Pain Points Faced With Content Creation

When companies need help on the copywriting for their websites, they simply approach a freelance writer or engage the same web design company to handle that. But what you do not know is that this process can be really painful for both parties. Similar to design work, the client demands high quality content that is in line with the company vision. Moreover, the benefit of having good quality content that shows the client’s expertise will help to boost SEO rating as well.

We will like to highlight these 3 pain points that we usually face with clients that requested us for copywriting:

3 Pain Points Faced with Copywriting Projects

1. Not Enough Input

Normally, the clients who outsource their copywriting do not have much marketing materials to provide and demand the vendor to do their own research on the competitors’ websites. The problem here is that we, as a third party, will never be a good subject matter expert as compared to the client who runs their business for years.

We need to first educate our client about the benefits of being a subject matter expert on their website. Once the rationale has been established, we can then conduct a proper meeting with the client to collect all the necessary information we need. Some of the areas to cover are:

• All the source materials, like brochures, posters, other marketing collateral, etc. so that we can refer to for creating their main web pages’ content.
• Ask for the unique selling point of his or her business. There are bound to have lots of competitors doing very similar business as the client, so the client really needs to provide an unique point that most competitors do not have so that we are able to craft the copywriting towards this unique selling point.
• Address all the common issues (pain points) faced by his or her customers so that we can pinpoint these points in the copywriting. The potential visitors will then be able to relate and trust this website’s content.

2. Too Much Input

There will also be cases of client providing lots of references that end up confusing us. For example, the client might provide you with 10 different websites to reference from, or 20 conversational points to consider, or research papers for you to read.

As a writer, you most probably be overwhelmed by the information provided. We have to educate the client again that these information are definitely useful but they need to be filtered and repackaged before handing over to us. The client needs to understand that we are not able to read through all the 10 websites, research on 20 topics and read through all the research papers before we can get started on the copywriting. In fact, most of the time, all these information are not advisable to be on the client’s website as well. The goal of the client’s website is to create the brand image and a persuasive pitch to hook their visitors to engage their service or product. Hence, the client needs to provide to us the key ideas clearly, concisely, consistently and compellingly.

3. Request for Uniqueness

Most clients want the writer to provide content as original as possible with all the information provided and repeating of the same words used in brochures are not allowed.

This is a bad approach as the client forgot that the goal of the website’s copywriting is to reinforce the selling points in all his or her other marketing collateral. Most, if not all, of the clients’ marketing collateral should align to the same brand message, including the website. Re-writing those content will be disastrous.

Conclusion

The goal to having a good copywriting process is to communicate closely with the clients. The clients need to understand that they do need to devote more time to content creation as it will affect his or her business directly if it is not done properly.

Share with us if you have any pain points that we did not mention in this article.