Ultimate copywriter career pivot guide | Part 3: Your message
Photo: Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels
Nothing stops you in your tracks quite like the “Tell me about yourself” question during an interview. Or that blinking cursor when you’re updating your resume or “about me” on LinkedIn. If you can’t master your message, no stellar blend of skills and accomplishments will see the light of day. So let’s craft a message that commands attention and explains who you are and why you’re special—designed just for resumes, interviews, and portfolios.
This is the third and final installment of the Ultimate Copywriter Career Pivot Guide series. The first two are dedicated to everything about resumes and portfolios. In this one, you’ll learn:
What messaging is
How to develop messaging that your dream brand or client will care about
Where to use your new messaging to reach the next level in your career
What is messaging?
Messaging can get very deep. But when you just need to know how to talk about yourself and sell your value for a job hunt, you don’t need to create a whole brand book. Discovering the basics about yourself—and putting it all into words—is the perfect place to start for beginners and gives you a solid foundation to build off of.
So for right now, we’re keeping this simple by developing the core message that you can use in your resume, portfolio, website, and during interviews. That is your career profile (aka career summary or writer’s bio).
The writer’s bio gives recruiters or clients a detailed, relevant, yet succinct view of your background, credentials, and approach. This all helps you stand out from everyone else in the candidate pool.
How to figure yourself out
You’re not going to get around a self-evaluation and journaling session this time. Sorry. In order for everything else to work, you need information. And most of the time, we don’t know this stuff off the top of our heads. Things like our process or approach are second-nature and we may not consciously realize the way we operate. That’s why we have to do some digging. So here’s how to do just that.
Info mine. This step is all about creating awareness about yourself—your accomplishments, deliverables, skills, and other areas of expertise.
Find patterns. With an inventory of data points (the info mine), you start to notice patterns. These can be repeats of certain skills from role to role or several bullet points dedicated to a specific project or objective. Patterns are different for everyone, so you’ll need to pay close attention to details.
Draw insights. Now that you understand your patterns, you can see how this could play out in a team setting, drive to a certain result, or avoid something painful.
Write your career profile. Incorporate everything you’ve discovered so far—your skills, areas of expertise, and unique approach into a descriptive paragraph.
Apply messaging. Add your new career profile to your resume, use it as a starting point for a more detailed brand story (like for an About web page or bio in your portfolio), and as talking points during interviews.
Now let’s unpack how to do each step in more detail.
How to mine information from your resume
Maybe it’s because we’re too busy actually doing the work to look up and catch a breath, but we usually don’t have a lot of visibility into our aptitudes, special skills, or how much we’ve progressed in our careers. That calls for a mining expedition into your updated resume so you can uncover the value and unique perspective you specifically bring to the role of content and copywriter.
Get out your resume. Jot down updates before you start, if you need to. Then start looking for the following information:
Your job title
Years of experience in the role
Industries (worked in or served)
Content types you know (blogs, email, video scripts, etc.)
Technical/hard skills
Soft skills
Accomplishments, awards, or what you deliver (content, outcomes, etc.)
Even after all this information mining, your self-written resume probably has a few blind spots—talents you don’t even realize you have. This is where you ask for outside perspectives. Ask work friends, peers, and supervisors what they think your top skills are or what they can always count on from you.
How to find your patterns
You have a work style. You have a perspective. Even if you don’t realize it yet. These will show up as patterns or repetition throughout your resume. And these patterns help you start piecing together your message.
Even if you’re pivoting into copywriting from another field, you’d probably still approach projects in a similar way to how you do it now. For example, if you’re a retail manager, prepping for a floor set might mean you thoroughly review the floor plan and merchandise on hand, then communicate with your team. While you won’t be building any sweater shops as a writer, you still might:
Thoroughly read the content brief (similar to reviewing the floor set guide)
Check that you have everything you need (just like checking your inventory)
Coordinate with the team (same as with your dedicated floor set and sales teams)
…All before you start writing. Similar approach, even if it’s a different job. And if you’re in a similar situation, pivoting into copywriting from some other role, this can be how you figure out your patterns.
