What Is Copywriting? The NEW Definition You Need To Know In 2025

– If you’re still buying into the 1960s madman definition of what copywriting is, you know, witty, one liners, clever slogans, and a cutthroat anything, it takes approach to sales and marketing. Then I’m sorry, but you’ve got it all wrong. Especially today, thanks to digital marketing, the explosion of social media, AI, and well automated everything. The question to what is copywriting has massively changed in the last few years alone. In this video, I’m gonna talk about what the job of a copywriter really looks like today and the three copywriting skills you should be investing in pronto.

Keep watching. Hey Posse, what’s up? It’s Alex coming at you this week with a video that is long overdue. I have really been meaning to do this one for a while.

It turns out that a lot of people are still asking what is copywriting?

In fact, that search term got 38,000 searches this month alone. So let’s talk about it. But first here is the definition. According to Wikipedia, copywriting is the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. Copywriting is aimed at selling products or services.

Hmm, okay. Yes. Now to be clear, that is not wrong.

It’s just leaving out like a lot of stuff. It is pretty outdated in my opinion right now in 2025.

At the end of this video, I’m gonna share my modern definition of what copywriting is, but first, let’s talk about how and why it is changed. I mean, what in the heck happened? Well, to really understand how copywriting has changed over the years, we need to go all the way back to the 15th century. When the printing press was industrialized, it paved the way for the first form of mass-produced widespread copywriting. The newspaper and back then newspaper ad copy was clear, short, focused simply on problem solutions, and in many cases, very, very direct.

And to be honest, advertising didn’t really change much for quite a while. That is until the Mad Men era of copywriting and marketing revolutionized the industry and formed the definition of copywriting that many still rely on today. As the market grew more sophisticated and options became more plentiful, writing attention, grabbing hooks became like way more important. And it was during this time that copywriters started using psychology and storytelling and status and ego and emotion in their writing. Copywriters needed to know how to capture attention, keep attention, and how to persuade a person to buy this product over the growing number of alternatives that were quickly becoming available in the marketplace.

And of course, this is even more relevant today, thanks to the rise of the internet and digital marketing and social media, there has never been more noise competing for your audience’s attention. And that is why I always say attention is the most valuable currency in marketing that will never change. But unlike before, getting attention is no longer enough because after you get their attention, you then need to earn their trust. And that is getting a lot harder to do. Now, you might be thinking, yeah, obviously right, trust is important.

I’m sure it always has been.

And yes, that’s true, but here’s where things have changed. And I think the best way to show this is to tell you a little story. So, when I started in the online marketing world back in 2008, customer trust was more or less the baseline or the default. It was almost as if people just trusted anything.

If it was published online without asking too many questions, you didn’t have to work too hard to earn that trust. So for example, back then, I knew of so many businesses that were making millions of dollars by selling a product with barely any social proof, using a fake personality, stock photos, and a pen name, and never even creating a single piece of content or a video. It was all just ads directing to usually a really ugly sales page.

It was usually like black text on a white background with huge red letters and yellow highlight and underline and zero images. And I mean, that’s pretty impressive if you think about it.

It really highlights the power of great copywriting. But let’s think about this for a second today, no matter how good the copy is, would you buy any product online that didn’t have believable and real customer reviews or social proof, or it wasn’t backed by a brand or a person who had at least some credibility or authority or that you could verify was in fact a real person? No.

Why? Because we’re smarter than ever before.

And unfortunately, many of us have been scammed one too many times before. When you combine that with the flood of regurgitated hypey, boring, watered down content, it all kind of sounds the same. It’s really no wonder that skepticism and distrust are now the new default, which means winning the marketing game today is no longer as simple as gaining and keeping your prospects attention. Because after you do that, you then need to gain and keep their trust. And that makes our job as marketers, as copywriters, and as business owners, a lot different.

And that job description of being a copywriter just got a major update. Copywriting and marketing today is not about just knowing how to write catchy hooks or persuading a person to click on the buy now button. Sure, well, you do still need those skills. They alone are not enough. So what does copywriting actually look like right now today in 2025?

today in 2025? Well, in my opinion, a great copywriter needs to have these three skills.

