Picture this— your marketing team has worked their fingers to the bone to generate fresh traffic to your sleek and responsive website designed with eye-catching and visually appealing graphics and images. Sadly, your hard-earned leads get turned off by poorly written, mistake-riddled, low-quality copy on your website. And the cycle continues—obviously, no brand owner in their right mind wants this. 

A sleek and functioning website is essential for your brand. So is high-quality graphics, a world-class marketing team, and a well-articulated business model. Unfortunately, these won’t mean much if your copywriting sucks. 

Copywriting is salesmanship in print and makes up a large percentage of your marketing efforts. So, believe me when I say that bad copywriting is costly and can do more harm to your business than you think is possible. 

What is bad copywriting? 

Before we get into the real cost of bad copywriting, you may want to know what quality of copy falls under that category. While there are no hard and fast rules to qualify copy that sucks, There are guidelines you may use to evaluate poor copywriting. These pointers include: 

• Spelling and grammar errors.
• Use of complex jargon.
• Keyword stuffing.
• Not using appropriate headings and subheadings.
• Vagueness and lack of clarity.
• Less focus on the audience.

You may have excellent products and services. But you need to communicate your brand value in clear and comprehensive terms devoid of the flaws listed above to avoid losing their attention quicker than you got it in the first place. The dwindling attention span of the average consumer today makes it even more pertinent to create high-quality content that not only grabs attention but holds it long enough. 

4 high costs of bad copywriting  

Copywriting is a long-term investment that can yield both positive and negative returns on investment. If you invest in good copywriting, you can expect increased traffic, lead generation, engagements, and conversion. Bad copywriting, on the other hand, can cost you a lot. 

Keep reading to learn the real cost of bad copywriting.

1. Money—lots and lots of it

One thing you can expect bad copywriting to cost your brand is money in large amounts. 

If you believe hiring someone to produce cheap copy saves you some marketing bucks, wait until you learn that bad copywriting costs US companies up to $400 million annually. You’ll agree that that is a lot of money to let go to waste in a bid to cut costs.

I must clarify, at this point, that not all cheap copy are bad; you might get lucky a few times. However, it’ll be unrealistic for you to assume that a copywriter who has agreed to do your copywriting for a fraction of the average price owes you thorough market and keyword research, competitor analysis, and all the other careful details that go into producing high-quality copy—all the while working nonstop to satisfy the demands of multiple other brands looking to economize as well.

While procuring poor copy may save you a few bucks, it is way more expensive in the long run. 

Bad copywriting will cost you:

• Traffic and conversions, which in the real sense is money left on the table.
• More money to hire a better copywriter to fix the mess.

So, when next someone tells you, “I know a copywriter who can do it cheaper,” remember that that might just be an invitation to shoot yourself in the foot.

2. Trustworthiness

Have you ever stumbled on a website offering products and services you need, maybe even at mouth-watering prices, but become skeptical about the brand’s authenticity and legitimacy because of several wrong spellings and grammatical errors? I know I have. 

If you have had this experience, it would be easy to put yourself in your audiences’ shoes and understand how bad copywriting can affect brand trust.

One of the hardest things to earn as a brand is the trust of your target audience, and for good reason, too. There are thousands, if not millions, of other brands offering the same products and services as yours, sometimes of lesser and even inferior quality. So, it is normal for consumers to withhold their patronage and loyalty until your brand proves its trustworthiness. 

The last thing you want to do is shatter the hard-earned trust of your audience by consistently creating and promoting poor content that paints your brand as anything but trustworthy. 

Beyond money, bad copywriting can cost you your trustworthiness, which in turn costs you more.

3. Average time on page and conversion rate

Two things could happen when people land on your website. One, they find your content valuable and spend their precious time gathering and consuming your insights. Or two, they get turned off by the low quality of your website content and click out with lightning speed. No doubt, you want the first response for your brand.

The time visitors spend on your website indicates their level of engagement with your brand. For instance, if a visitor spends more than two minutes on your website— let’s say reading a blog article—chances are they love what they can see and find it insightful enough to engage with it. On the other hand, if a visitor bounces off almost immediately after clicking on a page on your website, they probably don’t think it is worthwhile. Sadly, this is most likely to happen when your copywriting is bad—statistics show that 38% of people will stop browsing a website if the content is poor. 

While this may seem harmless, it can negatively impact your conversion rate. You want your visitors to stay on your website long enough to convert, and the last thing you want is to have potential leads get turned off from your website because they can’t stand the low quality of your website copy. 

4. Brand reputation

Some things never go away, like the bad reputation bad copywriting can potentially give your brand. Having spent time and other valuable resources building your brand, you wouldn’t want to be known as a brand that uses jargon, spells incorrectly, and whatnot. 

The ripple effect of such a sting on your reputation is enormous—perceived incompetence and unprofessionalism, lack of trust, and lack of expertise. 

Make the right investments.

Your brand is your precious invention, and it is your job to make the right investments to ensure it is not losing money, compromising its trustworthiness, losing out on on-page time, and risking its reputation. And one way to do all this is to invest in high-quality copywriting. 

If you ever need a copywriter who pays attention to detail and produces content guaranteed to yield a positive return on investments, we at The Fourth Writers got you covered. 

Feel free to reach out, and let’s get you started on your new journey to exceptional copywriting.