How much should you pay a copywriter for copywriting services?
Around £14,150 for a single project…??!!
Let’s say that your company produces and sells widgets. Production isn’t an issue, so you want to scale up and sell more. You’ve been doing well but some of your competition has structured their messaging, SEO and marketing to a point where you’re falling behind and want to regain some market share.
You wrote your own website and the only emails your company sends are to distributors and manufacturers.
Outbound marketing is limited to some Google and Facebook ads that your nephew scraped together.
Someone in your team wrote the text on your expensive website, explaining in detail how you produce thousands of widgets each year using a complex process that only you can replicate, so now you’re wondering why that expensive website isn’t converting.
Your messaging and marketing collateral takes the form of complicated explanations from your perspective.
Your potential customers don’t care about the intricate manufacturing process, or how you have a poster about widgets on your living room wall.
You’re wasting words, which is losing you cash and attention.
It’s time you hired a copywriter.
So, you find a brilliant copywriter but you have a budget.
You can only afford to invest 15 percent of your revenue into marketing messaging and you NEED a return on this investment.
Let’s also assume that your company revenues £100,000 per year and explore the impact on your revenue.
In comes a copywriter who will:
Carry out a brand discovery workshop that will provide you with the right marketing positioning, and define your USPs within the marketplace as a foundation for the future of all of your marketing collateral.
Write your website copy (5 pages) following endless research into your brand and objectives.
Write a 3 email sequence to guide potential customers through a product or service sale using a system that tracks open rates and allows for AB split testing to improve open and engagement rates.
Enhance your technical SEO so that you start to rank on Google by setting your keywords, headers, tags, meta-tags and URLs based on keyword and competition research following an initial audit.
Write 10 blog posts per month of high quality, engaging content that is SEO optimised to help your website to rank higher on all search engines and improve the authority ranking of your website domain.
Improve your product descriptions so that they clearly describe the benefits in a way which appeals to the desires and pain-points of the reader.
Your copywriter has done this before with proven results.
This experience means that you’ll get a high-quality service that will bring about repeatable results in your industry.
They charge £50 an hour, roughly the same as the experienced plasterer in your local town (including tools and his apprentice). It’s less than your accountant and far less than your dentist.
The last time I checked, my dentist did nothing for my business development.
This rate includes technical SEO tools for high-level analysis, communication emails and creative concepting.
Brand discovery
Brand discovery might mean an hour of preparation to look into your current brand positioning, followed by a one hour meeting to discuss your brand development, then a further hour concepting your brand strategy and the deeper meaning behind your business.
Cost: £150
Gain: an understanding of your brand.
Gain: solidify where your brand should position itself within the marketplace.
Gain: a clear definition of how your brand connects with your audience.
Return on investment: priceless?
Website Copy
Following a lengthy discovery session that explores the tone, audience and objective of your website, a writer will then get to work on a first draft of website copy.
Through a further 3 drafts with revisions, review of copy in place and the use of an external proof-reader to ensure that grammar and language is perfect, your website copy is finally ready.
Let’s assume this takes 8 hours per page, for 5 pages.
Usually involving multiple pages at one time, and sometimes communicating your business objectives and delivery, this takes hours, and includes concepting of how to restructure your headers, sub-headers and paragraphs to increase the effectiveness of the text in moving your audience to your CTA (call-to-action).
Cost: £2,000
Gain: Professional copy that speaks directly to your audience that is structured to guide the reader into your call-to-action.
Gain: a website that you can now be proud of on a professional basis, that will last approximately 3 years before needing to be edited to update offerings.
Gain: an increase in website traffic due to Google recognising your messaging more, translating into a reduced ‘bounce rate’.
Gain: more sales and improved brand positioning thanks to a better structured website experience.
Return on investment assuming a 10 percent conversion increase (£10,000): 500% ROI.
Email Copywriting and Sequencing
Following numerous meetings your copywriter spends 4 hours writing each email:
An introductory email, welcoming customers to your brand and explaining the products or services you offer;
An email selling your most profitable product or service
An email thanking the person for their custom and offering a discount/upsell for further purchases on your ‘harder-to-sell’ items or services.
