In this week’s episode I’m going to be explaining how not showing your clients your drafts can help you create better relationships with them and gain more credibility and trust. I’m going to be explaining how to structure communication with clients and the process of creating copy without drafts so that you can:
- Give clients the big picture and get focused feedback in the early stages.
- Guide the feedback process and stay in control so that you only need one round of revisions.
- Save time and solve potential complications before you start writing your final draft.
- Create a collaborative process with your customer.
- Have faith in your abilities and avoid any subjective judgements of your work.
This week I’m providing you with a cocktail of fun sketches to get you thinking about how much information you really ever want or need to know in different scenarios. If your car gets you from A to B, do you really care how? And how much do you know about how those lion enclosures at the Zoo work?
As always, my aim is to help you develop your skills so I’m sharing strategies with you that will inevitably give you more confidence and help you establish credibility with clients. After years of experience, I’ve learnt that they key is communication and learning how to guide your client to make it easy for them to provide focused feedback so that you can plan and revise your copy effectively and not waste time.
Please feel free to post any comments or queries below and remember, every Thursday at 4:00pm UK time, I’m going to be online for 30 minutes doing a Q & A session so if you have anything you’d like to ask me or if you’d like me to review your copy and do a copy critique, I’d love to see you then.
- Join me Thursday April 2nd for 30 mins Q&A: Register here.
- Write with Influence course https://writewithinfluence.com/course/
Show Transcript:
Amy:
Welcome back to another episode of Write with Influence, the shortish podcast about writing better copy and creating better sales messages so that you can make more sales in your business. In this episode I’m going to explain to you why you should never show clients a first draft of your copy. So, this episode is probably going to be more relevant to copywriters or marketing agencies that are working with clients and writing copy for clients.
When I first started out as a copywriter and had a blog, I was doing content marketing to promote what I did and one thing I never understood was why I would see other copywriters quite often bashing clients. So, you would see blog posts with criticism of, you know, nightmare clients and blog posts about, you know, just terrible client experiences. This never made any sense to me because the content marketing – the blog that you’re putting out for your business – is supposed to be for the people that you serve. Now, I can understand the desire to want to write an article like that, to rant about a frustrating client or a bad experience but, if you do that as part of promotion for your business or the service that you offer, you’re going to attract people that like to rant about their clients and it’s very unlikely that these are actually your customers unless of course you are a copywriter who is training other copywriters in handling clients etc. But there was another reason why I didn’t really understand these types of posts because they seem to put all the blame onto the client and, you know, at some point we choose which clients we want to work with.
Now, sometimes you do get bad clients and if you’re starting out, you may feel like you have to take on just any work and you can’t be very picky or choosy and bad clients happen. In whatever industry you work in, you can get terrible customers that you wish you didn’t have but I particularly think that in a service industry, if you are a copywriter, you’ve got a responsibility, firstly, to minimise it happening again and also a responsibility to look at that experience with that client and ask yourself; is there something that I did to contribute to this situation? And what I found in my own personal experience is that sometimes, what could be perceived as a bad client, is often just badly managed expectations. You know, it’s not enough to be an expert in copywriting, you can be a great copywriter, but you also need to be an expert in guiding a client through the process and when you take more control, and I think when you’re more conscious about what that process should look like, you start to manage expectations better, you set boundaries better and what could have been a potentially terrible client is actually an OK client. Also, you’re more likely to attract better clients because you’ll attract people that respect those rules.
There’s a couple of valuable things that I’ve learned which do make for great clients and I wanted to talk about that today. One of these things is to never show clients a first draft of your copy and to allow one set of revisions only and make that very clear.
