You open up the first draft of the first piece of content from your writer. It’s perfect. Exactly what you expected, totally in line with your brief, and blazingly effective.
That does happen. Sometimes. More often, though, you’ll see something that needs changing. A word that’s not quite right. A message that doesn’t come through strongly enough. A gap between what you wanted and what’s been delivered.
This is normal. No brief ever tells the complete story of your business and what you need. If your brief said it all, there’d be nothing left to write. So there’ll always be a gap between expectation and delivery — at least in the first draft.
It’s what happens next that counts. What kind of conversation will close the gap? I wrote this piece to help you have that conversation. We’ll cover:
- The right mindset
- The right communication
I’m aiming this at people who are outsourcing writing, but 99% of it will also apply if you’re working with a writer on your team.
The right mindset
1. It’s a process
Outsourcing writing is like getting a suit tailored. If you wanted something to wear straight away, you’d pay $50 for a Kmart special, all shiny and baggy around the elbows. Tailoring means working in stages: getting measured, getting a rough fitting, then trimming and re-measuring till it fits you perfectly.
Expect the writer’s proposal to include rounds of revisions, each one getting you closer to perfect.
Getting to great writing takes some time.
2. It’s a collaboration
You reach the best result when there’s two brains working on your content.
Yours
You’re the expert in your business. You understand what you do and what you need.
So tell us what you know! Don’t ever feel like you need to apologise for giving us direction. We love people with a clear sense of what they want — that’s a clear target for us to aim at.
Remember, we’re not you. Even the sharpest writer will need some time to wrap their head around your business and your brief. You live and breathe this stuff, so it already makes sense to you. We’ll get there, but we will have a few questions.
Ours
We know writing: the mechanics of crafting a perfectly tuned sentence. Often, we’ll also know strategy and research: marketing, branding or user experience. So we can often bring more to the table than just making words sound good.
Are you open to that conversation? Do you want a writer who’ll write exactly what you’ve asked for, no more and no less? Or do you want a writer who’ll talk the brief through with you, make suggestions and help you refine the brief based on their expertise?
Either is fine. It’s just a question of what level of skill you need in your writer. Sometimes you do just need someone to write a tonne of content to your exact specs. A junior writer will be a better fit for that.
If you’re hiring a senior writer, they will offer advice. They may help you reshape the brief, or float new ideas. They may give you feedback on your feedback, if you’re requesting a change that they think may not work.
But you’re still the client. You have the final say. A senior writer will give you the advice. Then we leave the decision up to you.
The right communication
You’re all set with mindset. Now, how do you actually make the collaboration work? Here’s the essential qualities of good feedback.
1. Actionable
I have a patented feedback formula for you:
“Please change [this part of the content] by [specific action] because [rationale or context to your request].”
Be specific. Tell us what needs to change,how, and why. You’ll probably have an overall reaction to the content — and we want to hear it — but don’t stop there. Go to the parts of the content you want to change. Highlight them and attach your comments, so we know where to focus.
In those comments, give us direction. That’s why giving a specific action helps. Telling your writer ‘this needs to be stronger’ isn’t actionable, because it doesn’t tell us what ‘stronger’ looks like.
2. Informative
Tell us the ‘because’ — the rationale or context. What are the issues that make this change necessary, such as strategic direction or audience needs? When we know the context, we can learn from your feedback and apply that to other content. Next time, we’ll hit the mark faster.
Give us direction. Don’t rewrite content. That’s not informative. When clients rewrite content, all this tells us is that the first draft doesn’t hit the mark. It doesn’t tell us why. We don’t learn anything we can apply elsewhere.
Rewriting content also wastes your time — that’s usually better spent on briefing us and giving strategic direction.
3. Efficient
Tell us what needs to change as clearly and concisely as you can. Don’t give us essays or send us on hunting trips.
The essay: clients sometimes give paragraphs of feedback on one point. For a writer, that’s like finding the needle in the haystack: we read it and wonder ‘so what am I expected to do here?’ There’s a risk that we’ll pick up some random bit of hay, thinking this is what you’ve asked us for.
Sometimes, though, clients do need to write it all out to pin down what they think. If that sounds like you, there’s an easy fix. Write it all out. Then add a one-sentence summary up the top, telling us what you want us to do.
The hunting trip: other clients give vague directions, such as ‘this needs to be consistent with our business strategy.’ The business strategy is 80 pages long.
Your strategy is clear to you, but we’re sitting outside your brain. Point us in the right direction. For example, ‘This needs to reflect the ‘Operations’ section of our business strategy.’
4. Balanced
Tell us the good and the bad. This isn’t about pampering our fragile writerly egos. We don’t expect you to make up compliments. But we do expect feedback to be constructive and balanced .
Balanced feedback is about giving us the full picture: the good and the bad. If you see something you like, tell us. We know to do more of that. If we only get the negative feedback, we’re not getting the full picture of what you think.
Apart from that, just be a normal decent human being. Give us the feedback straight up, but don’t rant about how this work has ruined your life and upset your cat. Never make it personal. Keep the focus on the work and what you want it to do. Remember that your writer is here because they want to help.
5. Authoritative
We need one direction on the content. This gets tricky when more than one person wants their say. If you open it up to comments, soon your writer is staggering under an armful of changes, all wriggling in different directions.
Here’s how to manage that.
Appoint one person to manage the feedback. They collate people’s input, make a call on what to action, then pass that on to the writer.
That works for simpler cases. If there are separate teams all working on the one project, if the legal team needs to review it, or if there are many layers of executive clearance, the simple process won’t work. Before you start writing, create a content production plan defining who’s doing what — a senior writer or content strategist can help you with this too.
Writing is a skill. And so is giving feedback. I hope this helps you fine-tune those skills. And if there’s anything I’ve missed, let me know!
Get in touch
If you’re looking for help on your next content project, please get in touch.
