So many copywriters think that it's enough to be a stellar writer and grammatical genius. Oh, but this is so far from true. One of the most important aspects of copywriting is project management. When you're tight and together, you can deliver a perfect draft BEFORE the anticipated deadline, that the client can easily decipher and that whomever is designing the project will absolutely love you for.
As a polished copywriting professional, your writing drafts should include:
- Copy that's contextually structured in a logical fashion
- Copy that's emotionally geared to the audience in tone and message
- Copy that's non-repetitive or redundant
- Copy that conforms to the grammatical and stylistic rules within its unique category
- Copy that's structured to the medium in which it shall be presented; i.e. web, print, radio, TV etc.
Your client is entrusting his projects to you, and therefore you are the Keeper of the Order.
As someone who has signed a contract that commits you to be responsible for someone else's content, you owe that paying client:
- Copy that can be easily transferred from text to a graphic design or web format
- Project draft documents and emails that are consistent in their naming convention
- Text files that contain necessary headers and page numbers
- Fonts that are uniform in size, easy to read and used consistently
- Seach Engine Optimized copy (as it's requested) delivered in a standard document format
While creativity is a beautiful thing, the copy draft is the last place where we want to wow our customer with distracting graphics, multiple sized fonts, and inconsistency. Your designer will be working from one document set at one font face and size that he can copy and paste from. Make that document clean and consistent. Categorize everything so the client can tell "what goes where."
