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Sales and marketing copywriting can be a very lucrative business, but if you don’t know your value as a writer, you’ll probably spend your career on the lower end of the spectrum when it comes to earnings. To charge your clients prices that reflect your work’s true value, you must first understand what that value is. This can be tricky since overestimating your value and charging too much can turn away clients. On the other hand, playing it safe and charging lower prices can lead to more work but less income.
The good news is that there are several easy ways to get a good idea of your value as a sales and marketing copywriter. Not only will this help you to charge your clients as much as possible without overestimating your value, but it will also give you the leverage you need to justify those prices. Here’s a look at five ways to accurately assess your value as a sales and marketing copywriter. That should help you make more money.
1. How Much Your Clients Make Off Your Work
If you write a piece of sales copy for your client for $500 and it ends up making them $500,000, then they got far more value from your copy than they paid. While it’s natural for your clients to make more money off of your work than they pay for it, such a massive gap means that you’re not charging enough.
Before you give a prospective client a price quote, make sure you understand their project well enough to estimate how much revenue they’ll make off of your copy. The higher this estimate is, the more you should charge. Simple as that.
Another thing you should be doing is quoting higher than the actual amount you want to get paid. Playing it safe and quoting your client a “fair price” may seem like the best way to get work, but you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table. Also, remember that there’s no such thing as a fair price. Value is dictated by what someone is willing to pay. This means you should try and get your client to pay as much as possible every single time. If this makes you feel scummy, remember that they’re going to try and pay you as little as possible to increase their ROI (return on investment).
When you quote a bit higher than what you want to get paid for your work, one of two things will happen. Either your client will agree to your fee, and pay you more than you were expecting, or you can haggle down to the price you wanted in the first place. Either way, you win. If your client balks at your initial quote, and it seems like they may not want to work with you, just send them a friendly reply asking them to make you an offer. This gives you leverage and another opportunity to get the price you want.
2. How Much Time You Spend on a Project
The first thing you should know about being a serious sales and marketing copywriter is that you want to avoid working for hourly rates if at all possible. When you work hourly, you rarely get paid what you’re worth since your earnings become arbitrary and aren’t based on the value you provide to your clients. Be wary of clients who want you to work for an hourly rate. In most cases, they know they’ll be paying you less under those circumstances.
Even with this being the case, you still want to take the amount of time you’ll be spending on a project into consideration when coming up with a quote for prospective clients. Time is money, so the more time you spend working on a project, the more you should charge.
Something else to consider that’s along these lines is bulk orders. A bulk order is when a client attempts to get you to lower your prices by offering you more work. Bulk orders might make sense when it comes to physical goods but they’re a straight-up scam when it comes to service-based jobs. When a client offers you a bulk order, what they’re doing is essentially asking you to work more for less money. Don’t do it. Only newbies fall for this, and that’s only because they’re desperate for work.
3. How Long You’ve Been Copywriting
The longer you do something, the better you get at it. This applies to almost everything in life, and sales and marketing copywriting is no exception. If you’ve been a copywriter for ten years, you should be charging more than someone who’s been doing it for five years. Not only is your experience itself leverage, but it also means that you’ve had time to collect other forms of leverage as well. Positive reviews and endorsements, data from past clients that show you can get conversions, and plenty of samples to show prospective clients are all excellent forms of leverage that you’ll collect over the years.
While you may not necessarily feel like a better writer as the years go by, you can always look back at your old work for comparison. In many cases, you’ll be able to see how it’s inferior to your current work. It might even be a little embarrassing. This isn’t a bad thing, though. It just means that you’ve grown as a writer, and as such, you should be charging higher prices.
4. Covering Additional Expenses
As a sales and marketing copywriter, you’ll likely be paying a lot of your expenses out of pocket, especially if you’re not working for an agency. For example, if you’re hiring an editor to proofread and improve your work, you’ll need to factor their fee into the fee you charge your clients to offset it. If you don’t, you’ll end up losing money, and you may as well not even bother hiring an editor.
Other expenses can add up as well. Examples include a monthly subscription for grammar checker software, taxes, tax software, health insurance, and expenses you pay to find clients. These factors add up and need to be directly offset by the prices you charge your clients.
Any time you consider investing in your sales and marketing copywriting business, it should be just that: an investment. Any money you spend on your business should always be taken into account when deciding what to charge clients. You can keep track of this by having a spreadsheet that lists your expenses. You can then consider the total amount when giving your clients a price quote.
5. Results and Endorsements
If you have raw data from past clients showing that your copy got high conversions, you’ll have much more leverage in convincing new clients to pay you more. It may feel somewhat uncomfortable asking clients for this data, but it’s well worth it. Even if the results aren’t what you were hoping for, they can still help you improve as a copywriter.
If your client doesn’t want to share their data, or if they’ve made the mistake of not bothering to collect data, ask them for a testimonial. Positive testimonials from past clients are a powerful form of social proof that can make it easier to convince new clients to hire you. They can also help persuade new clients to agree to higher fees.
Something else to think about is that if you get to work with a client that’s a big-name company, make sure you ask for an endorsement. An endorsement is a little different from a testimonial. Instead of being a statement of approval, it allows you to use that company’s logo and say that they endorse your work.
An example of this would be the endorsement section that you see on many landing pages and sales letters where the logos of big-name companies and brands are displayed. The endorsement section will usually have a caption like “Endorsed by:” or “Trusted by:” to reinforce the idea that their brand is approved of by big-name companies.
How you work endorsements into your advertising is up to you, but in any case, having endorsements from well-known brands will raise your value as a copywriter. For example, if you’re a sales and marketing copywriter who specializes in the tech industry and you did a job for Google, having an endorsement from them will give you a ton of credibility. It will also give you additional leverage when negotiating with prospective clients.
Understanding the Relationship Between Client and Copywriter
When it comes to price, sales, and marketing copywriters have an antagonistic relationship with their clients. You want them to pay you as much as possible, and they want to pay you as little as possible. To this end, both parties have different forms of leverage. If you’re pitching too high, your prospective client can always hire copywriters who are charging less than you. You can counterbalance this by using your leverage in the form of past results, samples of your work, testimonials, and endorsements. This will help show your client that you’re worth what you’re trying to charge them.
As mentioned before, the best strategy is to give a quote that’s slightly higher than you feel your work is worth in each case. You’ll be surprised by how many clients will pay this amount. And if they don’t want to pay it, ask them to make you an offer and haggle it down to the price you initially wanted.
Also, never forget that your work is an investment for your client. Don’t let them forget it either. By framing your work this way, you can reinforce the idea that your client will be making back much more than they pay you. This can help make them more comfortable with paying you what your work is really worth.
You’re a sales and marketing copywriter so how successfully you’re able to market your services is just another part of the job and one that you’re exceptionally qualified for. Consider all of the factors that determine the value of your work, then use that as leverage to get your clients to pay you more. It’s not that different from asking for a raise at a normal job; sometimes all you have to do is ask. And, unlike people who work a normal job, you can negotiate for a better fee.
Most things in life are negotiable. As long as you remember that, and have a solid understanding of your true value as a sales and marketing copywriter, you’ll have no trouble getting paid based on the true value of your work.
