How to Hire a Copywriter Who Actually Drives Revenue

Most companies hire copywriters like they’re hiring a painter. Pick someone whose style you like. Give them a wall. Hope it looks good.

That’s not how you hire a copywriter who actually moves the needle.

I was a copywriter for years before I built Growth Models. I’ve written for SaaS, e-commerce, pharmaceutical companies, and B2B consultancies. I’ve also hired and managed copywriters as a fractional CMO for a publicly listed company. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t from both sides.

Here’s what most hiring processes miss: a good copywriter isn’t someone who writes well. A good copywriter is someone who makes you money. Those are two very different skill sets.

This guide is for founders and marketing leads at companies doing $1M-$10M who need copy that converts. Not pretty words. Revenue.

The Real Job of a Copywriter

A copywriter’s job is to get a result. That’s it.

The result might be a click. A sign-up. A purchase. A booked call. Whatever your conversion event is, that’s what the copy exists to produce.

The best copywriters I’ve worked with understood this. They loved the craft, sure. But they loved the craft because it got results. The writing was the vehicle, not the destination.

This matters because it changes what you should look for when hiring. You’re not looking for the best writer. You’re looking for the best researcher who can also write.

Research is the foundation of copy that converts. Understanding the customer’s language. Knowing what objections they carry into the page. Mapping the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

The actual writing is the last 20% of the job. The first 80% is research.

If someone’s portfolio is full of beautiful prose but they can’t tell you why they wrote it that way, keep looking.

What to Look For (and What to Ignore)

Look for: Results-focused thinking

Ask them this: “Walk me through a project where your copy directly affected a business metric.”

If they can’t answer with specifics, that’s a red flag. You want someone who talks about conversion rates, revenue, and customer behaviour. Not someone who talks about tone of voice guidelines and brand consistency workshops.

Good answers sound like: “I rewrote the landing page and sign-ups went from 2.1% to 4.7%” or “The email sequence I wrote generated $14K in two weeks from a list the client thought was dead.”

Bad answers sound like: “I crafted compelling narratives that aligned with the brand’s core values.”

Look for: Research habits

Before a good copywriter writes a single word, they should be deep in your customer’s world. Reading reviews. Studying support tickets. Analysing competitor positioning. Talking to your sales team about the objections they hear every week.

Ask them: “What does your research process look like before you start writing?”

If the answer is “I review the brief and start writing,” that’s a content writer, not a copywriter. Content fills pages. Copy fills pipelines.

Look for: AI as a tool, not a crutch

Here’s where the market has shifted. A good copywriter in 2026 should be using AI. Not to write the copy for them, but to accelerate the parts that used to take days.

Research that used to take a week can now take hours. Competitive analysis. Customer language mining. Pulling patterns from hundreds of reviews. Structuring data from interviews.

AI makes a good copywriter great by compressing the research phase. The strategic thinking, the positioning decisions, the actual persuasion, that still has to come from a human who understands your business and your customer.

If a copywriter tells you they don’t use AI, they’re either lying or they’re slow. If they tell you AI writes all their copy, they’re producing average work at best. The sweet spot is someone who uses AI to do better research faster, then applies human judgement to turn that research into copy that converts.

Ignore: Years of experience as a primary filter

I’ve seen copywriters with 15 years of experience who couldn’t write a landing page that converts. I’ve seen people with 2 years who could.

What matters is their process, their results, and their ability to think strategically about your business. Not how long they’ve been doing it.

Ignore: Industry-specific experience (mostly)

Unless you’re in a heavily regulated field like pharmaceuticals or financial services, you don’t need a copywriter who’s worked in your exact niche. You need someone who knows how to research a market quickly and translate that research into persuasive copy.

I wrote for SaaS, e-commerce, education, health and fitness, and pharmaceutical companies. The skill that transferred across all of them wasn’t industry knowledge. It was the ability to research fast, identify the real buying triggers, and write to those triggers.

How to Brief a Copywriter Properly

Bad briefs produce bad copy. Every time. And most companies write terrible briefs.

A good brief answers five questions:

1. Who are we talking to?
Not demographics. Psychographics. What do they want? What have they already tried? What are they afraid of? What words do they use to describe the problem?

2. What do we want them to do?
One action per page. Not “learn about our product and maybe sign up or contact us.” One clear conversion action.

3. What’s the single most important message?
If the reader remembers one thing after reading this copy, what should it be? Force yourself to pick one. This is your value proposition distilled to its sharpest point.

