Sorry Folks, Your Clients Aren't Psychic

Do you know what the first piece of marketing copy I ever wrote was?

Of course you don’t.

You don’t know that it was for a small boutique hotel, or that a 200 word piece came back with six recommended amendments from the Head of Copy.

Most importantly, you don’t know that it was a voice-over script.

You don’t know that I’d been a copywriter for four months before I’d written a website. Six months before I’d written an email. 14 months before I’d heard the acronym SEO.

Does that surprise you?

After all, if you look at my website, at my portfolio, at my LinkedIn profile, what do you see?

A digital copywriter. Someone who crafts websites and emails. Someone who understands search engine optimisation.

You might see three or four lines about my background in voice-over scripts.

And that’s a problem.

A few weeks ago, I had an email from a long-term repeat client. She hires lots of copywriters for lots of jobs, and the client found herself at a loss.

She needed someone to pen a voice-over script for an explainer video, and nobody in her usual stable of writers had any experience. Deciding that I could at least get the informal tone of voice correct, she decided to take a chance on me and fired across an email.

“Are you comfortable taking on a video script?”

Of course I was! How couldn’t I be? Everyone knows that I started out writing scripts. Everyone knows that they’re my forte! That’s obvious!

So obvious, in fact. That I’d not bothered to tell anyone. Turns out that the only people who know that I’m an expert at voice-over copy are the copywriters I worked with as a junior, my wife and muggins here. (And my wife only knows because I regularly bemoan the fact that I get so few enquiries about script work. There’s a red flag I missed)

That’s the problem with knowing stuff about your business. You assume everyone else knows it too. And you don’t want to waste their time by droning on and on and on about things they already know.

Turns out that if people knew everything about your business, they probably wouldn’t need to hire you.

Turns out that people in fact know very little.

Turns out they don’t care enough to look at a one line description of the first entry on your LinkedIn job history and extrapolate your skillset from that.

It turns out, as it happens, that your clients aren’t psychic.

So stop treating them like they are, and start telling them what they need to know. It’s easy. I’ll start.

I’m Andrew Nattan and I’m actually a bloody good writer of voice-over and video scripts.

See?

Now what have you forgotten to tell your clients?