Ocean Copy

As an experienced copywriter I am used to hearing the words “I can’t afford a copywriter” but to turn that objection on it’s head, I ask “can you afford not to?”

To demonstrate my point I’ll tell you a wee story about one of our recent experiences (I have permission to tell this story as long as I don’t mention the company by name). A company asked us for a quote for writing their website content from scratch and decided they couldn’t afford it.

The contact at the company was focused purely on the finances and ultimately informed us he would just get the copy written in-house.

Around a month later I got an email out of the blue from the same company asking for help. Here are the main points;

• One of their sales team wrote the website copy
• They’d had virtually no traffic and no orders since the site launched
• I was glad to be able to help out and the customer was only too happy to accept our quote the second time around.

While we chatted about his requirements, he divulged that his top sales person had spent a week writing the copy for the site – at a cost of £300.

The company also lost that sales person’s revenue for that week – estimated cost – £1000

Their website wasn’t being found by their target market in the first few weeks after launch – estimated cost £??

So basically writing the copy themselves cost them £1300 at the very least and they then ended up paying us our original £400 quote on top which brings it to £1700.

So the company that couldn’t afford a copywriter ended up paying more than 4 times the original quote and that’s without factoring in the lack of people finding them online.