Understanding the Craft of Copywriting
A one page Copywriting 101 to help navigate the world of copywriting
Copywriting is not a hack.
You cannot pick it up by looking at 30 examples, 40 tear-downs, and sipping 50 cups of coffee while at that.
Because copywriting is not a T-20 cricket match. It's a series of Test matches – played under immense heat and pressure for months.
Of course, examples, tear-downs, and workshops are of immense help. But there's so much more to learn. So much more to do.
So in this edition of the market-edit, we will take a dip into the realm of copywriting.
Copywriting is like sculpting.
You take a rough shaped body of clay at the start. Just like you do with your drafts. You shape them just like you tinker words. You add the details – the lines, the contours, the jargons, the phrases. It should look real.
Then you take away the words that don't belong on the statue. You chip at them slowly. Till you think the statue resembles what you had in your mind. Just like your draft.
However, copywriting is a kind of sculpting where you don't know what statue you are making.
It's an act of faith. As much as an act of art.
The wind blows over the billboards.
It ravishes everything in its way – trees, plastic bags, sand, and weak hoardings. The desert is real now. It forces everything with a soul into hiding.
It takes 5 minutes or so for the dust storm to settle. The weary travelers come out. They glance at the billboards.
"Thirsty? Paradise to the left." One of the billboard reads.
The travelers suddenly remember they are thirsty.
They all turn left.
Copywriting is a craft.
It's saying relevant, clear words. At the right time. At the right place.
It's not word-plays. It's not adding an action word. It's not using fewer adverbs. But again, it's all of those.
How to start with copywriting
I am sharing some of the very basics of getting started with copywriting. Not a whole lot of technical or advanced stuff, but I will cover the small but critical stuff that can help you understand and navigate copywriting.
Below is a simplistic breakdown of the concepts that can help you write better copies. (This is in no way, a complete picture. There are lots of other advanced frameworks and guidelines that you can find from so many amazing copywriting folks on the internet.)
1. Understand the message
One mistake that many marketers and copywriters make is going straight to the writing stage. They do not struggle or try figuring out the messaging. In fact, this could be one of the easiest reasons for copy failures.
Think about this – messaging is not copy(writing).
The biggest way to simplify copywriting is by differentiating copy from message.
Messaging or message is what you want to say. It’s an idea, a thought. It might be said in a 1000 words novel or in 140 characters of a tweet.
Copy is how you say it. It’s those 1000 words or 140 characters.
Once this difference is established, you can clearly figure out that the first task for a copywriter should be finding out this message.
This is the most daunting step for copywriters. It requires you to understand the audience, market, product/services and the context of the copy (where and how it will be used.)
Research, converse, analyze till you are confident you have grasped what you want to say.
2. Write the first draft
Just write it down. Crude, rough, bad, typos- doesn’t matter - just write the first draft down.
Getting everything right in the first try is gold. But very difficult to achieve. So, don’t pressure yourself into achieving this. Even the best of authors and copywriters have multiple drafts before they finally get it right.
The truism that you need to understand here is that the first draft is not the final draft.
3. Edit like a fervent critic
Once you have got a decent looking draft, now you bring in the editor in you out.
“Write drunk, edit sober.”
I don’t know who said it (there is a bit of confusion to be frank) but it conveys the point - both on writing drafts with ease and editing with all scruples.
Some things to work on while you edit are-
Cut out words and sentences that don’t help you in communicating what you want to say.
Replace words with words that make your message more clear.
Reduce the number of words. A terse, succinct copy is any day better than a long, droning one. Especially if you are writing marketing and ad copies, this is something you should heavily focus on.
Read it loudly. Does it sound good to you? Reading aloud can help you discover and edit details that the eyes might miss.
Does your first sentence lead to the second one and that to the third so on? The transition of a sentence into the next one is critical. This is what builds a narrative - a hook to bait the reader into reading the next line. Usually emotional or logical connections do this work. But sometimes, the connections are latent and that also builds a twist that can engage the reader.
If you have used emotional arguments in your copy, now is the time to verify their validity and expected impact. Does this emotional link sound sincere? Is it forced? These questions can help you figure the congruency of your emotional pointers.
Check if all your sentences are grammatically correct. Do note that if you are using conversational language, sometimes the sentences will miss out on objects, subjects, etc.
Practicing copywriting as flash fiction
As you might have noticed from the pointers in the editing step that copywriting involves too many things that will only get cultivated through practice. In fact, a fun way to build those copywriting muscles is via flash fictions.
This is because a good copy bears almost all the hallmarks of a flash fiction. It’s saying a story in as few words and as clearly as possible. And many would argue that micro-fiction or flash-fiction is essentially a kind of copywriting.
Below is a flash-fiction or a six-word story, popularly attributed to Ernest Hemmingway, is a great example of a good copywriting.
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
Notice how terse it is – 6 words.
There is a good link between phrases. What’s for sale? Baby shoes. What kind of baby shoes? Those that were never worn. There is a beautiful logical sequence running between the words.
The emotional appeal or presentation is tragic here. And it all comes up as a twist and surprise in the last two words - never worn.
It also creates a deep mystery. Why were the shoes never worn? Why were they bought in the first place? Did something happen to the baby for which the shoes were bought? An untold mystery of a tragic nature starts looming in the air as soon as you read the last two words.In the hindsight, after the next 5 seconds post reading, the mystery bites the reader even stronger. The reader is forced to reverse engineer with the given prompt. Why is the person selling the shoes? What kind of tragedy has befallen the person? Why would they sell something that might be a memory?
There is so much more to copywriting that meets the eye. And what I have stated here are the very basics. As you dive deeper into the field of copywriting you will discover amazing new thoughts and techniques.
Here are some folks you could follow to keep learning about copywriting.
Would request you to add more folks in the comment that have helped you with copywriting.
Regards,
Yours market-editor.
Separating the message and copy was a new insight. It makes copywriting more methodical for me. Amazing read, thanks!