Not only do you not need to use a copywriter who has experience in your industry to get great copy, but it’s also better if you don’t.
Let me explain.
If you were launching a brand new product to market and wanted the best field sales team possible, what would you look for in potential candidates?
- Someone with experience in selling a product similar to yours?
- Someone with an excellent sales record who is personable and enthusiastic?
The second one, right?
After all, knowledge about a product, industry or service can be learnt so that isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a prerequisite for your vacancy.
You’re going to be far more interested in the personality of the person you’re going to hire. You’ll want to know they can get on with people, deal with difficult questions, not get flustered when under fire, and have the ability to close a sale.
Well, the same goes for writers.
Experience stifles originality
Other than selling and delivering a strong SEO position, you’ll want your content to make you stand out from your competitors. After all, in our online world, the words on your website are all you have to make yourself seen.
If you insist on finding someone with oodles of experience in your industry, you’ll have a problem; namely, they’ll find it difficult to bring a new angle to your copy.
Although it will be well written, it will be very ‘samey’ as all the competitor sites that are also vying for your customers’ attention.
That’s not to say they’re a bad writer; it’s because they’ll be so used to writing in a particular way they’ll find it difficult to give your content the edge it needs.
However, hiring a copywriter will little, or no experience in your industry will pay off.
They won’t be blinkered by what’s ‘normal’. They’ll be able to look at your brand with a fresh pair of eyes. As a result, the content they generate will be unique to you and very different to everything else in your industry.
It’s good to be different
If being different brings you out in a cold sweat, it shouldn’t.
Let’s say you were looking for an accountant. Four websites stand out, but they all say the same thing, in the same way, giving you nothing with which to distinguish between them.
But if one of those four took a different view to the others and were written in a conversational, ‘light’ tone that made them sound approachable, you’d probably go for them because they are different.
Sometimes going against the perceived ‘norm’ is the smart thing to do.
If you want to be seen as the go to business in your sector, you have to be brave with your content, and the best way to do that is to hire a copywriter who consistently generates great copy.
That means forgetting about finding someone with loads of experience in your industry and instead concentrating on their flexibility as a writer, knowledge and experience of all things copywriting.