Responding to the death of copywriting
I saw a post on LinkedIn, from Anatolii Ulitovskyi, claiming the ‘death’ of copywriting, that was ‘doing the numbers’ (attracting attention), and I thought would respond — but it soon became too long for that platform’s miserly character allowance
I partially agree with his bullet points, they make some thoughtful points In response I would say for the moment:
Write what you know, have a go: This is where I agree. Of course, people should write about what they know intimately and avoid having to hire someone. We live at a time when having a go on the internet is what we are expected to do.
Frustration and lack of time are still with us: However, organisations, small or gargantuan, will outsource writing duties because writing is time-consuming, difficult. Writing is rewriting.
Expertise isn’t dead: However, that doesn’t mean expertise, or copywriting experts in a given niche, are dead. I myself have expertise in Education and credentials, plus skills and experiences, still count for something.
Data-driven: Anyone can write, but copywriting at its best is not just thoughtful scribbling.
It will aim to pair its message with the latest scientific literature about audience behaviour. This can get tricky.
Many of you will have data about the retention and engagement your posts generate: how many comments, how many click-throughs, how many actions taken, how long they spent looking at the content etc. etc.
It’s a good idea to also see what gets people stirring online.
Social media has discovered that it is often polarisation and division , rather than qualified and measured thoughtfulness that get minds engaged — but there’s also so much more than that: again, stories that only you can tell…
Anatolii’s post, although reasonable in places, has understood this principle. It starts off with a major word: DEAD. There’s seemingly no walking back from such an irrversible biological state like this. As such, the post has been generative of many bristly copywriters, responding with their business accounts, with their own reasons why copywriting is far from dead.
On the ‘science’, for example, despite the headlines about peoples’ attention spans being much shorter than they were, it’s incredibly hard to extrapolate a conclusion from limited sample size to the general, national, or world population at large.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38896790
It’s always a good idea to look at the research design.
Repeatable, reliable results matter too: the gold standard of scientific research is the meta-analysis (the analysis of many similar studies).
But if you’ve made it this far, thank you. You apparently have a good attention span.