Cost: £600
Gain: a solid and repeatable, diversified marketing strategy that lasts around one year before your copy needs changing
Gain: increased sales through brand loyalty.
Gain: increased brand engagement.
Gain: upselling your most profitable offerings in a way that doesn’t require an active sales force.
Return on investment: if well-crafted emails convert just 6 percent more of your audience into customers then you’ve just increased your revenue by £6,000. That’s a return on investment of 1000%!!!!!
That’s before we run separate adverts, change the copy on your social media posts or anything. Not bad at all!
Technical SEO improvements
I could put you to sleep with the science behind SEO backend structures and how Google interprets this, but I’ll save that for another post.
Let’s assume a 12 month project:
Cost: £450 per month (£5400 for the first year).
Gain: slowly start to rank on the first page of Google.
Gain: dramatically reduce your advertisement spend budget.
Gain: drop your Google ad words budget like a hot potato.
Gain: establish your brand as a trustworthy business and increase visitors to your site.
Gain: convert more visitors thanks to increased traffic.
Gain: potentially harness a second income source through Google running ads on your website.
Gain: you control your organic traffic and reduce your reliance on advertisement spend and other marketing collateral.
If you’re not on the first page of Google then you’ll have to put money into other forms of traffic.
Return on investment: let’s be conservative and presume only 15% more traffic to your website, converting just 10% more of your visitors. That’s an ROI of 185%.
That’s an extra £10,000 for something that sits in the background of your business, working while you sleep.
Copywrite 10 blog posts per month
Blog posts are the backbone of SEO and they allow you to put out complicated information in longer-forms of communication.
Not only do they link to other websites of higher authority, but they can establish you as an expert and give you the opportunity to really tell your story and reinforce your brand messaging.
Cost: £500 per month, stopping at 100 blog posts (10 months = £5000).
Gain: improve your on page SEO and convince Google that you’re an absolute authority in your area so that they rank you higher organically.
Gain: reduce your advertisement spend on other platforms to improve profits.
Gain: Increase interaction of customers on your page and persuade them that your products or services are grounded in facts and experience, improving your Search Engine rankings.
Gain: improve the positioning of your brand allowing you to command more sales at a higher price due to an improvement in your authority.
Return on investment: let’s be conservative and assume that this brings in only a 7.5 percent increase in revenues year on year.
Over a 2 year period (the blog posts keep bringing in custom for the following year, that’s roughly £15000 for 10 months work over 24 months)
ROI of 66%.
It’s like this whole copywriting malarkey is designed to helped businesses…
Product description copywriting
Tell your audience exactly how they can benefit by using your products or services. Make them imagine using your products and how their pain points will be removed by getting your product or service in their lives.
Cost: 4 hours of work per product, that’s £200 per product/service. Assuming 5 services/products, that’s £1000.
Gain: slicker product descriptions show the benefits of buying from you and leads to more sales.
Gain: your messaging is simplified and more people convert to paying customers.
Gain: your market positioning is improved - you look and sound professional and that increases trust with your customers.
Return on invesmtnet: let’s assume a 10% increase in sales.
For £1000 we’ve increased sales by £10,000.
ROI: 1000%!
Total return on investment for hiring a copywriter
Total cost: £14150.
Total return on investment:
Website copy: £10,000
Email marketing: £6,000
Technical SEO: £10,000
Blog posts: £15,000
Product descriptions: £10,000
Total improvement in revenue: £51,000.
Total return on investment: 360%
Conclusion
A rental property costs money. It puts rental income in your pocket.
Improved CRM software costs money. It helps you grow more leads, and leads increase revenue.
A good copywriter costs money. They improve your brand, your conversions and you profits.
Investing in the services of an expert can reap returns for your business. Some are less than £50 and hour, a lot of them are far more.
Sometimes you’ll only have the budget to take it one step at a time, sometimes you’ll want billboards plastered all over your target cities and are prepared to put your money where your messaging needs to be.
Want to know more about hiring copywriters and what this can mean for your business? Just contact me for more information and I’ll be happy to guide you.
Thanks,
Adam White