Honestly, necessity. I started thinking like a marketer / copywriter when I was at school. The old card playing adage of ‘play the hand you are dealt’ pretty much sums it up. What do you do if you are the skinniest, but also the cleverest kid in the school? My solution, learn how to persuade people and manipulate situations. I use the skills more ethically these days, but I was basically training myself in copywriting and behavioural economics from a very early age.

I’m first and foremost a marketing strategist. As such, I use copy strategically. Knowing how to write persuasive copy is orders of magnitude more powerful when you also know what the very best thing to persuade them to do is.

None at all — I don’t know if Copywriting qualifications even exist.

On a more serous note — If qualifications would be useful, I’d have them. When I decided I wanted to make my living as a marketing consultant I presumed that qualifications would be important so I signed up for the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Professional Certificate, and then the Diploma. To be completely honest, I didn’t find them particularly useful. I think they would be invaluable for people looking for employment in the marketing departments of large organisations, but that’s really not me. As a person who lives by the notion that there is always an advantage to be gained from working out what everyone else is doing, and then doing the opposite, this type of study was far too oppressive.

How someone writes copy is a lot like how someone develops their personality. You can’t be taught to be great, if you don’t have the right personal attributes to begin with.

I believe my qualifications to write copy are:

My in-depth understanding of marketing strategy.

My having never worked in a large organisation in which one could hide poor performance.

The fact I’ve worked my entire life as a self employed person, and since 2010 as a consultant.

My having helped at least a hundred business owners to improve their marketing across a very eclectic mix of industries.

My understanding of both psychology and behavioural economics.

My constant honing of skills on my own businesses and projects. I always have some kind of project ‘on the go’, sometimes to make money, sometimes as a platform for research. I’ve spent thousands of hours researching, testing and perfecting my skills as both a marketer and a copywriter. There is a limit to how ‘creative’ one can be with client projects, so I use my own to test more ‘unconventional ideas’.

As mentioned elsewhere, I’ve never had a job — I’ve been self employed my entire working life. If my ideas didn’t work, I’d have starved many years ago.

I understand business.

This is going to sound cheesy; I didn’t choose copywriting, copywriting chose me.

Whilst working as a freelance marketing consultant, it became increasingly obvious that copy I wrote, got much better results than copy written by anyone else we used. We got to a point at which either I had to write the copy, or we had to be OK with the fact that someone else was going to do it, and the results were going to be worse. My conscience won’t let me do that for client work, so now I’m a copywriter.

This one makes me laugh. If you are looking for a copywriter you’ll probably have noticed that most of them refer to themselves as ‘award winning’. It’s a bit of a joke in the industry. If you want to be award winning, it’s very easy to find an award to ‘win’.

This subject always reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my University lecturers whilst studying with the Chartered Institute of Marketing. She had carried out some research into ‘award winning’ marketing campaigns and found a striking correlation between awards won and positive financial gains enjoyed by the client. They were almost entirely inversely correlated. Having won an award was almost a cast iron guarantee that the campaign lost the client money.

Anyway, I’m not award winning — I do make clients money though.

If someone wants me to spend time receiving an award, they’ll be getting an invoice for my time.

To persuade someone to do something — anything actually.

Everyone thinks that we generally write copy for adverts, and that’s true. However, good strategic copy can achieve all sorts of things. Whenever you communicate with anyone, in any way, good strategic copy can improve your results.

Recently, I’ve written copy to:

Increase click through rates on LinkedIn ads.

Help a client rank on search engines for very lucrative search terms.

Increase current customer spend.

Make staff more productive / improve moral.

Increase acceptance rates of quotes and estimates.

Attract clients with more expensive needs.

Reduce time taken for clients to pay bills.

Encourage current clients to recommend my client to their friends and relatives.

Outside of client work, I’ve recently used my copy writing skills to:

Enable a friend to get an interview for her ideal job.

Negotiate the purchase of our current home. I actually did such a good job that the mortgage company pulled out of the deal because they had a condition whereby they wouldn’t lend on properties that were being sold by such a large amount beneath what their surveyors were calling ‘market value’. We found a new lender, and actually paid 31% below market value for the property. I did spend many hours crafting the perfect pitch to do that deal though. To be completely honest, professional curiosity and pride has meant that I’m actually more proud that I did the deal, than I am happy about the hundreds of thousands of pounds better off we are having done the deal. My wife, however, sees it quite differently.

Not at all. I look at it as doing the reader a favour. If you offer a great service or a great product, and it’s exactly what the reader is looking for, what’s wrong with increasing the chances of them getting to buy from you.

It’s just like me writing this page. I’m by far the best option for you if you want any copy written. I know it, but I need to do what I can to help you to realise it.

I’m not being sneaky. The very best thing I can do for you, is to do enough so that you use me to write your copy. If I fail at that, you’ll use someone who isn’t as good and get worse results. I feel a responsibility to get you to contact me.

Absolutely not. AI can replace journalists and content writers who churn out work, but AI can’t compete with me.

The idea of AI writing great copy is fundamentally flawed. Most of the information on the internet related to marketing is wrong. AI can take that information and do whatever it likes with it — it’s still going to be wrong.

Marketing, and more specifically writing copy, is a very human skill. It’s a life skill; it requires emotional attachment; it requires a deep understanding of empathy; it’s not something a machine can ‘learn’.

Behavioural economics is only just starting to realise that most of the economic models used for decades are flawed. Humans don’t make rational decisions. We can’t be explained by game theory or economic modelling. We are far too complex for AI to understand.

I do see an opportunity related to AI though. I’m going to offer my services to companies who have used AI to write their copy and have been disappointed with the results.