What is Copywriting?

Outside of the advertising world, not many people use terms like copywriting. More often, you’ll hear words like writing or text.

But when it comes to advertising, it’s always copywriting.

Put simply, copywriting is writing that is designed to sell. Or you could call it a mass substitution for a salesperson.

Believe it or not, copywriter is a job title. There are folks who do nothing but write copy. If you aren’t familiar with advertising at all, this might be somewhat of a shock to you. But it all makes sense once you consider just how important copywriting is to advertising.

When was the last time you saw an advertisement without copy? Probably never. Copy is like the peanut butter and jelly in a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Without it, you’re left with just bread. Boring. Plain. Bread.

Consider for a moment the most important part of any advertisement. No, I’m not talking about the picture.

I’m talking about the headline.

A poor headline will instantly break any advertisement. Consider this famous quote by the great advertiser, David Ogilvy.

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

The headline is absolutely the Atlas of an advertisement--the titan responsible for holding up the rest of it. The person (or people) responsible for writing the headline will be--you guessed it--copywriters.

Copywriting extends beyond advertisements as well. The text on your website is copy. And as such, it should be written by a copywriter.

This is a lesson that many businesses fail. Too many managers or business owners believe they should write their own website copy. After all, who knows their business better than them?

To an executive who holds this opinion, I would ask if they also believe they should design and code their own website?

Those executives who take it upon themselves to design or code their own websites rarely achieve professional quality results.

So I suppose the crux of this post is to ask why should copywriting be any different?