4. What proof do we have?
Case studies. Testimonials. Data. Awards. Anything that backs up the claims the copy will make. Hand this over upfront, not as an afterthought.

5. What are the constraints?
Word count. Brand guidelines. Legal requirements. Technical limitations. Deadlines. Give them the boundaries so they can be creative within them.

If you hand a copywriter a brief that says “write copy for our new landing page, make it sound professional,” you’ll get exactly what you deserve. Generic fluff that converts nobody.

How to Measure Copywriter ROI

Copy isn’t art. It’s a business function. Measure it like one.

For landing pages and sales pages:

Track the conversion rate before and after the new copy goes live. Give it at least 2-4 weeks of traffic before drawing conclusions. If you’re running paid traffic, the numbers show up fast. If it’s organic, give it longer.

For email copy:

Open rates tell you the subject line works. Click rates tell you the body copy works. Revenue per email tells you the whole thing works. Track all three.

For website copy:

Time on page, scroll depth, and conversion rate together paint the picture. High time on page with low conversions means the copy is interesting but not persuasive. Low time on page means they bounced before the copy had a chance.

The attribution question:

Copy rarely works in isolation. A great landing page still needs the right traffic hitting it. A great email sequence still needs a decent list. Don’t blame the copy for a traffic problem, and don’t credit the traffic for a copy win.

The simplest test: change the copy, keep everything else the same, and measure the difference. A/B testing is the cleanest way to isolate copy performance, but even a before-and-after comparison with stable traffic gives you useful signal.

Red Flags When Hiring

Watch for these:

“I can write for any audience” without asking about yours first. A copywriter who doesn’t ask questions about your customer before quoting is planning to wing it.

No portfolio with context. A wall of samples means nothing without the brief, the strategy behind it, and ideally the results. Ask for case studies, not just writing samples.

Pricing by the word. Copywriting isn’t content production. Pricing by word count incentivises filler and penalises clarity. Good copy is often shorter, not longer.

They talk about themselves more than your business. The discovery call should be 80% them asking you questions. If they spend the call pitching their process and credentials, they’re selling, not solving.

They resist measurement. If a copywriter gets uncomfortable when you ask how you’ll measure success, they’re used to environments where nobody checks if the copy worked.

What to Pay

Rates vary, but here’s a rough guide for the UK and US markets in 2026. (For a deeper breakdown of marketing costs across all models, see our guide on growth marketing pricing.)

Project Type	Budget Range	What to Expect
Landing page (1 page)	$1,500 – $5,000	Research, wireframe-level copy, revisions
Website copy (5-7 pages)	$5,000 – $15,000	Full site messaging, page copy, meta content
Email sequence (5-7 emails)	$1,500 – $4,000	Strategy, copy, subject lines
Sales page (long-form)	$3,000 – $8,000	Deep research, full argument, objection handling

Cheap copy is expensive. If someone quotes $200 for a landing page, they’re not doing research. They’re filling a template. And templates don’t know your customer.

Expensive copy isn’t always good either. Some copywriters charge premium rates because they’ve positioned themselves well, not because they produce better results. Always ask for proof of performance.

The Hiring Process That Works

Here’s how I’d hire a copywriter if I were doing it today:

Step 1: Write a proper brief. Use the five questions above. If you can’t answer them, you’re not ready to hire.

Step 2: Find 3-5 candidates. Referrals are best. Failing that, look at who’s writing copy for companies you admire, in and outside your industry.

Step 3: Send a short paid test. Give them your brief and a small, contained project. Maybe one email or one section of a page. Pay them for it. This tells you more than any portfolio review.

Step 4: Evaluate the test on three criteria. Did they ask good questions before writing? Does the copy demonstrate understanding of your customer? Can they explain the strategic choices they made?

Step 5: Start with a defined project, not a retainer. One landing page. One email sequence. Measure results before committing to ongoing work.

The Bottom Line

The best copywriter for your business isn’t the best writer. It’s the best thinker who can write.

They’ll spend more time researching than typing. They’ll ask uncomfortable questions about your customer, your offer, and your data. They’ll push back on bad briefs. They’ll use every tool available, including AI, to produce work that’s grounded in real customer insight.

And when the copy goes live, they’ll want to know the numbers. Because a copywriter who doesn’t care about results is just a writer. And writers don’t build revenue.

If your company is doing $1M-$10M and marketing still feels like guesswork, the copy might not be the root cause. Sometimes the whole growth system needs rebuilding. Get a free Growth Audit to find out where the real bottleneck is.