Stefan Georgi and others discuss hiring copywriters for SMMA agencies. Lower-cost writers need more editing; early-career hires from community programs can work well if vetted through paid test projects. Budget around $4-5k monthly for retainers if you have steady work.
So a question from Christian. Any advice on how to add a copywriter to my agency without blowing my budget? So it's like the reverse of the copywriter looking to get hired by an agency. So we have some conflict here. I love it. Let's do it. Drama.
Sally, you've helped run some agencies with a lot of copywriters. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I mean, without blowing your budget. So you just mean you want to keep the costs going low as possible. I'm guessing. You know, you're gonna pay. You're gonna get what you pay for. So you are taking a risk on the copywriter. If you do hire, you know, with a lower budget or a smaller budget, you're probably not gonna get one that's skilled enough to write you, you know, high converting copy. Or you have to have to go through a lot of edits. You might have to hire a copy chief to review it all. You know, you have to look at your copywriters as your investment, as a business investment as well, just to prevent, you know, low performing copy, first of all, unhappy clients and just sort of, you know, operationally, like, you don't want to have to hire more people to edit their work and revise and fix it.
Yeah, I think. I mean, like, obviously I think the best value is like, there's writers in Copycar Light and RNBC Method who are, you know, early on, but they're, they're starting to understand the fundamentals well. And, you know, you can get them for kind of like a bargain because they're trying to get clients. Um, so those are, those are the arguments, I would say. And Brooks put the link in there too, I think. Yeah, I mean, the question is, what is your budget, Christian? I mean, like, what, how much. What's your budget for it? You can put in the chat.
And he also asked a follow up, any tips on how to pay them, I guess, in terms like, do you mean retainers versus weekly, monthly, whatever, hourly type of thing?
Yeah, I mean, it would depend on, you know, what you're asking of them. Right? Like, how much volume are you talking? How much research things do they have to do? Or is the. The basically the assignments pretty much packaged up for them so they don't have to do a lot of research.
Yeah, I can feel like he said his budget's like 4 to 5k months. So for that, I think you can put a pretty copywriter on retainer that's from RBC Method or CA Light. I think that, you know, you'll want to, like, I think the big thing is like testing them out, I guess. Right. Like obviously like giving them maybe test projects, being very meticulous in the hiring process, things of that nature. But contest. Yeah, contests work. I know some people have done that in the RBC group to find like the right person. So yeah, I mean, give them a. You can do a contest assuming you've got full time work for them, you know, do a contest or something where you have them do something and like you can do where Everybody gets like $20 or something like that and you select, you know, 20 people or everyone gets $50. You select 20 people. And then, you know, whoever wins will get paid, you know, be part of retainer that gets XYZ per month type thing. And having do something that actually have them do an example, like a project that is something you're actually doing right now. You know, if you look at samples then say everyone's got some good samples that might be like not even legit. Maybe they aren't their real samples. Maybe, you know, there's a lot of variables there. So having them do projects that are actually like actual client projects and then that's the best way to see if you like working with them and what their skill levels are.
Yeah, awesome.
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