Patterns may show up like this:
Multiple bullet points dedicated to a certain project or objective
Repeat experiences across multiple roles
A common area of responsibility
Tools or techniques you use over and over
Repeat soft skills from job to job or project to project
Patterns vary wildly by person, so be on the lookout for nuances, repetition, and emphasis across all of your experiences.
How to draw insights from your resume
Insights shape your message. That’s why it’s important to step back and consider what your patterns say about you or your work style.
Drawing insights is another fuzzy process because everyone’s starting point and information is different. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all guide to how to do this. So instead of a prescriptive step-by-step punch list, think about following the information wherever it leads.
Think about it like this: if you were your own PR agent or spin team…
How would you spin each pattern to be a benefit to the team or client?
How can you spin a pattern as your way of producing a superior result?
How might it help you facilitate a great desired outcome?
Would this pattern help you or a team avoid something bad?
Example 1: Retail manager and a floor set
For our retail manager, their approach to preparing for a floor set demonstrates that they prioritize information and strategic planning. It might also mean that they’re more efficient and accurate than the average person. While these floorsets aren’t relevant to writing, it still demonstrates an approach, priorities, and outcome benefit.
Strategic planning, accuracy, and outcome-driven are all applicable to writing.
Because this is a very squishy area—open to interpretation—let’s do one more example to help contextualize this.
Example 2: A writer who builds content libraries
This time, we’ll imagine a writer with a few years of experience. They noticed during their info mine that they’ve been building content libraries at each brand they’ve worked at. If this were you, you would ask why…
Was it because it was part of your job description?
Did your team leader ask you to do it?
Did you take it upon yourself to improve the content library?
If it’s part of the job description, that might mean you have great organizational and communication skills and that’s why you were hired in the first place.
If a team leader added this to your plate, it might indicate you’re not only great with organization and communication, but you also demonstrate leadership or have an excellent handle on time management.
If you simply took it upon yourself to address the messy content organization, that may indicate your priority to make the content you create useful to the rest of the team… or avoid redundant work… or enable the department to improve content plan decision making.
Photo: Alpha En on Pexels
See how you can start to draw conclusions about yourself based on your patterns? Use these to create insights about your approaches or core values. Write down all your insights.
Write your career profile
Now it’s time to gather the information you’ve pulled from your reflections and resume audit. The idea is to have lots of options in front of you so you can “shop” the pieces you feel like capture you and your skill set the best. Basically, you’re creating a narrative. Select the pieces that support that message. And you will have leftover bits of information—that’s expected and okay.
I wish there were a one-size-fits-all formula or template for a career profile. But because everyone is starting with wildly different data, a formula wouldn’t be a perfect plug-and-play for everyone. That said, I’ll provide you with the elements and framework that the information fits into. It’ll be up to you to edit the content so it flows naturally.
Career profile elements
A power verb describing your primary characteristic
→ Driven, Outcome-focused, Story-first
Job title
→ Writer, Copywriter, Content Writer, Marketing Communications Specialist
Years of experience (If you have experience. If not, skip directly to 4.)
Major key performance indicator/result you contribute
→ Audience growth, leads, website traffic, conversions
Assets you create, level of responsibility/scope, achievements
→ Short-form content, social media captions, advertisements (assets)
→ Long-form content, video scripts, articles, blogs, case studies (assets)
→ Manages content strategy, development, and publication for… (responsibility)
→ Grew the blog channel to 100k readers per month/per post (achievement)
Industries you’ve either worked in or served
→ Healthcare
→ Tech & SaaS
→ eCommerce, Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
→ Sustainable Energy
Your approach to writing content. Think techniques, priorities, soft skills, or processes you leverage to deliver your exceptional results.
