“How will we know we’ll be happy with your copywriting?” said a marketing leader to our sales team. Super normal question. You explore options, you review samples, you commit to a solution, you make an investment. You ought to have some assurances. Is that even a thing, you wonder—and you are not alone.
After all, there are no real barriers to entry for copywriting: no required schooling, no board exams, no A-level certificate. That it’s outsourced can make your content solution feel even more random and suspect. Elsewhere, examples abound: of disappointment, of off-kilter approaches, of wrangling and delay and disaster. A promising freelancer flakes. An agency produces something pretty but unusable. An in-house writer goes off-track. You burn the midnight oil with a rewrite you hadn’t banked on doing yourself. Budget is depleted, lead times have vanished, resources are a-wasted. It seems unavoidable—and it’s no fun.
If you’ve been following our blog writers for a while, you know. Hiring a copywriter who can write in your voice and on strategy is challenging. What we find works best—and supports the consistency and effectiveness of content deliverables—is a proven process. Here are a few steps we take to make sure all of our clients come out on top.
Warning: you are going to see the word “strategic” in nearly every step. That’s because for copywriting to be fully useful, it needs to be fully on target—talking to the exact right people in precisely the right way, through the journey takes both your objectives and their learning curve into account. Here goes.
1. Beyond getting B2B copywriters, you’ll get a tried-and-true B2B copywriting process.
When you work with a foolproof copywriting partner, it’s not about landing a writer and hoping for the best—that leaves too much room for error and misalignment.
- What if your writer is normally fine—but fails to get it for a piece or two? How would that impact your initiatives and your workday?
- What if your writer makes a series of assumptions, which results in work that misses the mark? How would that impact your campaigns and your time?
- What if you don’t get a chance to speak to or brief your writer, or they walked away from your conversation with off-kilter insights? Will they be able to deliver the right piece from a flawed understanding of your message?
- What if the voice of the writing isn’t on brand? Maybe it lacks nuance or sophistication. Maybe it’s too dry, too on-the-nose, too playful. Maybe it reads in a cheesy or salesy way. What happens next?
- What if the logic is circular or convoluted?
- What if key details have been missed?
- What if the final piece simply falls short in making a compelling case? Would this be time well spent?
To ensure our clients receive copy or content that’s on brand, on strategy, and results-driven (the trifecta of quality for copywriting), we’ve built a framework. Without revealing proprietary detail, our own framework includes:
- A layered team to ensure a balance of strengths—and coverage across all necessary skills
- A way to unpack a complete set of insights—without requiring a ton of time from your marketers and SMEs
- A way to clarify assumptions to minimize misalignments
- Best practices, as perfected through a busy copywriting practice—and hundreds of successful partnerships
- Checkpoints to make your deliverables work not by happenstance—but every time
- Institutional expertise—lending gravitas across content pieces, no matter how new these may be to your brand
- The structure to proceed efficiently and effectively—with the flexibility to make it work for your team
- Constant evolution to encompass market, client, and other needs
Not only does this process eliminate blind spots, it leverages ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement. It’s the key behind our ability to consistently hit the mark and produce repeatable outcomes. And it’s how we achieve successful, disappointment-free partnerships, time and again.
2. Beyond getting carefully vetted writers, your copywriting team is entirely drawn from our in-house staff.
The first and most crucial step in our process is recruitment. We carefully test our applicants on their writing strengths and how attuned they are to our core values. And we’re very selective—just under 15% of applicants get to the test, and fewer than 3% pass.
Those that make it get hired directly on our own staff. They’re people we can trust, who require minimal hand-holding, and whose strengths and weaknesses we know well. That means reliable writers that will always be available for you—and whose skills align perfectly with your needs.
3. Beyond getting high quality copywriters, you’ll benefit from the guidance of team members with industry seasoning and strategy chops.
Writing is a complex skill. It involves analysis, storytelling, clarity, believability, persuasion, and higher-order thinking. Almost inevitably, it requires a journey into the interior world of another—be it a character, an author, a reader. Copywriting adds yet another layer of complexity to the challenge by demanding brevity—and calling for the application of insights to properly represent business interests. Mastering every angle is challenging—and blind spots are bound to happen.
While most see writing as a solo endeavor, great copywriting is better as the product of a team effort. This is why we assign everyone one of our clients a team of copywriters overseen by a content strategist. Your lead writers will do the heavy lifting—researching, finding an angle, and drafting the content—while the strategist will ensure that the final product is accurate, adequate, on-brand, and in line with your strategy.
This team isn’t new at your industry or your content type either. After 12 years in business and thousands of clients, we’ve worked with nearly every type of content out there—blog posts, ebooks, case studies, website copy, product descriptions, email campaigns—and we’ve developed into true experts at every single one of them.
4. Beyond having footings in your industry and realm, you’ll benefit from the built-in ability to ask good questions—and listen strategically to your answers.
Working across industries as we do, the MarketSmiths team inevitably has footings in your realm. But knowledge of a realm isn’t enough. Your B2B brand is entirely unique—including your offering, your business model, your audience constituents, your approach, your team, and all the rest. While we have a set process to guide our work, we don’t believe in one-size-fits all approaches—and listening is how we adapt our process to your needs.
We want to know it all: your goals, your struggles, your concerns—and we’ll ask the right questions to get there. Our aim is to learn everything about your strategy and your brand—and then channel that voice into polished, thoughtful copy.
This is why it’s so important for us that you meet with everyone in your writing team before we start any work. A lot can get lost in an email or a sales team relaying information to writers. We prefer that you put faces to names—and communicate your goals directly to the people who will help you make things happen.
An insurance firm received a much-needed website update.
A rapidly expanding insurance firm, Provence needed a revamped website that reflected its growing stature. Unfortunately, its existing copy missed the mark—only appealing to prospective policyholders, not independent agencies that may have wanted to merge with Provence. But through in-depth interviews, MarketSmiths soon put things right. Provence’s new website played up its strengths and appealed to the dual audiences central to its business plan, giving Provence pride of place in a crowded market.
5. Beyond getting solid first drafts, you’ll find that our deliverables are strategically on point.
A team and a process built for excellence pay off in content that’s consistently on-brand, on-point, and on-strategy. By the time content reaches your inbox, it’s been tested on everything from grammar and punctuation to voice, language, and approach. That means drafts that you can rely on to always hit the mark and require minimal—if not zero—edits on your part.
And that’s where the value of a great partnership lies. Knowing that you can trust work to get done in time and that it will perform exactly as expected.
6. We take feedback well.
Constructive feedback is magic and we highly encourage it. As a client-focused team, we measure our success by our clients’ success. Every need, every request, and every concern—no matter how small—is a chance for us to create better ways to serve you and grow in ways that we couldn’t have imagined alone.
Hiring a copywriting team that’s built to succeed time and again
Great copy isn’t born out of a solo, unchecked attempt. All writers—even the best ones—need someone to cover their weak spots and rein them in. This is why hiring a copywriting team often yields better results than recruiting a single writer and expecting them to do their work, plus that of an editor.
So, next time you need help with your marketing strategy, consider hiring a copywriting team that’s built never to disappoint.
Done being disappointed by bad copywriting? Contact Marketsmiths and never question it again.
