If you do an online search or ask your ever-friendly AI for an overview of what strategic copywriting is, there’s a standard definition: purpose-driven writing that aligns what you’re writing with customer psychology and specific business goals.
Well, yes. Except in my book, that’s plain ‘copywriting’.
I have a somewhat different understanding of what strategic copywriting entails. When I write – or rather well before I start writing – I want to be sure that the job I’m doing is the right one. Strategy comes first.
If the project is via an agency there’s usually a brief. With large clients, there’s generally a marketing department to work out what’s required.
With smaller clients, however, there’s no agency or marketing department. The process of working out what needs to be communicated, when and to whom, usually falls to two people. One is whoever’s commissioning the work – a salesperson, an office manager, a PA. Often, it’s the business owner themselves. They know their products or services inside out and may have a clear idea of what they want. But they’re rarely trained marketers, and their instinct for strategy may not be the right one.
That’s where the other person comes in: the copywriter. The strategic copywriter.
It can’t be a content writer, who simply writes what they’re told and aims to inform rather than persuade. And it can’t be just any old copywriter.
Any copywriter can follow a brief. A good one will interrogate it or, if it doesn’t exist, use experience to work out what’s required. But a strategic copywriter goes further: talking to the client, scrutinising their business, checking out competitors, working out which customers to target, when and how. That means that even before any actual copywriting happens, the end result is already well on the way to being a success.
Here’s what that looks like in practice, with four successes from my own back catalogue, plus one failure when the need for strategic thinking was ignored.
Outlet – standing out in a crowded property market
Many years ago I was asked to write web pages for Outlet, an estate agency in Soho. They had numerous competitors, including large companies with big budgets, and had already spent considerable sums with an SEO company over many months without much result.
Before writing anything, I did keyword and wider market research, taking time to understand the business. It quickly became clear there was no unified tone of voice across their sprawling website. Various people had written for it, and the SEO company had resorted to keyword stuffing and randomly capitalising and underlining words.
By concentrating on key pages, I could show what proper research followed by professional copywriting actually did: those pages soon began outperforming the rest of the site. About six months in, the client parted ways with the SEO firm and put their marketing budget behind copywriting instead.
In the first year I worked with Outlet, overall traffic more than doubled, as did enquiries. Alongside general property services, I recommended pushing under-used areas like penthouses and lofts, where they had real room to build a name for themselves.
I wrote for Outlet for many years, until the owner sold up and moved abroad. Their site continued to rise in the rankings for popular search terms throughout. I also advised on simple, low-cost SEO steps they could take themselves, and provided regular, plain-English reports that I researched and wrote myself, rather than forwarding meaningless computer-generated figures.
Edradour – a small distillery that made a big name for itself
Edradour was the smallest whisky distillery in Scotland, with a miniscule marketing budget to match. When I looked at their strategy, I decided their smallness was actually their biggest asset.
There was no money for regular campaigns, but they did have a website, and an opportunity to use it cannily to build reach and reputation. I devised a campaign with the tagline ‘Enjoy Life’s Small Victories’ and wrote half a dozen short stories on that theme, used as introductions to the site. Enter the URL, and a teaser to one of the stories would appear at random; visitors could click through and read the whole thing (which naturally involved sharing a dram of Edradour).
The tales covered fishing, chess, shooting, golf and even stone skimming. The random selection encouraged repeat visits, and alongside the stories, visitors could read about the distillery, the whisky and its heritage.
The campaign was hugely popular and ran for well over ten years – a lifetime in internet terms – making Edradour better known and more popular than many much bigger distilleries.
Janus Henderson – when a big idea is what’s required
A marketing agency, The Hub, asked me to work on a big multimedia campaign for asset management company Janus Henderson, targeting middle-aged investors who needed to fund their retirement. The agency had done extensive background work – market research, targeting, planning – and requirements included a retirement guide, a microsite, podcasts, articles, emails, print ads and a professionally-shot hero video.
What the agency didn’t have was a creative director, and that’s where I came in. With a background in consumer advertising, I knew what was required was a single-minded proposition and a big idea. Because in a crowded market, what usually gets produced is a mix of caution, cliché and progressive box-ticking, resulting in wallpaper with the copy and paste still dripping off it.
My idea was simple. Hitting fifty is a real milestone — we joke about it as ‘The Big 5-0’. When we reach our half-century, we realise our life is almost certainly half over, and that we need to start thinking about our remaining time. All I did was highlight that realisation by turning ‘The Big 5-0’ into ‘The Big 5-Oh.’ As in: ‘Oh, I really need to reshape my thinking.’ ‘Oh, I need to start thinking about life beyond work.’ ‘Oh, I’d better start saving for retirement.’
