How to Build a Career in Marketing Copywriting

To put it simply, a marketing copywriter is a person who creates texts to sell products. It can be email messages texts to send them to probable customers, materials for advertising, articles for company websites, or short slogans for TV or radio. In other words, it does not matter what kind of text marketing copywriter delivers, but it does matter how it impacts the company sales volume.

The need for marketing copywriting specialists is huge: there are 3,406 Marketing Copywriter jobs on the Glassdoor site with an average salary of $25-200K per year.

Where to Start

The main must-have skill for a marketing copywriter is the competence to create in readers the desire to act. For instance, to click the Buy button right after reading the text in the company blog, or to visit the company website after hearing the advertising slogan on TV. Therefore, a proficient marketing copywriter knows how to make entertaining content and understands how it will impact readers.

So, if you are interested in a marketing copywriting career, you should find out more about marketing strategies and PR. It will be not enough just to catch the main trends or tricks for marketing copy. Still, since selling is very connected with human emotions and behavior, it will be incredibly useful to study a bit of psychology.

Also, you must not forget about writing skills themselves. Although a marketing copywriter sells products, his or her tool for doing so is words. That means, your materials must be easy to read, informative, catchy, and entice customers first read till the end and then react in accordance with your marketing intentions, whether it is purchasing, checking the website, or something else.

Additional knowledge can enhance your copywriting CV. For instance, if you want to get a marketing copywriter job in an IT company, a degree in Computer Science will look like a strong advantage.

Steps to Become a Marketing Copywriter

Step 1. Defining your current skills

Now, when you know where you want to be, you need to define where you are at this moment. Maybe you are an experienced freelance writer; then you have to improve your skills in marketing. Or maybe you have just started your way, but you have already successfully participated in some volunteering projects. Explore your potential: sometimes, it is not apparent what heights you can reach.

Step 2. Boosting your skills if needed

Once you have defined where you have a gap in knowledge or experience, fill it with training or practice.

Step 3. Create a portfolio (you can get some freelance orders for that at low price)

It is essential for the copywriter to tell potential employees about the quantity of your experience and showcase the examples of what you can do. So, your portfolio becomes as important as your CV or even has more weight.

How to create a marketing copywriter portfolio:

●      Find a task at the freelance exchange, from your friends in the field, or even create it on your own. But the first two options are preferable. Why? The explanation is below.

●      Fulfill the task and measure its results. The master in marketing copywriting creates not just grammatically correct and interesting copy, but copy that helps to achieve some marketing goals. So you need to show this to potential employees. That is why it is much better to take a real task than to come up with it on your own. This is not always easy without experience, so just do the best you can.

Step 4. Finding an internship or full-time jobs

The path really begins on this step. Many newbies think that the hardest part is getting a job, but actually, you have to work even harder once you get it.

How to Make Progress at Work

While working as a marketing copywriter, you need to continue improving your writing and marketing skills. To do it effectively, you must learn to take an example from other people’s work, ask the right questions, and critically evaluate yourself. Specific marketing metrics will significantly help you with this last point: checking whether the copy achieved its goal with conversions, a percentage that shows how many customers read the text and how many of them did desirable action (buy, click, etc.).

You will also find the following tips helpful:

●      Read more. The more you read examples of other people’s good work, the more you understand what to strive for, and the faster you notice your own mistakes. For writing skills, any text is fine, but only marketing samples are useful for mastering your selling techniques.

●      Determine for whom and for what you write. It’s essential to do this every time before you start working on a new piece. Always keep in mind that your text must accomplish the task. Draw in your head a portrait of your potential reader and answer the questions: what he or she wants, what he or she is interested in, and, most importantly, how to hook them.

●      Follow the trends. Marketing is a very changeable area, so it’s important to know what is essential and relevant now or you will be hopelessly outdated. You can find out what’s trending on Medium from the blogs of the top experts.

How to Grow

A specialist in marketing copywriting can work on enhancing one’s skills in the niche or move into related areas. The first option might involve career growth to becoming the head of the department. The position will require writing articles, building strategies for development, and giving subordinates tasks. The second option is possible due to the fact that marketing copywriting already combines two specialties. So you can grow in the direction of pure marketing, up to the creation of your own agency.

Marie Barnes is a Marketing Communication Manager at Adsy, where you can write as a guest blogger. She is an enthusiastic blogger interested in writing about technology, social media, work, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs.