Content Marketing
Copywriting for websites, ads and email
Copywriting is selling in print. We write website pages, ad copy and emails that say what you do plainly, prove it, and ask for the action, without sounding like every other company in your category.
Who it is for: Businesses whose pages describe what they do but do not persuade anyone to buy it.
Everything in this service
- Website and landing page copy
- Ad copy for search and social campaigns
- Email sequences and one-off sends
- Headlines and value propositions tested in variants
- Voice notes so future copy stays consistent
What to expect
- Pages that convert visitors instead of just informing them
- Ads and emails with a clear reason to click
- One consistent voice across everything you publish
How copywriting actually works
Write to one reader and one action
Copy that tries to speak to everyone persuades nobody. Before a word is written we settle two things: who this specific page is for, and what one thing we want them to do at the end of it.
The reader is a person, not a segment. Not small business owners, but the operations manager at a forty person firm who has been asked to fix a problem this quarter and has to justify the spend to a finance director. That level of specificity changes the copy, because it tells you what they already know, what they are worried about, and who else has to agree. Writing for a named situation reads as if it was written for the person reading it, which is exactly the effect you want.
One action is harder to hold to than it sounds. Pages accumulate calls to action: book a call, download the guide, join the newsletter, see pricing, follow on social. Each extra option splits attention and makes the decision heavier. A page should have one primary action, repeated in the same words wherever it appears, and at most one quiet secondary option for people not ready. The words of that action should describe what happens next. Book a thirty minute call tells the reader what they are agreeing to. Get started tells them nothing, so they hesitate.
- Define the reader as a situation, not a demographic
- One primary action per page, in consistent wording
- Say what happens next, not get started or learn more
- Keep at most one low-commitment secondary option
- Remove every link that competes with the main action
Message hierarchy: what goes first, second, and never
Most readers give a page a few seconds before deciding whether to stay. Hierarchy is the decision about what those seconds are spent on, and it is made before any sentence is polished.
The order that works for almost every page is the same. What this is and who it is for, in plain words, above the fold. Then the outcome the reader gets, stated concretely. Then the proof that this is real. Then how it works, in enough detail to feel credible. Then the objections answered. Then the action. Anything about company history, values or awards sits far down or on a different page entirely, because it answers a question nobody asked yet.
The most common failure is a headline that describes the company rather than the reader. A headline that says a full service partner for modern brands tells a visitor nothing they can act on. A headline that says what the business does and for whom, in words a customer would use, does the work of the next three paragraphs. If a visitor cannot tell what you sell from the top of the page, the rest of the copy will never be read.
- Above the fold: what it is, who it is for, what they get
- Then proof, then the mechanism, then objections, then the action
- Headline describes the reader outcome, not the company
- Company history and values belong further down or elsewhere
- Every section should answer the question the last one raised
Outcomes over features, without losing the specifics
People buy a changed situation, not a list of components. But the advice to sell benefits not features is usually taken too far, and the result is copy full of vague promises that could belong to any company in the category.
The version that works keeps both and connects them. State the outcome, then immediately name the specific thing that makes it true. Faster monthly reporting is a claim. Faster monthly reporting because the numbers pull automatically from your ad accounts and land in one document on the first working day is a claim with a mechanism attached, and the mechanism is what makes the outcome believable. Features on their own are inert. Outcomes on their own are hot air. Together they persuade.
Specificity is also what stops copy sounding like everyone else. Numbers you can actually stand behind, named tools, real timeframes, exact deliverables and honest limits all read as confidence. The strongest move available to most businesses is to say plainly what they do not do and who they are not for. It costs a small number of unsuitable enquiries and buys the trust of everyone else, because a company willing to turn work away reads as a company that knows its job.
- Pair every outcome claim with the specific mechanism behind it
- Use exact deliverables, timeframes and names instead of adjectives
- Never state a result you cannot evidence
- Say who the service is not for
- Replace superlatives with something checkable
Handling objections inside the copy
Every reader is arguing with the page as they read it. Copy that ignores those arguments loses them silently, because an unanswered objection does not get raised, it just ends the visit.
