers. This helps your target audience be informed and engaged in reading the messages of your company. Plus, it establishes brand awareness and ultimately sales revenue.

Traits And Qualities Of A Good Copywriter

Even before looking up freelance copywriters, you should know what skills and qualities you need. Here are some of the skills companies often look for in marketing copywriters.

1. Research Skills

This is one of the basic writing skills any copywriter should have. Technical blogs and guides are some copywriting that require more research. New marketing and advertising content also need research to make sure that the information used is accurate and updated. Evergreen content can serve as great marketing material that can build your authority over time. Consistently publishing great copywriting that uses accurate information and statistics is the key to its success.

The marketing content company Search Engine Journal publishes evergreen content. As a result, it has become one of the best sources of information as it built its authority around SEO and digital marketing. To provide the latest best practices and strategies, it consults the smartest practitioners in its industry.

2. Adaptability

Being able to adapt to changes and new situations is another copywriter skill to look at. It allows them to write in the formats and styles prescribed by your chosen platforms. A press release follows a certain format, tone, and style. It’s different from that of a blog post, landing page, and infographics. While all these should use your brand voice and style, each kind of content has a different audience.

For example, PR Web, an online public relations site and press release distributor, accepts companies who want to publish their press releases on its website. However, the press releases have to follow their format such as certain link file types like .jpeg, .gif, .pdf, etc. they don’t accept your press release if it’s a duplicate, meaning that it’s been published on other websites other than PR Web. Check out their editorial guideline for the complete list of information.

3. Understand The Audience

Good copywriters should convey the brand message you want to tell your target audience. Plus, they should know how to engage your customers through written content. Knowing your audience’s needs, preferences, and interests allows them to write your content in a way that appeals to them and their emotions.

Use the right tone and language in the content to make an impact. Apple’s content marketing is so effective that other companies use it as a benchmark to attain popularity, staying power, and consistent profit earnings. They let their products do the talking by using simple but effective visuals and messaging. They lean on standout features — the MacBook PowerBar and the Retina Display for example⁠ — and capture customers’ emotions by appealing to their habits, likes, and dislikes. They talk to them using their language.

4. Can Work With Minimal Supervision And Quick Deadlines

Being able to work with no or minimal supervision and still meet tight deadlines is a great help to a growing business. Copywriters who can work independently keep your business marketing going while requiring approval on final outputs from you.

Netflix uses its corporate culture to maintain its business philosophy, core values, beliefs, and behaviors. However, it also encourages its employees to share new ideas and expects others to support innovative ones so it retains its strategic place in its industry.

5. Relevant Experience In Social Media And Content Marketing

Hire a copywriter with relevant writing experience in line with digital content marketing and social media. Since most companies capitalize on digital marketing, it’s important that your copywriter can create ad content, blogs, and other marketing content that’s suitable for your target audience. For example, trending news travels fast through social media. As a copywriter, they should react to these by providing fresh content from it to benefit your business.

Google Trends and Google News plus Twitter and Facebook are prime sources of trending news that can follow. Your copywriter can use relevant news sources when creating news that you’d want to share with your audience, especially if it’s interesting for them to know.

6. SEO Awareness

A freelance copywriter should be able to create Search Engine Optimization (SEO) copywriting without keyword stuffing. Build your brand by regularly publishing blogs and other content that helps your readers. Google responds positively to a 0.5% keyword density. But many SEO specialists advise 1–2 percent. That’s using one to two keywords for every 100 words of copywriting.

Google constantly updates its algorithms to provide the best responses to a question. It factors in page ranking and relevancy when showing search engine results pages (SERPs).

Copywriters now use long-tail keywords containing around four-word phrases instead of repeating a single keyword throughout the content. This makes it easier to create informative SEO copywriting that’s written for humans and not for search engines.

7. Powerful Storytelling

The best copywriters are powerful storytellers. They can catch the attention of their readers and hook them until the end of their story. After all, readers love meaningful, memorable, and immersive stories. Hire a copywriter who can include storytelling in their copywriting. This should result in a steady increase in your target audience. Not to mention the regular return of existing readers whenever they have problems that you can help them solve.

Storytelling is an effective way of capturing your target audience.

• Use interactive posts on your company’s social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook
• Create SEO-rich blogs and landing pages
• Personalize cold emails

Reach your target audience by telling your stories following platform requirements and marketing purposes. Humanize your brand by publishing personal stories that build the trust of your target audience.

8. Strong Copywriting Skills

Excellent copywriters possess professional writing skills that allow them to create various kinds of copywriting including guides, web pages, product reviews and descriptions, journals, white papers, and ads. Ask for previous writing samples. The samples should convey the message that the company wants to deliver. Better yet, hire them for a sample article to evaluate their skills. Include the content details you want to find in the final content. Their copywriting should appeal to your target audience and persuade them to act on the CTA of the content.

For example, Notion, a tech startup that provides an all-in-one workspace for companies and their teams, hires copywriters to adopt a business tone fit for their B2B customers. They can use appropriate jargon in their copywriting but should keep it at a bare minimum to encourage quick understanding for their readers. However, TikTok and remote work boosted its to-do, note-taking, and calendar features, resulting in thousands of signups. This unexpected event opened its doors to creating B2C customers as well.

Also, I think it’s important to note that Magic generally avoids trying to fill roles that require a strong cultural fit,* and that includes most copywriting. Better to focus on writing that relies less on cultural immersion, such as product descriptions, summaries (e.g. podcast show notes, cataloging, archives, etc.), and reports (i.e. for internal use). Please revise the conclusion of the article accordingly.

Choose A Magic Assistant For Specific Copywriting Tasks

Here are the top reasons why you should hire a copywriter at Magic:

• Create excellent catalogs and podcast show notes
• Customize product descriptions and accurate summaries
• Execute tactical messaging among chosen platforms
• Bring strong writing on progress reports and archives
• Give high-quality content following a format or suitable for a particular platform

Magic prides itself on matching clients with the most suitable virtual assistants. With just one discovery call, we can discuss what you need and we can make a shortlist of candidates for you to choose from. Skip the recruitment and screening process and just hire your Magic assistant among our top matches. Check out our hiring guide for the details of how we match VAs with clients.

Take advantage of seamless integration using our client portal. It allows you to easily and quickly communicate and assign tasks to your VA to handle your digital marketing campaigns. Hiring a copywriter starts with one call. Hire a Magic assistant when you contact us now!