To have these three skills. Number one, content strategizing. A content strategy is intentionally created to pull your ideal audience into your world and build trust for years.

Content and copy were looked at as two completely separate things. And I even did a video way back when where I broke down the three key differences. But today that is no longer the case. They are very much intertwined because of the huge web of touch points that the average person takes interacting with your content and marketing before they ever decide to buy from you.

As a copywriter and marketer, being able to create valuable and memorable content in those touch points has never been a more important part of the overall marketing picture.

Through blog posts or YouTube videos like this one, social media posts, free lead magnets that deliver real value like checklists or guides or eBooks or quizzes or anything like that, you can really increase the number of touch points that your audience is taking. Now, your content strategy might not generate much, if any direct revenue, but it’s invaluable because this is what will feed your sales later on. The main focus of your content strategy is to attract new leads and build trust, and you wanna create as many of those micro conversions and touchpoints as possible because those are leading indicators of how likely that person is to buy from you later on. So to help build out your content strategy or a content strategy for your clients, if you’re a copywriter, I recommend following a three tier approach where you have top of the funnel posts, middle of the funnel posts, and bottom of the funnel posts or content in general.

It’ll look slightly different for every type of brand, but here’s a general guideline to get you started thinking about your content strategy.

One, pull them into your world with that top of the funnel content. So this should be more of that broad appeal that your non followers might find interesting, but of course still related to what you teach or what you offer. These can be things like funny memes or opinions or quotes, anecdotes, stats, relatable stories, polls with the goal of, again, pulling people into your world. Your CTAs for this type of content should be dead simple. You want your audience to follow you for more.

Now the second type of content is that middle of the funnel content where you’re educating and building trust. So once a new lead comes into your world and decides, Hey, you know what? I like what this person has, I wanna get to know them a little bit better. Now it’s time to show them what you’re made of for this type of content.

You winna focus on delivering free value that will genuinely help them.

Stuff like tools, strategies, tips, and frameworks. This content really should showcase how you can help your audience achieve their goals or solve their problems. That of course, will move them closer to trusting you and buying from you. And the perfect CTA to use for this type of content could be to download some free lead magnet or get some other type of resource, and that is how you get your followers onto your email list, which we know is really, really important. And then finally, you have your third type of content, which I call offer and nurture.

This is your bottom of the funnel content. The people who have been following you for a while, they probably already trust you, but they haven’t taken action yet. So, this is the type of content where you winna present an offer to those who already.

Now, these types of posts should be few and far between. Remember, the purpose of your content strategy is not to sell directly, it is to grow an engaged audience and build a relationship with them over time so that when they are ready to buy, they will buy.

And if you do a great job at number one and two, then your bottom of the funnel followers will already be on your email list possibly, and they will already be seeing your offers and promotions.

So, we don’t really need to work too hard at selling directly on social media here. But with that being said, it is totally okay to present an offer every now and then. You just don’t winna do this like all the time, or you might throw a massive wrench into all this work you’ve been doing to build up trust and to really get your most loyal followers to stick around. And a word of caution here, creating content faster is not the answer.

It’s about connecting with the right people deeper. So be careful about creating content just for the sake of creating content or using AI to generate fast and cheap content that essentially says nothing. Your content needs to say something, it needs to make people feel something. You need to be using your heart and your brain to connect with your audience, to nurture that relationship with them so that if they aren’t yet ready to buy from you, that is totally okay.

They are still going to stick around.

Can AI help you generate ideas? Of course, but trying to over automate or shortcut this step is a big, big mistake. If you winna dive deeper into building out a content strategy, then definitely grab a copy of my social media cheat sheet and check out my social media lead generation tutorial. I will link both of those for you in the description box below. All right, so now let’s move on to the second most important skill you need as a copywriter marketing.

So now that we’ve started to bring new leads, you know, into your world and you’re getting them on your email list, it is time for the next phase of a copywriter’s job to kick in. And this is more of the traditional stuff that we typically associate with the former definition of copywriting. And yes, it is still totally important. I’m talking about writing ads and landing pages and sales pages and emails.