So, let’s look at the first part: never show a first draft to a client. Why? Well, no matter how many times you say to a client, “Look, this is just a draft copy, we can change things . . .”, they will read it as though it’s final copy – they absolutely will. Even if they say, “Yeah, that’s okay . . .” and even if you give them the guidance like, “Look, this is just draft copy so just, you know, let me know, is it accurate? Are there things that we’ve missed in it?”, they will read it as though you have submitted your final copy and they won’t judge it as a draft copy to be improved; they’ll judge it as final copy that is lacking. It’s a little bit like house hunting or putting your house on the market, you know, if you’ve been house hunting and you see houses that just hang around forever and they don’t shift – it’s usually the ones that have a really specific style or design or they’re just filled with clutter etc. You know, the advice is always that you should make your house look as neutral as possible because people can’t imagine that stuff not in it. They look at it and even though, logically, they know that it’s not going to come with the doilies on the back of the sofa or the chintzy furniture, they can’t get past it, they can’t see it as their home and it’s a little bit similar for your client in that, when they receive copy, they expect it to be final. And if it’s not, if it doesn’t look like how they feel the final copy should be, they’re going to get a bit antsy and this is when they’re going to start getting out, well, if it was old school they’d be getting out their red pen, but they’re going to just start adding tons and tons of comments to the page. And before you know it, you are drowning in an explosion of feedback, like a kicking in a wasp’s nest, of stuff that you then don’t know how to take forward. And there’s usually a situation where there’s a little bit of tension because you’re feeling frustrated as a writer because they didn’t listen to your instructions and they started picking on specific words when you said, “Look, this is just a draft”. They’re getting frustrated because they feel like maybe you didn’t listen or now, they’re a little bit worried about whether you’re the right copywriter for them and it’s just not a very nice place to be. I’ve learned this over many, many years and the realisation that I came to is that there’s no real benefit in showing draft copy. You know? Why would you hand in anything other than something that is as close to final as you can get it? If we hand a draft in and ask clients what they think, it looks like we’re asking them to help us finish the job and it’s kind of a common assumption as well that people think that because they can write (you know, most of us can write), they feel that they can also judge copy, but it’s really not that simple. You are trained in copywriting, you’ve studied copywriting, it is a very specific style of writing. Just because you can write it doesn’t mean that you can judge copy and, if you’ve got something half finish and then you say to your customer, “What do you think?”, they kind of feel like you’re asking them to help you finish the job and if you think about it, we wouldn’t expect this in any other industry.
[New Scene]
Customer:
“Hi.”
Mechanic:
“Oh great, come in. I’m glad you’re here.”
Customer:
“Is it ready?”
Mechanic:
“Well, let’s see what you think – how does this sound to you?”
Customer:
“Bad”
Mechanic:
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Have a look at this, I was thinking of unscrewing that and then tightening that up. What do you think?”
Customer:
“I’ve got no idea. Why isn’t it ready? I came in to pick it up! I’m, I don’t know, I’m not a mechanic!”
Mechanic:
“Well, no, but you drive cars, you have a car, you know what a car looks like and I just thought you’d like to see the progress. . .
{crash}
Crap! Do you think that it was important?”
[End Scene]
Obviously, I’m joking, but you know, you have spent time studying copywriting – you do know more about the process of it then your client hopefully, and that does count for something and by not handing over a first draft and asking people what they think, you establish credibility and you establish yourself as someone that knows what they’re doing and is confident in the process.
So, what’s the alternative? Because you may think, well Amy, that’s a little bit risky, you know, for me to just hand in copy and for them to expect that it’s 95% done. Well, just because you don’t let them see your first draft doesn’t mean you don’t get feedback during the writing process. What I recommend doing or trying is, instead of presenting a draft, present an outline. So, this outline would sort of block out the different areas of whatever it is that you’re writing, whether it’s an email or a sales page or a piece of web copy, and then you feed back to the customer like;
“Look, based on our discussions, based on our research, here are the elements that I’m looking to include in each of these sections.”
So, instead of writing a specific headline, say;
“I think what we should do is start off with a headline that is risk-based because we know that customers are motivated by risk and what came up in research is that the people that buy explained that it was a concern or it was a worry around something getting worse that caused them to make the purchase.”
And then you might say;
“Then I want to move into the key benefits of the product which you outlined to me were these three/ five things you said are the most important features of the product that people love, and we’ll talk about the benefits of those. . .”
