How to speed up copy sign-off

If you’re the person in charge of signing off copy for your organisation, I bet you wish you could make it faster. Faster sign-offs mean more time for that copy to work its magic. And more time spent doing other things for you, whether it’s getting home for dinner with your kids or binge-watching that new show on Netflix.

So, how do we speed up copy sign-off? Here are my top tips.

1. Write a proper brief

Without a proper brief, your writer has no hope of hitting the nail on the head or even vaguely near the head. Your brief should cover:

●      Goals: what does this piece need to achieve?
●      Audience: who is it for and when are they reading? What do they want to achieve?
●      Context: why now?
●      Research: any background information you have and direction for further research if needed
●      Message: an indication of anything the copy needs to say
●      Tone of voice: direction on how the piece should feel and sound
●      Deadline: when the work is needed by

2. Agree on what you want to say before figuring out how you want to say it

With writing, the heavy lifting is in figuring out how you want to say something. Playing with infinite sentence structures, words and stylistic choices to make each paragraph sound clear, considered and on brand.

That means you can save valuable time by nailing down exactly what you want to say with your writer before they move on to the longer job of figuring out how to say it. Encourage them to bring you an ‘outline’ or ‘blueprint’ draft. Though it feels like an extra step, I promise you’ll get to a strong result faster.  

3. Have tone of voice guidelines

When it comes to sitting down with a piece of copy and deciding whether it gets a thumbs up, thumbs down or somewhere in the middle, a tone of voice guide is an essential tool. Think of yourself like a GCSE examiner or a person who MOTs cars. You don’t just sit there and guess what that car or exam paper is worth, you have a guideline, a checklist. A tone of voice guide is the same thing for your copy. Has the writer nailed all the personality pillars? Are they stylistically and grammatically on track? The best tone of voice guides (mine included), have a checklist so that you can whizz through and assess a piece of writing in minutes.

4. Train your team

Rather than launching a tone of voice guide at your team and letting them sink or swim, a bit of interactive training can really help get them on board and accountable.

Equally, if there are areas of copy they struggle with, bringing in an outsider to workshop ways to improve can get you better results in the long term.

I offer training with all my tone of voice guides to help teams get their heads around new writing rules and get the creative juices flowing. They’re informal, fun and interactive. It’s less about instructing and more about co-creating the new voice together.  

5. Aim for 90%

This one is especially for folks who used to write the copy and are now in charge of signing it off. Yes, if you were writing, you might have phrased something slightly differently and maybe you wouldn’t have used that exact word. But if it matches the tone of voice checklist and it makes sense, your best bet is to leave it.

You want to aim for copy that’s 90% of the way there. The return on your time spent getting it to 100% rapidly diminishes. Your customers won’t notice and you’ll only drive yourself and the writer round the bend.

So, leave the little niggles, as long as they won’t affect your customers’ experience, it’s good enough.

If you’d like to chat more about nailing copy for your business, I’d love to hear from you.