How to Determine If You’re Ready to Hire a Copywriter
Hiring a copywriter is not for everybody.
With that in mind, answer these questions to find out whether you’re ready or not.
Question #1: Are you already making sales?
The copywriter’s job is to improve response to an offer.
If a product or service has not yet attracted customers, then there is nothing to improve. Zero multiplied by anything else is still zero.
Famous ad man, Claude Hopkins, says this in Scientific Advertising: “The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want.” p. 225
Do not even think of hiring a copywriter unless you are confident the market wants what you’re offering. A good way to do this is use low-cost and no-cost methods to promote your product or service. Then measure the response.
If you get sales, then you may want to hire a copywriter to improve your response.
Question #2: Are you in a position to risk some money?
The reason the best copywriters command big fees is because they will often produce more than enough profit to cover their fees.
Still, no copywriter in history has batted a thousand. There will always be an occasional “dud” among dozens of winning promotions.
Hiring a copywriter is an investment. You hope to make a good return on your money. And you may get back 10 times what you invested or more.
Naturally, your investment could fail to produce the kind of response you want. Which is why it’s important for you to have some money to risk. After that, the decision of hiring a copywriter is up to you.
Question #3: Do you test ad copy?
You can virtually guarantee the success of any offer by doing one simple thing: test it and improve it continually.
The purpose of a test is to determine what your market responds to best. Example: You decide to test two different headlines. The first headline converts prospects to customers at a rate of 4%. The second headline only converts 2%.
As you can see, if you had relied solely on your personal preference, you might have lost half of the potential profits!
Here’s why you should test your ad copy. First, it gives you solid insight into what really works. And, secondly, whenever there is a disagreement between you and your copywriter (or anybody within your company), testing serves as a non-biased way of discovering the truth.
So before you ever hire a copywriter, you should be committed to split-testing. This will tell you how well your copywriter is doing, as well as what works and what doesn’t.
Did you pass the “test?” If so, congratulations. Not only do you have an uncommon understanding about the nature of copywriting, you would probably do well to hire a copywriter.
