Information we need

To do a great job, we need to properly understand your business. So before we even start work, we invest a lot of time learning about your offerings, your differentiators, and your market (which explains why we require 50% up-front).

Our insistence on uncovering all the subtle details isn’t us being difficult, it’s us being diligent. It allows us to do what you’re paying us to do:

1. Engage your readers by showing you understand their situation, needs and feelings;
2. Prove you can meet those needs by accurately and credibly conveying the qualities of your business; and
3. Compel your readers to act by promising real-world, believable benefits and guiding them towards a relevant, respectful call to action.

This means you’ll need to invest a fair bit of time too. We can’t just make this stuff up because it’s all unique to your business. It needs to come from you. So we’ll ask you a lot of questions, on the phone (up to 2-hours included in most fixed-price quotes) and in a questionnaire, and the more time you invest in answering them, the more value you’ll get out of us.

Here’s a rundown of the sort of questions we ask for a typical copywriting and web design job…

Home page questions

• For the headline: What is the one main point you want readers to ‘get’ the moment they arrive at this page? E.g. Often the headline will promise a benefit or an outcome.
• What main points / claims do you want to make on this page?
• What questions do you think readers will be asking themselves about your business / offering as they’re reading this page? What are the answers to those questions?
• Do you have any relevant existing copy we can refer to?
• What is the call to action for this page? (i.e. What do you want the reader to do immediately after reading this page? Call you? Email you? etc.)

Product / Service page questions

We ask the following questions for each of your product / service pages:

• For the headline: What is the one main point you want readers to ‘get’ the moment they arrive at this page? E.g. Often the headline will promise a benefit or an outcome.
• What main points / claims do you want to make on this page? Remember, your readers don’t know as much as you do about this product / service. We need to provide enough information that they can clearly differentiate between your different products / services, and between this product / service and competing offerings from other providers. We need to give people a reason to consider your offering. We need readers to think, “Oh THAT’S what it is. That’s exactly what I need!” Please try to provide information that backs up any claims you make.
• Tell us about this product / service (in detail).
• Do readers need to be persuaded that they need this product / service, generally, or only that they need you – and not your competitors – to provide it? I.e. Have they already decided they need this product / service, and are simply trying to choose someone to provide it? Or are they still unsure what service they need?
• What makes your delivery of this individual product / service better than your competitors’? Please try to provide information that backs up any claims you make.
• Who is the reader (e.g, brain surgeon, male, 30-45, professional, affluent, physically active)?
• What problem / need / situation has caused the reader to visit this page?
• How would they have arrived at this page?
• How would your reader achieve their objectives without this product / service?
• What is the reader’s current opinion of this product / service of yours? (e.g. Unaware / suspicious / loyal customer / indifferent.)
• What questions do you think readers will be asking themselves about this product / service as they’re reading this page? What are the answers to those questions?
• Do you know of any barriers to sale / conversion ? (Reasons the reader might decide NOT to engage you to provide this product / service.)
• Any other details you want to include?
• What is the call to action for this page? (i.e. What do you want the reader to do immediately after reading this page? Call you? Email you? etc.)
• Do you have any relevant existing copy we can refer to?

Contact page questions

• What do you want visitors to contact you to discuss? And what are they most likely to want to discuss?
• What’s the most compelling reason we can give them to pick up the phone and call you, or to email you?
• How would you prefer they contact you?
• Who will respond to their enquiry, and how soon? What sort of information will they likely provide when they respond? How will they help the customer in their response? (e.g. Will they provide useful information that the customer might have to pay for elsewhere? Will they get some idea about the best way to achieve their goals, with or without you? In other words, are you offering something for nothing in your response?)

If you give us detailed, constructive feedback on our work, we can deliver exactly what you want, faster.

Reviewing our copy

It’s important to note that the copy review process can take quite a bit of your time. You’ll need to read through the copy line by line, to ensure that it not only reads well, but that it also meets your objectives.

The only way you’ll get exactly what you want is to provide detailed, constructive criticism. It’s not enough to say, “I don’t like it” or “It’s not quite what I was after.” If you do that, we’ll have no idea how to fix things, and we’ll just ask for more information.

In order to deliver the results you’re after, we need to hear things like, “The second paragraph is a bit too formal, and it hasn’t really conveyed the benefit of my product effectively. It needs to really reinforce the fact that the customer will save 5 minutes every time they use this widget.”