The line sat at the centre of the hero video, which showed a man enjoying his fiftieth birthday cake with his family as the realisation of his age hit him. The idea was echoed across the press ads, microsite, retirement guide and the rest.
It paid off handsomely: the client’s most successful campaign ever. The video received well over a million impressions, with a YouTube click-through rate 280% above target. The print element delivered over three million impressions, with online page views up by around 2,000 a month and average retention over four minutes.
A lot of that success came down to the agency’s skill in getting the planning and briefing right. But I was glad to put the strategic icing on the birthday cake – which proved rather more palatable to the public than wallpaper paste.
PRIME – meeting international business requirements
Based in Bahrain, PRIME is the country’s leading provider of office space and business services. I started working with them soon after the company was set up, and continued for well over ten years.
My first contributions were strategic. The company offered many services, from office space to visa assistance and IP legal support, targeting both local and international audiences – essentially anyone who might want to do business in, or with, Bahrain. I advised on channel and audience prioritisation before turning to their website, starting with the right keyword terms.
As well as completely rewriting the site, I made many adjustments over the years. With new competitors appearing, existing ones shifting strategy and Google’s algorithm changing, website optimisation is never static. I also monitored the site for problems; when a major design issue by a third party caused a big loss of traffic, I identified the cause and got it rectified.
Over the years I also wrote brochures and other sales collateral, and rewrote the website of an affiliated legal company. As of 2026, PRIME has just celebrated its 21st birthday, and they continue to use my copy. Once again, it was the strategic part that really made the difference.
Project X – set up to fail
Now for what happens when the strategising is skipped. I was asked by an agency to write a showcase report for a major energy company.
I was contacted on a Sunday evening (first red flag) by a project manager in a panic, needing a writer fast. I put in a proposal, allowing for plenty of revisions. It was accepted, then the agency asked, incredibly, for a higher quote. This was because the client was ‘an absolute nightmare’ – the previous year’s report had gone to 38 rounds of revisions.
However, they clearly hadn’t learned anything from this. The PM had never worked with a writer before, never wrote a brief, and was, astonishingly, the only person the agency assigned to this flagship project.
I had specified the need for proper initial strategic work in my quote. The client wanted a shorter, sharper report than before, and that needed figuring out. But once the agency won the project, the initial draft time was more than halved, strategising was dropped entirely, and I was told to just start writing, despite much of the necessary information being missing. (There were now more red flags waving than at a Labour party conference.)
By working nonstop, evenings and weekends included, I was able to keep everything on time and on budget. Initial feedback was good but the deadline kept shrinking further even as the scope crept upward: they’d wanted a shorter report, and it was shaping up to be nearly half as long again. Then, before I’d even finished the first draft, they demanded a second. Over 35,000 words, with large chunks of information still missing, to be completed in two days.
Ridiculous. Especially as the final deadline was still over six months away. Yet rather than push back to the client, the agency said they’d use AI to draft parts themselves. But they hadn’t actually read what the client had supplied, which was my copy interspersed with raw data randomly pasted in by numerous different people: a Frankenstein’s monster of a document. Too late, they realised AI couldn’t fix it, so two agency staff each cobbled together a section – one riddled with errors, the other simply abandoned halfway – and sent the shoddy result to the client anyway.
The client asked what the agency’s vision for the report actually was – a question that should have been answered before any writing started. A couple of days later, the client unsurprisingly pulled the project. Six months later, the report limped into print, overlong, confused and inconsistent.
The whole affair had been a foreseeable fiasco caused, above all, by a dearth of strategic thinking at every stage.
And the moral is…
As a strategic copywriter, I’m here not just to write, but to think, to plan, to research, and to use 30+ years of business experience to make recommendations. With small businesses and limited budgets – Outlet, PRIME, Edradour – it was the strategic groundwork that made all the difference. With Janus Henderson, the client and agency already knew what they needed and had done much of the hard work – I just added strategic creativity on top.
Project X, meanwhile, shows that it’s no use being a well-known name with a massive budget and a big agency if nobody involved goes about it the right way – not least by ignoring strategic thinking altogether.
So if you’re a business with a tight budget and limited marketing expertise, and you know you need copywriting oomph, there’s a simple solution. Don’t start with the writing – begin with the thinking. Talk to a strategic copywriter.
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