What to give somebody who is writing your copy

"We trust you on the tone." It is kind, and it is the sentence that produces the most rewrites.

Copy is not judged on its quality. It is judged on how closely it matches what the client had in mind without saying. Here is what to make them say before a line gets written.

How many pieces, and how long

Two numbers, and neither follows from the other.

"The copy for the site" can be five pages or forty. A client who answers "well, the site" has not counted, and will count when the invoice arrives. Ask it as a number: how many pages, how many articles, how many listings.

Length decides the work more than the count does. Three hundred words and fifteen hundred words on the same subject are not the same research: the first holds on what the client told you, the second means going and finding out elsewhere.

If the client cannot answer, give them a reference point rather than an open question: a home page is rarely more than six hundred words, a substantial article is a thousand or more. They will choose better against an order of magnitude than against an empty field.

Who it is for, in a sentence that excludes somebody

"Everyone" is not an audience, it is a refusal to choose, and it produces copy that speaks to nobody.

The useful question is not "who is your customer". It is: who reads this page and does not buy? A client who can say "individuals write to us but we only work with trade" has just handed you the tone, the vocabulary and half the examples.

What the copy should trigger

Understand, reassure, get a form filled in, get a phone call. Four intentions, four different pieces on the same subject.

This is the question that decides the structure: copy meant to reassure puts the proof high up, copy meant to get action keeps the action within reach and repeats the argument. With no answer, you write a presentation, and a presentation is what people read twice without knowing what to say about it.

Tone, which gets shown rather than described

"Professional but approachable" is what everybody answers, and it means nothing. Two ways out, and the second works better.

Ask what must absolutely be avoided. People are far better at naming what they hate than what they like. "No jargon", "no exclamation marks", "no superlatives" are answers you can use immediately.

Ask for two or three sites they like, competitors or not, and why. The why matters more than the list: "it is clear" and "it looks serious" do not point at the same copy.

Search, which is not a last-minute option

If the client wants to be found on particular searches, that has to be known before, not after.

Copy written and then "optimised" ends up carrying phrases wedged in afterwards, and it reads that way. Copy written knowing what it has to rank for takes the words in at the structure stage, and does not read differently.

Two things to ask alongside: the target keywords if they have any, and the address of the current site. The second is worth more than the first, because it shows what already exists and what the site does or does not come up for.

The full list of questions this trade asks is here: the brief for a copywriting job. It is a proposal rather than a standard, to shorten and reword to the way you work.

And on how many rounds to announce before starting, which matters as much in writing as in design: how many rounds to plan.

Frequently asked questions

What should you ask before writing a client's copy?

How many pieces and how long, who they are for, what they should trigger, the tone to avoid, and whether search is part of the job. Without those answers the copy gets judged against an intention nobody wrote down.

How do you get a client to describe a tone?

By asking what they definitely do not want, and for two or three sites they like with the reason why. People name what they hate better than what they like, and "professional but approachable" points at no particular piece of writing.

Should search be quoted separately?

Yes, because it changes the writing and not just the proofreading. Copy optimised after the fact carries phrases wedged in, and it shows. Writing while knowing the target searches takes more preparation, and gets charged as such.

What do you do when a client says "we trust you"?

Treat it as a missing brief, not as freedom. Ask three closed questions instead: who for, to trigger what, and what must absolutely not be in there. A client who still will not answer will approve on taste, and taste gets discovered in the rewrite.