This is where strategy and problem solving and sequencing and formulas and psychology and funnels and sharing real specific results come in where leads are taken through a funnel and they’re presented with an offer.

But the key here is that this is a continuation of your content strategy. You’re still working on connecting with your audience. You’re still building trust and delivering value through your email list. You can’t just stop doing that when it comes time to sell something. In fact, I would argue that you wanna do even more of it.

You need to show your audience that you deeply understand them, what they’re going through, their problems, what they care about, and that you care about the results and the outcome.

Knowing how to write punchy headlines and persuasive ad copy is important of course. But even more important is knowing how to write conversationally, knowing how to write a great story that evokes emotion in the reader and empathizes with their pains, fears, and desires, knowing how to effectively research what those pains, fears, and desires even are. Knowing how to use psychological triggers and storytelling, how to identify and address objections and how to sell without being forceful or pushy. And that is what makes marketing effective.

And if you winna learn how to write copy like that, make sure to check out my right and Ignite challenge where you’ll learn my step-by-step process for writing a compelling and persuasive sales page that connects and converts. All right, now we need to talk about the third and arguably most important copywriting skill today.

Yes, I am talking about branding. The key to any successful business today is not just knowing how to bring in new leads and then of course how convert them into customers. It’s knowing how to keep them around for the long term.

It’s knowing how to create a place where people actually like to hang out online, right? A community that they feel like they belong in. So even if there is a cheaper alternative elsewhere, which there is, they would never dream of leaving. The goal of any copywriter, marketer, or business owner should be to keep your best customers coming back again and again and again. And this is really where branding plays such a critical role.

I’m talking about messaging, belonging, identities, values, and creating that long-term sense of loyalty. This is why you do what you do, how you communicate with your customers, and the vibe you set inside your programs and offers or with your customer support to create that sense of community.

This should all be intentional based on the impact you winna create. So often branding is just thought of as like a color scheme or a font or a logo or maybe the lingo or tagline that a brand uses. And while that is certainly part of it, it is nowhere near the full picture.

If you winna dig deeper into branding and learn how to create that full picture, brand voice experience, make sure to download my free brand voice checklist in the description box below. So, you heard it here, posse in 2025, we are redefining what real copywriting is. So are you ready for this? This is my modern definition of copywriting and it’s a long one. Copywriting is content strategy; copywriting is customer psychology.

Copywriting is brand messaging; copywriting is building trust. Copywriting is getting into the hearts and minds of your customers. Copywriting is crafting a cohesive buying experience. Copywriting is getting and keeping attention. Copywriting is overcoming objections.

Copywriting is solving problems. Copywriting is strategizing offers; copywriting is planning sales funnels and launches.

Copywriting is testing new hooks, new headlines, and new CTAs. Copywriting is crafting a brand voice. Copywriting is storytelling.

Copywriting is identifying the right case studies and testimonials to use in your marketing and where to use them. Copywriting is translating scientific, technical or academic language into relatable messaging that makes an impact. Copywriting is sales, copywriting is communication, copywriting is meaningful marketing, and that is exactly what I teach here at the Copy Posse and right here on my YouTube channel. So give me a thumbs up below if you wanna see more videos like this one. And while you’re at it, go ahead and subscribe.

And don’t forget to ring that bell to be notified when my next video goes live. And if you wanna check out all of my step-by-step video programs where I outline every single strategy and formula that I have used to build my business, go ahead and check out my programs below.

I have definitely got something to help you with. Everything from writing a sales page to email sequences, to building a brand voice that resonates with your dream customers. I hope you found this video helpful.

I will see you next week. Until then, I’m Alex Chow for now. All right guys, if you enjoyed that video, make sure to check out the next one for me right here, and you can click right here to get a free gift.

Listen to this average person is bombarded with 10,000 marketing messages every single day, which begs the question, in a world where attention is the most valuable commodity, how do you command it instead of demand it? In this video, I’m going to walk you through how to create a spectacular, never the same, totally unique brand voice that helps you stand out, keep watching.

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