I’ll admit that, in the beginning, I’d never really thought about using a copywriter. I know my business, and what we do, better than anyone. So how could an outsider write copy for my website better than me?

I know first-hand how Cultrix continues to benefit from using a copywriter

Back in 2007 when we became Cultrix, part of this process included sitting with a brand expert and talking about the company – what it was, what it wanted to become, etc. From this, our brand values emerged: a list of things that are important to us and how we relate to our customers.

When we set about developing our new website, it took a long time to come up with the sitemap, but once we had that, we took the existing copy and put it into the new sitemap. But it wasn’t right. We had blank pages, there was no consistency and it read too technical for our audience. Through our branding work I knew our audience were non-technical. The website read totally wrong.

“Where do we start?!” I cried. We needed help.

I spoke to Rachel about the daunting task ahead and was reassured that this is exactly why you would use a copywriter. We can give her whatever words we have and she can turn it into exactly what we need. The website as a whole was coherent, with each page happily next to each other, in the same kind of language, having a similar kind of feel to it, and adhering to a set of rules about how Cultrix copy should be written.

First, Rachel used our brand values to create a ‘tone of voice’, to set out how Cultrix copy should sound, and some rules, like not using industry-speak that customers don’t understand. Then she set about editing the pages we had, and creating copy for the blank pages from notes I had written about each of them – anything she needed more detail on, she would ask. What we ended up with was the website you see today. The copy is consistent, professional, free from errors, and sounds like Cultrix; how we want to sound.

But, on top of this, I now have a huge resource of well-written words at my disposal that I can take and use in other documents. Our IT and web proposals use soundbites and paragraphs from the website, our emails and social media marketing does the same – so not only do we have a great website but we can use the copy again and again.

It makes life much easier as I don’t have to think about what to type into Twitter, I just find a sensible sentence from the website and use that. This means that whether you look at my LinkedIn profile or the company tweets, it all has the same Cultrix tone of voice as the website, which is how it should be. You can tell it’s Cultrix copy. In the same way our little characters are recognisable as Cultrix, so is our copy; it stands out, and for all the right reasons.

Cultrix believes in a content-led marketing approach, but each page or article on the website still needs some extra hidden content for the search engines and social media giants. Rachel ensured each has an equally well-crafted title, description and set of keywords that follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, enhancing the way they look when displayed in search engine results or on social media, but also making sure they perform well naturally.

We have continued to work with Rachel to produce news articles, case studies, and other articles for our website to keep it fresh. It’s as simple as me emailing Rachel a quick overview of what we need, including contact details of a willing customer if it’s a case study, and Rachel will do the rest. She’ll contact the customer for a nice quote to add to the article, make sense of my ramblings, and produce a shiny, new article for the website.

Anyone can write copy, but not many can write it well. I don’t think I’m too bad, and since working with Rachel I’ve definitely improved. But a lot of that is cheating – I’ve got very good at copying and pasting things Rachel has produced for us to put together very professional documents.

In the same way a professional could make your photographs look much better than ones you take yourself with your smartphone, and it’s the same with illustrations, animations and video – you really should treat copy the same as all other content and leave it to the professionals.

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