If you’re currently freelancing as a copywriter — marketing and advertising work, collateral materials, direct-mail pitches, web pages — you may be able to add a corporate training market to your business plan.
Now, this isn’t a slam dunk. While some of your skills will be very valuable in this market, you also have to adjust your thinking to fit a different set of needs.
What are the advantages of your copywriting background for training development?
• You can write, producing both quality and quantity. Even inside the training business, many people don’t realize how much training depends on creating a large body of content, clearly written. Scripts, activities, exercises, supporting materials, online courses, leaders’ guides all take the ability to write a lot, and write well.
• You have experience in persuasion. You may already write carefully structured pieces to generate some kind of action from the recipient, and a similar need to elicit action (not just reading/listening) from trainees is all too easily overlooked. The return on investment and corporate training would be a lot higher, for a lot of companies, if they made a greater effort to get their employees to embrace, rather than just tolerate, the best practices and standard procedures of the organization.
• You understand the business world. Some people move into corporate training from fields like education, which can work very well. But compared to those individuals, you just have a much better feel for how business works.
That said, not every copywriter is going to be successful at developing training content. Here are some of the challenges:
• While a persuasive approach is a definite benefit, it can be overdone. Your efforts to get your audience to embrace the company’s strategies, values, and standards can’t come across like a “get rich quick” or “lose weight instantly” scheme. And “longer is better” is hardly an article of faith in the world of corporate training. You’ll probably have to tone things down a bit.
• You have to reach every single “customer” in training! This is one of the biggest differences from copywriting. You don’t get to send out a ton of e-mails and hope that a couple of percent of the recipients pay attention. Training is developed with the intention of having an impact on every single person who goes through it.
• Return on investment is harder to demonstrate, and resources can be limited. You have to help your clients see the benefits of quality training, when those benefits are less obvious than a dollar return based on a lead cost and a response rate.
• Structure and information flow decisions are crucial. Training topics tend to be broader and more complicated than a lot of copywriting assignments. And you have to handle many more details than are typical of most copywriting projects. You have to figure out what to say first, what to say second, and what to throw away entirely. (If this isn’t a strength, you can still work with an instructional designer to develop content based on someone else’s structure.)
In a way, the ideal training developer is a hybrid between a copywriter and a technical writer. The best training combines an engaging, persuasive approach with meaty content, clear explanations, and highly accurate detail.
If you’d like to try this market, leverage your current work. If you’re working with corporate marketing/communications departments, ask them to refer you to HR, to their training function, or to individuals who manage product/service training for individual departments. If you’re developing product launch materials, ask your clients how they are going to make sure their employees effectively promote and deliver the new products and services, and then offer to help them develop the needed employee materials.
Training development is certainly different from copywriting, but if you have the right skills and the right attitude, you may find it a logical next step in expanding your writing markets.
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