→ Story-driven content
→ Content for digital-first environments
→ Vetting sources and thorough research
→ Collaborative content development
→ Filling gaps in the customer experience
→ Human-first-Bots-second
Let’s put this into practice for the retail manager from our earlier example. Let’s also say that she’s got no professional writing experience, but she occasionally writes and self-publishes blogs about lifestyle, pop culture, and food on her Substack. Here’s an example of what her career profile can look like with each element tagged with its corresponding element number.
Story-first[1] writer[2] growing an organic audience[4] for 2 years[3] on Substack. Develops timely op ed pieces, essays, and blogs,[5] covering lifestyle, pop culture, and food.[6] Amassed an engaged email list of 20k readers and routinely receives 50k hits on my blog each month. Leverages strong research skills, source vetting, interviews, and narrative style[7] to deliver content people love to read.
Okay, your turn. Write a short paragraph (2–5 sentences) that strings all your elements together. And remember, you’re not trying to stuff everything into a paragraph. Instead, pick out the best or most relevant information and build your profile with those.
And make it your own. Infuse your personality into it. Have fun, show off your humor. Add additional details or insights. Share how your unique background plays a role in your writing, core values, or mission. Use the elements to make sure you’re covering all the information a client or recruiter would want to know. And then charm them with you.
Where to use your message
Armed with your message, you now have a touchstone for every single platform, asset, and scenario you’ll need or encounter as a writer. You can customize the message to suit the platform or circumstance, but the core stays the same. Here’s a list of where to use your message and how to customize it.
Social media bio
Extract the top ideas from your career profile to meet the short character count for social media platforms. If you can, spin a cute tagline from the career message.
“Sharing opinions and stories about lifestyle, pop culture, and food on Substack.”
Resume
Your message, if you’ve constructed it in a similar way to the career profile example, is ready to use on your resume. Copy. Paste. Done!
Portfolio bio/Website About Me
Feel very encouraged to add more details to your career profile message for longer format biographies or profiles used on your website or portfolio. Consider any of these ideas to build out your bio:
The origin story, the project that started it all
The core value that guides all of your decisions or writing approach
The industries, causes, or types of companies you want to support
Your philosophy on writing, persuasion, building reader relationships, etc.
Your city/where you’re from
Pets and/or family
Interview “Tell me about yourself”
Sometimes we can go way off topic, sharing where we’re from, the fact that we just moved, or some other irrelevant details. But what they want to know is how you’re qualified, what skills you have, and what makes you different. Your career profile contains all the top need-to-knows that an interviewer is looking for when they ask that “tell me about yourself” question.
“I’m a writer who’s really dialed into the lifestyle, pop culture, and food scenes. I actively monitor news, social media, and trade publications to develop story concepts or for citations. For the last two years, I’ve organically grown a Substack to 50 thousand readers each month. And I’m growing an email list from that with about 20 thousand subscribers at the moment. I’m tech savvy and collaborative—I set up all platform back ends. When I’m not writing, I manage a sales floor, where I coordinate multiple functions like sales, visual team, and operations. I love the energy of collaborative work, which is why I’m excited about this role working on a staff of writers.”
When you understand your message, you have the key to break through a noisy job market
Having a message helps you write a better resume, kick off an interview on the right foot, and understand how to pitch yourself in a cover letter. I consider your message just as important as the resume and portfolio itself. It’s what takes your resume or portfolio from forgettable to sticky and interesting. It’s even required groundwork to create more advanced brand messaging like taglines, headlines, hooks, brand stories, and professional websites. But that’s another blog.
So many people have a hard time talking about themselves and I think it comes down to awareness. Or lack thereof. You’re busy, so I know you’re not carving out time for a self-audit. But that’s actually what will help you understand what your value is and how to sell it. Spend an afternoon to reflect, info mine, and craft your message.
This is the final piece of your three-piece toolkit for successfully pivoting into copywriting. In case you missed it, check out these blogs to read all about resumes and portfolios.