The objections are usually known, because the sales team hears them every week. Too expensive. We could do this in house. We tried an agency before and it did not work. We are not big enough. This will take too long. How do we know it worked. Each of these belongs somewhere in the page, answered directly rather than dodged. Cost gets answered with framing and a real range rather than silence. The in-house objection gets answered by saying honestly when in house is the better choice. The previous bad experience gets answered by describing exactly how the work runs and what you will see each month.
Position matters. An objection answered before it forms is persuasive. The same answer buried in a FAQ at the bottom arrives after the reader already left. Put the biggest objection right after the main claim it threatens. And where possible, answer it with evidence rather than reassurance. Telling someone not to worry is weaker than showing them the reporting they will receive.
- List the real objections from sales calls before writing
- Answer each one near the claim that triggers it
- Give a real price range rather than saying it depends
- Say when your service is the wrong choice
- Answer with evidence and specifics, not reassurance
Keeping one voice across pages, ads and email
Voice consistency is a practical problem, not an artistic one. Different people write the website, the ads and the emails, often months apart, and without something written down the brand ends up sounding like four companies.
A voice reference solves it, and it needs to be short enough that people actually use it. One page is usually right. It covers who the brand sounds like, three or four traits with an example of each, the words and phrases that are always used, the words that are never used, rules on contractions and sentence length, and how the brand handles bad news. The most useful part is a set of before and after pairs, because showing an off-voice sentence rewritten teaches faster than any adjective.
Voice stays constant while tone shifts with the situation. The same brand should sound warmer in a welcome email than in a service outage notice, but it should still be recognisably the same brand. Ads compress the voice into very few words, which is where it usually breaks first, so it is worth writing the ad variants against the reference rather than treating them as a separate exercise. A quarterly read of a random sample of live copy catches drift before it becomes normal.
- A one page voice reference beats a twenty page guide nobody opens
- Include before and after rewrites, not just adjectives
- List banned words and phrases explicitly
- Voice stays fixed, tone flexes by situation
- Sample live copy each quarter to catch drift
Why clarity beats cleverness
Clever copy wins awards and loses customers. A pun in a headline costs the reader a moment of decoding, and a moment is often all the attention the page had.
The pattern is easy to recognise once you look for it. A headline that only makes sense after reading the subheading. A metaphor that requires knowing the industry. A tagline that would fit any company in any sector. Copy written to impress the people who commissioned it rather than the people who will read it. None of it survives contact with a distracted person on a phone between meetings.
Clarity is not the same as dullness. Plain words, short sentences and concrete detail can be warm, funny and distinctive. The difference is that a clear line is understood at first pass and remembered because of what it says, while a clever line is admired for a second and forgotten. The test we use is simple. Read the page to someone outside your industry. If they can tell you what you sell, who it is for and what to do next, it works. If they say it sounds nice but ask what you actually do, it does not, and no amount of polish will fix it.
- If a line needs a second read, rewrite it
- Avoid metaphors that require industry knowledge
- Concrete detail is more memorable than wordplay
- Test the page on someone outside your sector
- Plain does not mean flat, it means understood first time
A clear path, step by step
- 01
Brief
We agree the goal, audience, format and references, so edits are on target.
- 02
Produce
We edit and design with platform best practice built in from the start.
- 03
Review
You review against the brief. We revise quickly with clear version control.
- 04
Deliver and learn
Final files for every platform, plus what the performance tells us for next time.
Why choose us for this
We write to persuade, not to fill space
Short sentences, specific claims, no jargon
Copy informed by the SEO and ads teams using it
Common questions
What is the difference between copywriting and content writing?
Copy persuades a reader to act now: buy, book, subscribe. Content earns attention and trust over time. Most businesses need both, and we write both, but they are different jobs.
How do you learn our voice?
We read your existing material, interview you briefly, and draft a short voice reference. You review the first pieces closely, and the reference tightens from your feedback.
Explore related work
Want this for your business?
Book a free visibility call and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.
How this is delivered
One person leads every project. Where a job genuinely needs a specialist, I bring in people I have worked with before and manage them, so you get one point of contact and one invoice rather than three suppliers blaming each other.
- You talk to the person responsible for the work, not an account manager
- Specialists are briefed and managed by me, and their work is checked before it reaches you
- One contract, one invoice, one place to chase