Build it as you would build it, but keep it to an outline in terms of – these are the elements I want to include and this is the order that I’m thinking of putting it to together in. Don’t use specific wording, just outline the sections and what you want to put in in each one because this is the big picture stuff and this is what’s really important. This will improve your relationship with your client because it is easier to discuss this stuff and it’s easier to solve things that might crop up this way before you then spend a ton of time writing copy. So, your customer might come back to you and say, “Well actually we’ve got this new research in and we really want a positive headline.” You know, “We want a benefit-based headline.” Or they might say to you, “Yeah those, features are good and I think that we should make this particular one more prominent – give it more space, give it more attention.” It makes the relationship more collaborative because the customer feels guided but they’re not getting bogged down into picking up my specific wording etc.
The other benefit of providing an outline first is it gives you a key checkpoint to refer to. The problem with handing in a draft copy where you’ve written it from start to finish is that, if you get so far down the road and they don’t like it, it’s just horrible. The outline is like your safety net. It lets you catch problems and it lets you refer to something if later on in a draft, a client decides to pick up on something. So, if they suddenly decide that a bunch of new features need to be mentioned, you can go back to the outline and say, “OK, well you mentioned that these four features or these three to five features were really important. Are you telling me that they’re still important and we need to add another bunch to this list or are you saying that some need to be swapped out and some are not as important?” Quite often just having that conversation makes clients stop and think about what they’re actually asking and the beauty there is that it stops people judging your copy on just a subjective whim or saying things like, “I don’t like it.” Or, “Can it be more compelling?” Having an outline to refer to lets you guide the feedback process, narrow down where changes need to be made and it also makes you look more credible because you look in control, you look confident and you’re able to guide the feedback process better than simply handing over draft copy and crossing your fingers. Now that being said, once you have an outline, it’s signed off, you go away and you write your copy and you present your first round of copy; you do have to be prepared to fight.
[New Scene]
Copywriter:
“En garde! I think it should say accelerate, it suggests speed.”
Client:
{Laughing}
“No, I think it should say improve or increase – no one will believe accelerate. Do you want to kill our sales?”
Copywriter:
“Well, I don’t like the word data for analysis. I think it should be insights in science.”
Client:
“Everyone is talking about insights. We need to say something else like, like . . .”
Copywriter:
“Intelligence.”
Client:
“Intelligence is cliched.”
Copywriter:
“I’m prepared to fight you on this.”
Client:
“I know.”
{knock at the door}
Copywriter:
{Opens door}
“Yes, what?”
Visitor:
“When you finished fighting over the perfect word, just thought you should know that the competition actually published their sales page and we’ve already lost clients who said that they couldn’t wait for us and they use the words data, insights, accelerate, analysis and improve.
{Gasps from Competitor}
[End Scene]
OK, you don’t actually have to do battle with a client, but you do need to know why and where to push back. One of the other things that can really help manage client expectations is to give them a guideline for providing feedback. When you give over your first round of copy, you’re not simply saying, “What do you think?” So, for example, I will often ask people to focus on industry terminology because sometimes they use internal terms when they’re discussing things with you that they wouldn’t necessarily use with the clients. I also ask them to focus on, you know, whether we have picked out the right benefits and the right pain points. Should there be any that are more prominent? Are there any that we have missed that you would like included? Now, hopefully not because hopefully you’ve caught this when you’ve put together the outline, but again, this is giving your customer a focus for providing feedback. They’re not just reading through it, they’re actually doing what you did to build the copy, which is to look at specific benefits, to look at specific pain points and to see whether everything is there that should be, you know, it may be that they come back and say, “Actually, do you know what, we forgot to mention that we also provide 12 months online support 24/7, can you include that in the copy?” This is great – that’s absolutely something that should be included in the revisions. What shouldn’t change are the building blocks of the message and any sort of overarching themes or narrative that you’ve picked because that should be well established when you present your outline. You know, you don’t want to have your customers say, “Well actually, I think that instead of leading with a risk message, we should be selling the benefits first of all.” You don’t want that coming up after you’ve written the copy. You want that coming up at the outline stage. Another reason why your outline is so important is because sometimes clients forget things. I have had someone highlight copy, absolutely trash it and then I’ve had to point out diplomatically that it was something that he wrote in a round of revisions (this was before I only offered one) and what having this resource does is, it gives you more confidence to guide the conversation so that it’s more productive. It’s less personal and you can actually push back respectfully if they’re asking you to add something in that they missed out or they’re asking you to change something that you hadn’t agreed to. More often than not, once you can prove that there is a reason why the copy includes certain points, benefits and features, clients will, I don’t want to say ‘back down’ because it sounds combative, but I’ve found in my experience that they respect that push back because you’re not just changing everything on their whim – you are actually showing your expertise and you’re explaining, that this is the process that we have for writing copy and this is why it’s included, this is why I’ve written it this particular way, these are the psychological principles and the persuasive principles I’ve included etc. This really does give confidence to a client that you know what you’re talking about and it makes it more objective. You are working more collaboratively and the client is taking responsibility as well for having to remember which changes to make – they’re not just putting it all on you as the copywriter and saying, “Hey, I don’t like it. Fix it.”
