A strong copywriting team brings the whole package: business savvy, strategic accuracy, strategic effectiveness, skilled discovery, strong industry footings, versatility across voice and content types, on-demand availability, detail orientation, timeliness, staff-level ownership, quality control, and the ability to scale. Taken together, these are rare if not impossible to find in a single freelancer that also has availability for your needs.
It depends. For smaller projects, we prefer to follow our asset review with two-way conversations and the rich gems they inevitably uncover: hidden insights, crucial nuances, and the stories that bring your solutions to life. If your project scales across multiple brands, departments, or locations, then questionnaires become a real necessity. In these instances, we would like to weigh in on and/or write discovery questionnaires—and prefer to have a few SMEs (subject matter experts) on hand for continued exploration.
Most of the time, it’s a collaboration. It might skew toward us (generating blog topics for your approval) or toward you (if you tend to be very specific about what you want). As creative thinkers who are a little bit obsessed with how people consume content at every stage, we’re more than happy to come up with topic ideas, especially after the first few months—when we’ve learned how you and your team think—and what your audience craves. We also realize that some blog posts require a client’s natural authority—honed over years. In this case, we can fine-tune blog post titles from a general topic concept, or take your title and run with it.
We are not a PR firm. We can help you build a thought leadership platform, generating story ideas for specified publications, then ghostwriting both these pieces and their accompanying pitches (which you would then send). In this way, we’ve helped clients secure stories in publications such as Forbes and Entrepreneur. We also write press releases, rich with media angles ripe for the picking.
We are not in the business of cultivating pitch-worthy relationships with editors, placing stories on our clients’ behalf, obtaining media soundbites and appearances, running social media channels, securing backlinks, or performing any other traditional or modern public relations tasks.
If we work together on your thought leadership platform and you do need PR-type work, we can refer you to a range of partners.
A lot! We leave few stones unturned, diving into strategies, eliciting case studies, testing assumptions, and walking away with a thorough understanding of what “success” looks like—for you, for your teams, and for readers. The process is unusually thorough, and it enables your copy and content to act like a heat-seeking missile—reaching intended targets with precision, power, and velocity.
We love this question! After all, talent is the difference between content that sinks (or stinks) and content that soars, and we never forget it. That’s why at MarketSmiths, we accept only writers showing raw talent. We look for whether new copywriters:
- Are able to express vividly, leveraging soul v. words
- Have a knack for enterprise, in all its delicious nuances
- Can efficiently structure phrases, sentences, paragraphs, pages, and whole websites
- Have an absence of bad habits
If you’re interested, take our copywriter’s test!
We use a combination of methods. For example, we can add you to Slack or ClickUp, or join your project management platform, e.g. Asana or Trello. We can also file work via email, Dropbox, or other repository (group emails keep these simple on your end). It’s seamless.
Sure! But take heed: 9 times out of 10, we scrap existing web copy, and start from scratch. It all depends on whether the structure is solid—and the development useful. A lot of times, it’s not. If you already have a start, definitely send it to us. We’ll mine it for any nuggets of insight, and then mine your (live) brain for the rest. If you don’t, then by all means save your team the struggle. You can turn the job over to our rigorously vetted, quality-guaranteed team, and end up with a product that’s 8,000% better—without moving a (typing) muscle. It’s fun—and far more conducive to focusing on your real role.
We’ve no doubt your intern/English major/essay wiz is amazing. We just suspect he hasn’t mastered copywriting, yet. Just because someone’s got a way with words is no guarantee they’ll be able to use them to forge branded, integrated strategy. Powerful copywriting entails a) extreme comfort with the content type (e.g. case study, web copy, blog post, ghostwritten article, Powerpoint deck), b) a keen head for enterprise, and c) absolute clarity on how words enter the reader’s brain, dance with the heart, and result in a clear-cut decision to read, share, like, download, fill out a contact form. Let us do that for you–and let your intern employ his charm in a different realm!
Great! Fill out our contact form with a specific description of your copy project and timeline. If it’s a website, send your site map to info@MarketSmiths.com. Our copywriting team will respond within a few hours, or at most one business day. Assuming we can help, we’ll set up a quick introductory phone call to hear about your objectives, and capture scope. Once we have a complete idea of your needs, we’ll send you a customized proposal, clarifying our exact approach and flat-rate fees.
