Copywriter Interview Questions

The first thing I do is read the brief carefully and identify what I do not yet understand. Most briefs have gaps: the audience is described at a high level, the tone is vague, or the success criteria are not defined. Before I write anything, I ask the questions that will shape the work. I want to know who exactly is reading this, what they already believe, and what we want them to think or do differently after they have read it. I also ask what channels this is running on, because copy for a Google ad and copy for a long-form email are structurally different even when they serve the same campaign. Once I have those answers, I start with the single most important idea. I find that writers who try to say everything in a piece of copy end up communicating nothing. My process is: find the one thing, then build everything else around it. The brief review stage typically takes about 20% of my total time on a piece and saves far more than that in revisions later.

I treat each brand voice as a set of specific constraints rather than a general feeling. When I work with a new brand, I read their existing content across every channel to build a picture of the patterns: which sentence structures they use, what vocabulary is characteristic, how formal or informal the register is, whether they use humour and if so what kind. I document these observations in a short voice guide for my own reference. Once I have a clear model of the voice, I run everything I write through that filter before submitting. The most useful test I have found is to read the copy aloud. Inconsistencies in voice almost always become audible even when they are invisible on the page. Adapting to a voice does not mean suppressing good writing instincts. It means channelling them through the constraints of the brand. Strong copywriters can write compellingly within almost any voice, weak ones can only write in their own.

I start by getting clear on what the visitor already knows when they arrive on the page. A landing page for a paid search campaign needs to reflect the promise made in the ad, because visitors have a mental contract from the moment they clicked. If the page breaks that contract in the first headline, they leave. My headline carries the single most important benefit, not the product name or a tagline. I write several options and test them against the question: does this tell me why I should keep reading? From there, the body copy handles objections in priority order: the objections most likely to stop a conversion first. I try to keep sentences short and paragraphs short. Most people scan landing pages rather than reading them, so every heading and subheading has to work as a standalone sentence that makes a complete argument. The CTA is specific rather than generic: 'Start your free trial' rather than 'Learn more'. I always review the page in full before submitting to check that the argument flows and the voice is consistent.

SEO and good writing are less in conflict than most people assume, but they do require deliberate management. The main tension is keyword density: search guidance will sometimes push you toward repeating a phrase more often than a good writer would. My approach is to meet the SEO requirements on the structural level, headings, URL, meta description, image alt text, and the opening paragraph, and then write the body copy primarily for the reader. If the keyword appears naturally elsewhere, good. If not, I find a synonym or restructure a sentence to include it without disrupting the reading experience. The worst outcome is keyword-stuffed copy that readers ignore or bounce from, because that sends negative engagement signals back to search. The copy that performs best for SEO is usually the copy that is most useful to the person reading it, so the interests are aligned more often than writers assume. I also ensure I understand the search intent behind a keyword before writing: someone searching 'what is X' needs a definition, someone searching 'best X' wants a comparison.

A client asked me to rewrite the homepage of their SaaS product. I wrote a draft that I thought worked well: clear, focused, and with a strong opening benefit statement. The feedback was that it was too direct and did not reflect their brand personality, which they described as warm and conversational. My instinct was to defend the original approach because directness usually converts better on a homepage. But I asked more questions before pushing back: what did 'warm and conversational' look like to them, and could they point to examples they liked? They sent me three examples from brands they admired and the pattern became clear. Their audience was not technical buyers who wanted efficiency; it was small business owners who felt intimidated by software and needed to feel that the product would not make their lives harder. Once I understood the emotional job the copy needed to do, I rewrote it with that in mind. The second draft was accepted with minor changes. The lesson for me was that feedback that sounds aesthetic often has a strategic insight underneath it, and my job is to find that insight rather than defend my original instinct.

