Copywriters generally work in two basic industries, either for agencies or businesses.  Many people in this field begin with agencies. Some move away and venture as freelance copywriters. In large corporations you may find copywriters in the marketing department. Often these companies hire also freelancers. This happens specially in the B2B copywriting.

There are different goals that copywriters may follow. In the offline direct response copywriting, there is the tradition of beating the control. What does that mean? Let’s say that a company is selling a particular product, and has a very well performing sales letter. The challenge would be if there is a copywriter out there that can write a copy that exceed the convergence of the current letter.

Copywriters have to know the market

The fact is that copywriters do not know if a sales letter will sell the product or not. Copywriting is in that sense a very scientific specialization. Copywriters perform sometimes complicated mathematics to know if their copy sells the product or not. This mathematics  is called split-testing and is based on probability. Result is the final determining judge.

In the history of copywriting, there are many cases where copywriters have written sales letters that might not be clever at all, yet these have been extremely successful. It is indispensable for the copywriter to know who he is writing to.  There are some copywriters who just sit and write and write without knowing who they’re writing to. They don’t know the target market.

There are certain things that copywriters need to do to accomplish a great job. First, they need to know the product. Spending time with the product in indispensable. They need to have the product in their hand, to task, smell it, hear it, feel it. They have to understand the product. What does it do? How does it work? Copywriters have to understand the market and what problems the product solves.