Consultancy

The whole caboodle

If you’re an SME or start-up, you sometimes just need the whole job done. The copy, the content, the naming, the proposition, the URL, the business cards, the elevator pitch, the visual and verbal tone, not to mention the search engine marketing, and making sure the strategy is robust. This can be a joy to do, or immensely painful, depending on how you approach the problem. And the simple way to approach the problem is from the images backwards. At the Copycourse we see images as inextricably connected to text rather than a separate entity to project manage off.

The whole caboodle

Certainly it really helps if you can nail the imagery sooner rather than later. You need to find a source of imagery that’s distinct, on-brand, relevant and one you can afford on an ongoing basis. This is because it usually occupies so much real estate on your site and is the first thing everyone really sees. The main thing is to avoid buying a rag bag of assorted pictures that don’t have any coherence. Get that right and you’re well on the way.

Consultancy services

Creative

Finding new ways to solve old problems

Review

A look at writing in your most critical documents

Train

Equipping your people with the basic mindset to write well

Tone

Getting your writing to have a voice

Client

Investigating how writing plays out with your clients

Need some help?

How to hire a decent writer.

If you’re thinking about hiring a copywriter, don’t necessarily assume you know what they will do.

They may be able to bring a lot more than you expect to the problem, simply by identifying elements of your story that are missing, or need a little sorting out.

The chemistry of how you work with them can make a big difference. It generally helps if you can point to examples that they’ve done and explain why you like what you like. Then they can form a picture of what sort of writing you’re after.

Below you can download a file with various examples of Gideon’s copy. Some of this appeared as ads, some for web, and some is writing for speeches.

It’s also worth pointing out that copywriting means many things to many different people. It can include thinking up creative ideas for advertising like posters, TV scripts or digital. It can be about using very few words, as in a strapline like just do it, or a headline like labour isn’t working. Or it can be about using lots of words like a white paper or a media pack on a website.

Copywriting can mean writing content – journalistic pieces that have an editorial feel. It may be about PR and spinning a story. It is often to do with words, but it can also be about pictures and positioning.

Sometimes people call pasting bits from the internet in a random way copywriting. It isn’t; anymore than welding two separate bits from two different cars on a road side collision, and calling it auto manufacture.

But whatever it is that you call copywriting, when it’s done well, it almost always looks like the piece wrote itself.