Good copywriting is more than just using the right keywords. It’s about understanding what makes a business tick.
Behind every polished brand message sits a real organisation made up of real people. The more insight you gain into that internal world, the easier it becomes to craft stories that are authentic and impactful.
Do you know how to better understand the way a company supports its people? Asking about their brand values is one thing. Experiencing them in real life is another. Recruitment choices, cultural expectations, and internal communication say far more about a brand’s identity than any official document. They show what the business genuinely cares about.
For copywriters, it is crucial to understand these internal dynamics. Here is how leveraging recruitment and workplace culture can help build stronger narratives that fully reflect a company.
Table of Contents
Recruitment Shows What a Brand Values
If you want to understand a brand’s real priorities, look at how it hires its people.
As surprising as it might sound, job descriptions and interview questions can give some clear clues on what a company genuinely values.
For example, if a business focuses on collaboration, they will look for team-minded candidates. If, on the other hand, the brand identifies as an innovation leader, adaptable candidates with unusual backgrounds have a better chance. Ultimately, these choices show what a brand considers essential to success.
That is why organisations put considerable effort into finding the people that match both their skill needs and cultural expectations. Many rely on employment screening services to ensure candidates align with the businesses’ values. Gaining insight into this process could provide copywriters with valuable information about the brand. Ultimately, you can’t understand a brand without understanding its people, so looking into how a business chooses its talent feels like a good place to start.
Workplace Culture & Brand Story
If the recruitment process gives you a glimpse into the company values, the workplace culture shows how these values really get put into practice in day-to-day work.
It’s about paying attention to the little things, such as behaviours, mood, and atmosphere that shape how teams interact and work. To put it into perspective, a company that puts people’s well-being first is going to communicate differently than a company that puts performance and ambition first.
Culture naturally plays a huge role in how teams interact in everyday situations, from client-facing to approaching challenges. There is an element of personality too, but we can’t ignore how the company’s values are also represented by its people. Resilience, curiosity, being bold vs. being meticulous about each task, all these personality types are also a reflection of what the company encourages and wants to see.
So, it pays off to take the time to understand the workplace culture, as you get a real insight that’ll make storytelling more authentic and brand-centred.
Internal Communication Reveal Tone & Voice
What really helps get a better grasp of a brand’s authentic voice is to pay attention to how it communicates internally.
Indeed, external messaging tends to be dictated by marketing goals. On the other hand, internal messages reflect how the company talks to itself, and this is valuable insight for any copywriter.
So what should you be looking for:
- Team notifications
- Onboarding materials
- Internal newsletters
- Shared meeting notes
- Etc.
Some brands have a casual and friendly tone, while others prefer to keep it formal and structured. These choices are part of a brand’s DNA, and they also impact how customers perceive the brand. Ultimately, internal tone and external tone are often very similar.
When you get a better understanding of the internal voice, you are better equipped to strike the right balance with brand messaging and brand storytelling. This is a lot more effective than trying to impact an external style. You can use your understanding of the internal voice to shape a message that feels authentic and natural for the brand.
Copywriters Need to Mirror the Brand’s Personality
Authentic brand storytelling relies on content that resonates. And to do so, you need to research the “deeper” personality of the organisation:
- What it believes
- How it behaves
- How its people experience everyday work
This is where the insights from recruitment and workplace culture are valuable. They build the narratives that will ground your content.
Effective quality content creation depends on capturing these subtleties. When you know how a company thinks and communicates internally, you can mirror that aspect of the brand personality (to some extent) externally. It’s a fantastic approach to give depth and layers to the stories.
For copywriters working with a brand on storytelling, whether you are at a stage where both are still trying to figure out the correct tone and voice or whether the brand has provided specific guidelines, there is a lot of valuable information from recruitment and workplace processes. In fact, this may even be a moment of self-discovery for a lot of businesses!