So, this brings me to revisions. Now as I mentioned, I generally offer one round of revisions and that isn’t to be mean. In my experience, if you offer more than that, clients will use them, but not because they need to. They’ll use those multiple revisions because they will concentrate less first time round. They will think, “Well I’ll catch that in the next bit – I’ll have a brief skim over and I’ll get it back to them.” And then, in the second round of revisions, you find out they’re bringing in completely new ideas that have things that they want to change. If you tell them that there is one set of revisions included in the price and that any changes after that are charged, suddenly they start to focus and because you’ve already got this outline that you showed them, you can get them to focus even more on how to provide feedback. I will often reiterate, you know, we worked together on this outline, I’m not expecting any of the key themes to change during the revision process. This is mostly a process of tweaking any language for accuracy . . . and that tends to set the stage pretty well as to what is expected of them when they are providing feedback. It’s all about guiding your client to make it easy for them to provide focused feedback and when you do this, you get a much better quality of revision requests, it’s a lot less overwhelming to them than if you hand over a draft and say, “What do you think?” And more importantly, when you show them that you have a specific system for building a message, guiding them through the revision process, you look like an expert who can be trusted and that’s why I recommend not sharing your draft copy with a customer.
That’s all for today. If you’ve got questions you want me to answer, you can pop them in the comments on the show page at the moment. I’m also hosting a free weekly Q&A session for 30 minutes every Thursday at 4:00 PM UK time. I’ll link to the registration, but feel free to come along and say hi. It’s very laid back and welcoming. Stay safe, keep believing and remember some things just shouldn’t be shared until they’re absolutely ready.
[New Scene]
Amy:
Welcome to my world-famous Zoo. Come in, come in and see the animals. Get up close.”
Friend:
“That was a quick opening Amy!”
Amy:
“I just couldn’t wait any longer to share it with people.”
Friend:
“Those lions seem close, have you got some sort of an invisible netting or something? Oh, it looks amazing!”
Amy:
“Yeah, we’re, we’re still working on the cages.”
Friend:
“What?”
Amy:
“They’re probably the next thing we will get finished I reckon. I mean, most of the animals have got cages.”
Friend:
“Which animals don’t have cages?”
Amy:
“All the water animals are pretty secure, urgh, except for the Puranas which we had to keep in buckets.”
Friend:
“That kid has just knocked it over.”
Amy:
“Most of the snakes are accounted for.”
Friend:
“There’s one wrapped around that woman’s arm!”
Amy:
“That’s going to make a great profile picture. . .
{Screaming}
Ooooo its just bitten her – I hope she got a picture before her face started swelling up.”
Friend:
“What’s about the lions?”
{Screaming}
Amy:
“I think, if people just calm down . . . everyone’s wiping the animals up! Maybe we should’ve waited to finish the cages – I can see now why the insurance company advised that. I thought they just lacked vision.
{Turns to her friend}
Where’d you go?”
[End Scene]
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