Copywriting isn’t difficult to learn but good copywriting is almost impossible to come by. The best copywriters have the ability to persuade you into action without you even realizing it. The best copywriters are so good at their job that you won’t even know you’re being hypnotised.
Copywriting is one of the defining entrepreneurial traits of the 21st century. Often dubbed as salesmanship in print, it’s the process of defining and sharing the voice of the brand and persuading a customer to take action. Most people don’t know that it’s actually very different from content writing.
Learning how to write great copy is an absolute must for everyone, regardless of your profession. Focused on maximizing every word, copywriting will teach you the principles of good salesmanship – a key skill for no matter what you do in life.
In this article, I provide 3 more compelling arguments as to why you should learn how to write great copy.
Table of Contents
Why Should I Learn Copywriting?
Regardless of what you do, I bet you’ll find some way to make use of a superpower like copywriting. Whether it’s for a job interview, a business, or maybe asking someone out on a date, the fundamentals you’ll learn in copywriting will definitely carry over in your daily life.
So why should you learn copywriting? Here are three reasons:
Teaches You Principles Of Effective Research
When I first got started in marketing, I never realized how data-driven it was. My concept of marketing was that it was the simple process of creating loud ads that caught customers’ eyes and make them want to fork over money.
Boy, was I wrong.
In truth, marketing and copywriting are incredibly reliant on the process of effective research to draw and create consumer insights and truths. Through the process of discovering a product’s target market and garnering opinions in an efficient manner, marketers create better content by tackling pain points head-on.
Copywriting forced me to become a better researcher.
It made me more intentional with the questions I ask, more aware of the body language of my respondents, and provided me with the experience that allowed me to quickly internalise a strong vision of what I want to achieve.
It also taught me how to Google better.
These skills are transferrable to so many other aspects of life (especially the part where I learned how to effectively use Google).
Say, for example, you’re in a job interview and you really want to impress the interviewer.
Market research dictates that you learn everything there is to know about the company to figure out what sort of employee they’re looking for. So you interview past employees and read through every inch of the company’s website.
On interview day, you quickly assess the interviewer’s body language in reaction to your answers and adjust your subsequent answers accordingly.
Before you get home, you receive an email congratulating you for getting the position.
You start Monday.
Shows You How To Hone Influence
An often-overlooked skill that copywriting teaches is the art of persuasion. Copywriters create different types of copy that could take on longer forms (like articles and journals) to short product descriptions and advertising.
Yet no matter what you do, the main goal remains the same: to ultimately persuade an audience to take action.
This is where marketing psychology comes into play.
By using emotional triggers, copywriters can easily and effectively influence buying behaviour.
It’s important to remember that when making purchasing decisions, people are influenced by psychological and emotional factors just as much as objective facts.
A car commercial, for example, can always feature things like improved safety and fuel efficiency – and that could be enough to convince a person to buy a sedan. Yet the copywriters behind the script understand that a car is also an expression of social status – and that feeling of being in a luxurious, comfortable car is exactly the trigger point that BMW advertisers want to capitalize on.
Copywriting has taught me to use marketing principles like reciprocity, scarcity, and social proof to encourage people into action.
Practices Your Communication Skills
I mentioned earlier that copywriting can take on longer forms, such is the case for some articles and white paper journals, but generally speaking, copywriting is seen as the process of convincing people to commit to a certain action in as little time as possible.
Think about it: Commercials aren’t 30 minutes long, they’re 30 seconds. Taglines aren’t 5 pages, they’re 5 words.
Most of the time, copywriting is short and convincing.
Every piece of information conveyed on a piece of copy serves a particular purpose. Every word was chosen for a reason.
And it is exactly this conciseness in word choice that I find extremely useful in life.
I genuinely believe that the fewer words it takes to convey an idea, the better – especially in today’s setting of limited attention spans.
The common internet abbreviation “TL;DR” (Too Long; Didn’t Read) is the perfect example of my point.
People want something tight and efficient rather than a wall of text. With more efficient communication, each word has a stronger impact, time is saved, and clarity is improved.
The best movie quotes, after all, aren’t monologues, they’re 10 words or less.
Is It Worth It To Learn Copywriting?
Copywriting equips you with skills that transcend the profession. It allows you to be more efficient with your communication, speak in a persuasive tone, and influence the thoughts of others. Whether or not you work in marketing, you will need one of these skills in your life. That’s what makes copywriting worth it to learn.
If you choose to write copy as a profession, know that copywriting is one of the most preferred jobs in freelancing and that the industry continues to grow. With readers only spending 37 seconds on every article, it becomes THAT much more important to be concise and deliberate with your word choice.
And concise word choice is where copywriting thrives.
So, you should learn how to write copy if you’re:
- Wanting to take it on as a profession
- Looking to learn how to be more persuasive
- Practising to write better
The principles of salesmanship and purpose-driven decision making are especially transferable and useful no matter what you look to do in the future.
With copywriting, you’ll finally be able to sell that pen.
On Copywriting As A Career
I’ve been copywriting for 3 years now and in that time, I learned so much about being intentional with my word choice and the state of today’s consumerist market.
The fact of the matter is that as people’s attention spans are growing shorter, the need for effective copywriters will continue to rise.
As per the report by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, copywriting will continue to be a more competitive career as more people become interested in working as copywriters.
But is a career in this profession worth it? My answer is yes, especially if you tie it in with other side hustles.
Like I’ve said time and time again throughout this article, the skills you learn in copywriting are transferable. You can easily take on different projects and create great copy once you’ve achieved a certain level of experience.
At the end of the day, there’s really no downside that I see to learning how to write copy.
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