One unique thing about being an entrepreneur is that you are a generalist. You must know a little of everything. Things ranging from production management, sales, marketing, accounting, leadership, cash flow management to employee motivation, economics, law, communication and every other thing pertaining to business. Even if you are the CEO with a team of employees, you still need to know these things because you are the chief decision maker of your team.
So if you think copywriting has nothing to do with entrepreneurship, then you better think twice because creative copywriting skills is a business necessity with respect to pitching sales and getting clients. If your business thrives on direct marketing or you frequently run ads in popular media, then copywriting skills is not an option for you. It’s a must.
You don’t have to be in the business of offering copywriting services before you acknowledge the need to improve your copywriting skills. With the appropriate copywriting training course, preparation and determination, you can easily improve your copywriting skills.
Today, i am going to reveal some hard core strategies you can apply to improve your creative copywriting skills; even if you are a copywriting novice. Below are practical steps and tips to improving your creative copywriting skills:
7 Tips on How to Improve Your Creative Copywriting Skills
1. Believe that creative copywriting skills can be acquired
The first step to improving your creative copywriting skills is to develop the mindset that creative copywriting can be learned. If you view copywriting as a professional skill that cannot be learned and mastered quickly, then you are never going to learn it no matter how hard you try. So the earlier you shake off the ‘it can’t be done’ perception, the better for you.
2. Seek advice from the masters
Once you have accepted the fact that acquiring creative copywriting skills is not rocket science, the next thing to do is to get hold of some copywriting course or materials. The best way to go about this is to seek mentorship from the copywriting gurus or better still; request for their copywriting hand guides.
Please when i mean copywriting gurus, i am not referring to those professional copywriters who work for big advertising agencies. Those guys are employees so you don’t need to learn from them; except you fancy their job title.
If you read the book “Think two products ahead‘ by Ben Mack, you will come to understand why you don’t need the advertising agencies. The guys you need to learn from are those creative copywriting gurus who honed their skills by practicing on their own business; not on someone else’s business.
Examples of such entrepreneurial copywriting gurus are Ted Nicholas and Michael Morgan. These guys are masters in the game of creative copywriting and their proof is that each of these guys has sold nothing less than $10million in direct mail marketing alone.
They’ve also helped other entrepreneurs create response pulling sales copy sold millions of dollars worth of products. So if you are going to learn the secret to writing great copy, i will advice you learn from them.
3. Start practicing on your own
The third of the copywriting tips is to start practicing on your own. Even after learning from the masters, you will still need to build your own creative copywriting style, tone and voice. Practicing on your own will help you discover your own unique selling point.
A good way to go about practicing on your own is to study the nature, outline and copywriting style of other marketers in your niche. Research and study the copy of best selling catalogues, sales letters, classified ads placed in popular magazines. From your research, you will come to understand the colours, shapes and words that hold prospects spell bound.
4. Start an idea collection box
Another way to improve your creative copywriting skills is to start a marketing idea collection box. A marketing idea collection box is simply a collection of written super ads and sales letters. Whenever you come across a written copy that has the signature of a bold creative hand, all you have to do is extract and add to your marketing idea collection box.
The after effect of this is that you will come to have a load of other people’s creative copywriting ideas and when creating your own copy; you don’t have to waste your time brainstorming. All you have to do is go to your marketing idea box and pull out some creative ads, tweak them or use them as a yardstick to create your own copy.
By occasionally going through the marketing copies in your idea box; you will come to observe over time that you have subconsciously developed some creative copywriting instinct.
5. Test your creative copywriting skills
The next effective way to improve your creative copywriting skill is to test run some ads and track the response rate. This will help you get some real life experience of what it takes to create and run an advert.
This experience is necessary because it will help you realize the importance of creative copywriting to your business. When you see the fact that a strong creative copy is directly proportional to sales and income, you will work hard to improve your creative copywriting skills.
- Creative Ads Copy = Increase in sales = increase in profits
6. Collect and analyze the feed back
After test running some ads, you need to collect and analyze the feed back because it is only through the feed back that you can ascertain the current level and improvement of your copywriting skills.
Your feed back collection and analysis entails knowing the estimated readers or viewers of your choice media, the number of calls or response generated from the ads, the performance level of each of the ads, the sales generated, percentage increase in sales, the response to sales conversion ratio and the ROI on the ads.
Feedback is very vital especially when you want to stay in business. In fact, the level of your copywriting skills can only be determined by these feed backs. Some of the copywriting gurus have been able to achieve an increase in sales of more than 75% and a response rate of more than 500% from a single advertorial. They won’t be able to know this if they hadn’t tracked and analyzed their feed back.
7. Correct your mistakes and test again
You might say you made no mistake but i want to let you know that as far as entrepreneurship is concerned, it is a continuous process. The same goes for copywriting. In the game of entrepreneurial skill development, there is always room for improvement. You must keep testing different ads, copywriting styles and techniques.
That is to say you must keep improving your copywriting skills. If you hit a 50% response rate or more, you must keep aiming higher by setting new goals. To constantly improve your creative copywriting skills, you must keep challenging your ability and capacity. You must never be satisfied with your current achievements.
In conclusion, these are my seven copywriting tips for those who desire to acquire or improve their creative copywriting skills. As a final note, i think it’s worthwhile you know that quality results don’t come overnight. It is a product of constant learning and discipline.