I was briefed to write a series of email campaigns for a specialist engineering equipment manufacturer. I had no background in the sector and the audience was professional engineers who would immediately recognise copy that was not grounded in real knowledge. Rather than writing from the brief alone, I spent two days doing intensive research: reading trade publications, watching product demonstration videos, and interviewing two of the client's sales representatives about what questions customers asked and what objections they had. I also asked the client to share any existing case studies or testimonials from customers. The goal was not to become an expert but to write with enough specific, accurate detail that the reader trusted the copy. I flagged three claims in my draft that I was not confident about and asked the client to verify them. One turned out to be inaccurate, which would have been embarrassing if it had gone out. The campaigns performed 30% above the client's benchmark for open rate. The work taught me that subject confidence in copy comes from specific research, not from vague general knowledge of the sector.

I wrote a series of Facebook ad creatives for a consumer app that I was confident about. The hooks were strong, the offer was clear, and the visuals were good. The click-through rates came back at well below benchmark. My first instinct was to blame the targeting, but I resisted that and asked the media buyer to share the impression data alongside the CTR. The issue was that the ads were getting good reach among the right demographic but very few people were stopping to read them. The problem was the first line: I had written informational hooks when the audience needed emotional or curiosity-driven hooks to pause their scroll. I rewrote the hooks with a completely different approach: opening with a question or a counter-intuitive statement rather than a product claim. The revised versions doubled the CTR within a week. The lesson was that on social channels, the first line of copy is doing a different job from the body copy. It is a pattern interrupt, not an introduction. I now write social ad hooks as a separate exercise before writing the body copy.

Email and web copy serve fundamentally different contexts. Someone visiting a website chose to be there; someone receiving an email did not ask for it at that moment. That changes everything about tone, length, and structure. Email copy needs to earn the reader's attention in the subject line and the first sentence, because that is where most decisions to read or delete are made. I write subject lines to be specific and relevant to the subscriber rather than clever or promotional, because specificity converts better than creativity in most email contexts. Body copy in emails should be short enough to read in the time someone has when they open their inbox: I aim for a single idea, a brief supporting argument, and one clear call to action per email. Web copy, by contrast, can be longer and more layered because readers who are actively looking for information will read more. The job of a web page is to answer the question the visitor arrived with and give them a reason to take the next step. I structure web copy using headings as signposts so scanners can navigate to the section they care about without having to read everything.

Social media ad copy works against the scroll: the reader is not looking for what you are offering, and you have a fraction of a second to change that. The hook is everything. A strong hook is either surprising, personally relevant, or poses a question the reader cannot immediately answer. I avoid hooks that open with the brand name or a product claim, because both require the reader to already care about the brand, which most people scrolling do not. The most effective hooks I have written tend to open with a tension or a problem the target audience recognises immediately, often in the form of a specific scenario rather than a generalisation. 'If you've ever spent an hour tailoring a CV and still heard nothing back' performs better than 'Job searching is exhausting', because the specific scenario creates recognition. After the hook, the body copy is short and carries one idea. The CTA is explicit and low-friction. I also vary the hook between ad variations in A/B tests so I can learn which emotional angle is most resonant with that audience. The data from those tests shapes future campaigns.

I edit in passes rather than trying to fix everything at once. The first pass is structural: does the copy make a coherent argument from start to finish, and does each paragraph earn its place? I remove anything that repeats a point already made or exists only to fill space. The second pass is at the sentence level: are any sentences longer than they need to be, and are there any words I can cut without losing meaning? I apply George Orwell's rule: if a word can be cut, cut it. The third pass is voice and tone: does every sentence sound like it belongs in this piece, and are there any phrases that feel generic or automatic? The fourth pass is the read-aloud test. I read the final draft out loud at normal speaking speed. Anything that feels awkward in the mouth is usually awkward on the page too, even if it looks fine visually. After all four passes, I put the copy down for at least 30 minutes and come back to it fresh. The errors that survive four editing passes tend to show up in that final read when the piece is no longer familiar. I also keep a personal list of words I overuse and check for them specifically.