For marketing leads and business owners

Train your team or hire a copywriter?

I do both, which means I have no stake in your answer. The decision turns on how often you need writing and who will be doing it, not on which option is cheaper. Here is the reasoning I use when a client asks.

The short answer

Hire a writer for work that is occasional, high-stakes and measurable. Train the team for work that recurs weekly and will always be done in-house. Most organisations need both, and get the split backwards: they hire out the recurring work and attempt the high-stakes work themselves.

The comparison

	Hire a copywriter	Train your team
Best for	Sales pages, launches, campaigns with a number attached	Social posts, internal comms, product descriptions, routine email
Speed to result	Fast. Days to weeks	Slower. Weeks to months before quality lifts
What you own afterwards	The asset, and whatever you learn from the result	The capability, permanently
Cost shape	Per project. Rises with volume	Fixed and one-off. Falls per piece as volume rises
Main risk	Dependency, and a brief that was never clear	Training people who do not actually write, so nothing changes
Fails when	The work recurs weekly and the invoices never stop	The stakes are high and the team is still learning on the live page

The break-even logic

Strip out the preferences and this is arithmetic. Training pays when the same kind of writing happens often enough that paying for each instance costs more than teaching someone to do it once.

Work out three things: how many pieces of a given type you produce in a year, what you would pay to have each one written, and who in the team would be writing them if they knew how. If the annual outsourced cost exceeds a workshop and the person exists, train. If the work happens twice a year and carries real revenue on it, hire.

The variable people forget is the person. Training only converts into output if someone on the team is actually going to write, has the time allocated, and wants to. A workshop delivered to a team that has no writing time produces goodwill and no change. I would rather tell you that before the booking than after it.

When hiring is clearly right

• A launch or a campaign with real money behind it. This is not the moment to be learning. A single sales page carrying a quarter’s revenue should be written by someone who has done it before.
• Work that needs an outside view. Teams close to a product lose the ability to hear how it sounds to a stranger. That blindness is structural, not a skill gap, and training does not remove it.
• Nobody has the time. The most common honest answer. Capability without capacity produces nothing.
• You need it to work on the first attempt. Training produces competence over months. Hiring produces an asset this month.

When training is clearly right

• The volume is constant. Weekly emails, regular social posts, a product catalogue that keeps growing. Outsourcing recurring work is the most expensive habit in marketing budgets.
• Your people already write, just not well. The fastest return in any workshop comes from teams who write daily and have never been taught structure. The lift is immediate because the output already exists.
• Briefing is the bottleneck. If projects stall because nobody can specify what is needed, training the briefers is worth more than hiring another writer.
• Subject knowledge lives in the team. In technical and regulated fields, teaching an expert to write is often faster than teaching a writer the subject.

The split that usually works

In practice most organisations land in the same place: hire for the handful of pages that carry the revenue, train for everything that recurs, and have the trained team work from the hired writer’s structure.

That last part is where the compounding happens. A sales page written properly is also a teaching artefact: the team can see how the argument was built, and reuse the structure on the next thing. Done in that order, the training costs less because it has a worked example to point at, and the writing costs less over time because the team stops outsourcing the easy half.

What this is not is an argument for buying both at once. If budget forces a choice, the question is simply whether your next six months contain more recurring writing or more high-stakes writing, and the answer is usually obvious once it is written down.

What about AI?

It changes the arithmetic in one direction: it makes training more valuable and plain drafting less valuable.

A team with a tool and no judgement produces a great deal of competent, undifferentiated writing that does not sell. A team that has been taught what to say, to whom, and how to tell whether it worked can use the same tool and get somewhere. The scarce skill is no longer drafting, it is deciding. That is now most of what a workshop is for, and it is the argument set out in full on can AI write my copy and content strategy.

Not sure which you need?

Tell me what you are trying to produce and how often, and I will tell you which of the two I think you need, including when the answer is neither. Since I offer both, I have no reason to push you toward the wrong one.

Frequently asked questions

Is it cheaper to train my team or hire a copywriter?

It depends on volume. Training is a fixed cost that gets cheaper per piece as output rises, so it wins for writing that recurs weekly. Hiring is priced per project, so it wins for occasional work. The break-even is reached when the annual cost of outsourcing one type of writing exceeds a workshop, provided someone on the team will actually write.

Can training replace hiring a copywriter altogether?

For routine writing, often yes. For high-stakes pages carrying significant revenue, usually not, and not because of skill alone. Teams close to their own product struggle to hear how it sounds to a stranger, and that is a structural limitation rather than a training gap.

How long before training shows a return?

Quality usually lifts within weeks on the kind of writing the team already does daily, because there is existing output to improve. Harder work such as a full sales page takes months of practice. The fastest returns come from teams that write often and have never been taught structure.

What if nobody on the team has time to write?

Then hire, and do not book training yet. Capability without capacity produces nothing, and a workshop delivered to a team with no writing time is money spent on goodwill. This is worth establishing honestly before anything is booked.

Can you do both for the same organisation?

Yes, and in a specific order that works better than doing them in parallel. Write the pages that carry the revenue first, then train the team using those pages as the worked example. The training is cheaper because it has something concrete to point at, and the structure gets reused rather than reinvented.