What to ask your agency about microcopy

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on microcopy, these questions are worth asking early.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

The small words carry a lot of the experience. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Reassurance next to an action reduces hesitation. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The short version

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about microcopy before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• The small words carry a lot of the experience — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.