The Revival of Copywriting And How It Has Changed Over Time

26 Sep 2017 / Branding

Copywriting is DEAD!

Or so was claimed by a popular web blog back in 2011. Five years later, we find that the demise of professionally constructed content to be far from the grave. Content and content management has changed into a precise and technology driven ball game that has moved from traditional marketing into a more customisable option.

There was a time when people believed that copywriting and marketing was exclusively reserved for tier-A brands alone. And there was good reason to believe that – marketing was an extremely expensive proposition. But something changed over the past few years – social media sites and search engines emerged, and business could now interact with their audience without the use of traditional mediums.

With the coming of Search Engines and Social Media, the entire ballgame of marketing a brand has considerably shifted. Marketing is no longer about creating catchy campaigns and blindly running them, but it is now about developing specific data-driven creatives that communicate directly with your target audience. Maybe, that is why we see so much resistance to the term copywriting – Content is now democratic!

Traditional marketing sees its clientele as being a mass of people that by chance, if the campaign is loud enough, will come across the brand or product they’re trying to sell. It relies purely on making your brand as visible as possible! Enough for people to subconsciously choose one brand over the other, purely relying on familiarity as a selling tool. This method is not only cost intensive but also relies on prolonged campaigns that need to be extremely audience-generic.

This is where modern content writers are so different from traditional copywriters. We come from the same pool of people, we believe in the same golden rules of selling, but what we do differently is create selective customisable copy that can be changed easily and used for very specific purposes. This purposeful advertising has not only resulted in drastically reducing the turnover time for delivering effective campaigns, but has also made marketing more available to smaller brands.

So, the real question we need to be asking ourselves is ‘Where is Copywriting headed?’

The answer to that are both simple and a little complex at the same time. Simple because data is now universally accessible, enabling us to find the right audience at the time and the right place. Complex because we can no longer focus on creating generic campaigns that can only run on a single medium. We are the inheritors of a world that is drastically different from the theoretical know-hows created yesterday. Technology and the internet have transformed the copywriter from being a brooding creative archetype to that of a dynamic strategic being. The copy was bound to change.

To understand how to effectively market your brand online, you need to pay attention to certain basic concepts:

1 – Brand

No other marketing concept has been so muddled about and tampered with as the concept of the Brand. To make things worse, there’s more than enough confusion even amongst marketing strategists to define the meaning of the word Brand. Simply put, brand is what makes your audience recall your product’s name, instead of the product itself. For example, nobody asks for glucose biscuits, but they do want Parle-G.

2 – Positioning

Every business wants to be perceived a certain way by their audience. You might be an automobile design company that does not want to appear like a pure engineering firm, you want to seem more approachable and fun; positioning is what helps communicate this message across. This is what professional copywriters and brand strategists excel at, the ability to design a language style that flawlessly helps you position yourself in the market.

3 – Medium

Marketing your business online can get a little chaotic sometimes. What we often forget is that brands do not have to be present in every possible avenue out there. In fact, the more purposeful and targeted your approach, the faster your conversions take place. This task is made proportionately easier for us by the distinct characteristic of every social media site at our disposal. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, they all have very distinct personalities and audience groups. And you would be wise to choose a select few for what they can offer your brand in return.

To choose the right mediums for marketing yourself, do keep in mind what your brand stands for, and how you intend to position yourself; based on which you choose a social media and search engine strategy.

To cut a long story short, what we can simply infer is this – Copywriting is not going anywhere, brand strategy is no longer exclusive, and a little planning can go a long way in effectively promoting your business.