When it comes to copywriting price is not the same as cost

Last week I spent an hour on a conference call with two agency personnel and three people from their client having a meeting about a meeting to be held next week at which I would be briefed about a copywriting requirement. The number of people involved and time taken in what was a fruitless interaction got me thinking about the cost of the copywriting process.

When it comes to copywriting whether for whitepapers, case studies, bylined articles or brochures, there’s a massive spread in terms of the cost professional writers charge. Some look stratospherically expensive when compared to some of the amateurs populating sites such as People Per Hour or when stacked against those that operate from low cost locations. Yet, there’s far more to consider than the price charged by the writer when it comes to the cost of having copy written.

Yes, you can hire someone cheaply to write your copy. I’ve seen rates from apparently professional writers in the UK that would put them below the breadline if this were their sole source of income. Equally, I’ve seen agencies charging absurdly high fees. The headline cost per word or per hour isn’t actually the most important cost to consider. Instead look at the total cost of the project.

That means taking full account of all the costs. A cheap writer may be inexperienced as a writer, have no knowledge of your industry or, in a very small number of cases, turn out to be an absolute bargain. If you take the example of a 2,000 word technical article or whitepaper, a cheap writer might only charge a few hundred pounds, but what’s the cost to you?

Let’s assume there are a series of personnel from your business involved. There could be at least three: a marketing professional, a product manager and someone from the technical side of your business. It’s not a stretch for a successful sales director who sells complex, high value products or services to earn a salary of upwards of £150,000 per annum. Then there are costs to their employer of an additional £50,000 per annum from items such as desk space, communications, IT and company car. Most UK employees work for 240 days a year so this type of employee’s daily cost is £833 – that’s a little over £100 per hour. If you extrapolate that to add in additional personnel and possibly some PR support, there’s a minimum cost to a company of £250 per hour for their involvement in a copywriting process. It’s not unusual for a longer chain of personnel to be involved so, in some cases, costs per hour could hit £500 before you even get to the cost of the writer.

And that’s the point. A cheap writer that needs to be educated about your business and is unfamiliar with your sector will take up far more of your time during the briefing process and during rounds of rewrites than an expert copywriter that understands both your business and your sector. I would estimate that an experienced copywriter charging £1,000 for a case study could typically save four hours of a team’s time during a project when compared to an inexperienced writer that charges just £200.

Those four hours actually make the experienced copywriter that charges £1,000 work out to be £200 cheaper than the writer charging £200. That’s because the experienced copywriter is already most of the way to knowing what you want before the first meeting even starts, they know how to keep the process moving, how to avoid hours of non-productive meeting and conference calls and how to avoid needless rewrites. Professional copywriters also know how to eliminate meetings about meetings that extend the process and waste your time and your company’s resources.

When it comes to copywriting, cost is different to price. Your time is actually worth more than money in this process so choose your copywriter wisely with this in mind.