Fractional copy, messaging & brand voice support
The copy and messaging duo that becomes part of your team
With AI, getting copy out the door is the easy bit. The hard bit is the strategic stuff. The "how do we handle this and stay on-brand?" head-scratchers. The "should we even be saying this?" dilemmas. That's where we come in. We'll become a tag-team part of your team to make sure every word always does your brand justice. (Plus, we’re around for all those “hey, does this sound right?” Slack messages at 4:38pm.)
Two copywriters in your corner. (And your Slack.)
Look, we know that you don't need copywriters on your team like you used to. We get it. In fact, we almost knocked this service on the head last year. But there's still a small group of brands that want us on-call to help wrangle their AI copy, that prefer the Big Stuff to be written by people, to help them make big picture decisions or just to say "hey, this page isn't converting like it should, can you take a look?". So that's what we do.
Direct access to us
No juniors. No account managers. Just the two of us in your Slack, kicking around ideas, giving you concepts and writing copy. Unsurprisingly, it's like having two senior copywriters on your team. (Minus the salary, the coffee bill and our very dad-rock-forward Spotify playlists.)
Part of your team
Whether you ask for a caption or a full site rewrite, we'll always think about the bigger picture. Will this stand out? Does it do your brand justice? How do we make this as good as it can be? (No joke, Jack rewrote a headline 103 times last year until it was bang on.)
PDPs, emails, decks... done
PDPs, emails, flows, decks, campaigns... whatever needs copy next, we'll get it done. We dig into your customer reviews, your competitors and what's already working, so everything we write is unmistakably you & rooted in what your customers actually respond to.
Ready for design & dev
Even the best copy doesn't work if it never sees the light of day. That's why we write as much as we can directly in Figma or Klaviyo, so it's ready for your designer or dev to run with straight away. And we're always happy to jump on calls and team up to tweak copy to work.
One client saw a 78% revenue bump in the quarter after a copy & brand voice sprint. Nice.
We've worked with over 300 big brands, scale-ups, the odd celebrity and, once, a talking cat. (Don't ask.)
One client grew from £5.6M to £25.2M the year after working with us. We take maybe 2% of the credit.
A client had banging products, but their copy was meh. After nailing it, they grew by nearly 400%.
Think of us like the Legolas and Gimli to your Aragorn
Weird analogy, we know. But how we help as fractional copywriters looks a little different to everyone. So a dwarf and an elf that are really good at what they do being on-hand to help Aragorn do his thing felt like a better explanation than any buzzword soup.
(We'll leave you to decide which of us is which.)
At its very core though, fractional is really about shorthand and collaboration.
It's not "here's a brief" like sprints. It's not "help your AI stay on brand" like the AI service.
It's about that shared understanding of your brand, customers, 5 year plan... so you can send us a messy voice note and we'll send back a ready-to-publish PDP. You say "we need a retail deck" and that's all we need. You say "this copy we wrote last year doesn't feel right" and we'll know exactly how to fix it.
On-call support
For brands that always have something that needs doing
There's always a launch coming, a page that needs updating, an email that needs to go out by Thursday.
On-call is for brands that want two people they can just send it to that know their brand, know what good looks like, and can turn copy around quickly without a 2-hour meeting or a brief the length of a novel.
Fractional support
10 days a month of fractional copywriting, messaging and brand voice support.
Less "here's a task" and more "and my axe". At this point, we're de facto members of your team, in huddles, dropping ideas and living across your launches, your Klaviyo flows, your big strategic shifts. Basically, we'll make sure your copy is dialled in, wherever customers see you.
“An absolute game-changer…
transformational for us as a brand.”
Shall we see if we're a good fit?
Fractional works best when it feels less like hiring an agency and more like adding two people to your team. So before we talk scope and pricing, we like to do a quick chat to get into your brand, what you're trying to do, and whether we're the right people to help.
We'll be straight up if we don't think we're the right fit and you'll get a pretty good sense of whether you want us in your Slack every day.
Book a call or drop an email to hello@dowordsgood.com
Trusted by brands like...
Get to know the brothers you're inviting into your Slack
We know choosing people to work with isn't just about skills or track record. It's a vibe thing. Are they easy to work with? Do they need a 2-hour meeting for every task? Do they say "synergies"?
For what it's worth: we've been told that we're super easy to work with, that we're "mindreaders" when it comes to understanding your brand, and we basically feel like part of your team pretty much from the get-go.
Oh, and we never, ever, ever say synergies.
JACK
BARCLAY
Older brother. Obsessed with brand voice. Has genuinely rewritten a headline 103 times before we sent it over.
When I’m not at my desk: pretending I’m Carmy from The Bear, searching for wild mushrooms with the kids, or working on the home renovation with an AF brewski in hand.
JOE
KARAALI-BARCLAY
Younger brother. Former solo marketer for an ecomm brand. Feels like the walls are closing in if he doesn’t have a process and a system.
When I’m not at my desk: updating my Strava, puppy training, trekking out to craft breweries, or rewatching Mad Men under the banner of “professional development”.
FAQs
What’s the difference between On-call and Fractional support?
Yeah, it’s a good question. Ultimately, it’s about how much support you need and, by extension, what kind of role you want us to play.
On-call is more for teams that need copy on an ongoing basis, but aren’t at that “we need a full time copywriter” stage yet. Think everything from “can you sanity check this email before it goes out?” to reworking PDPs, emails, etc… month after month.
Fractional is twice as many hours deeper, ongoing ownership of messaging, brand voice, etc…. Think more thinking time, more copy going out and two senior copywriters proactively owning your messaging and copy on all fronts. (Like having two heads of copy.)
How does working together actually work day-to-day?
Great question. So, when you start fractional support, we’ll set up a shared Slack channel and add you to our client portal.
Slack can be used for anything from hitting us up with a question to jumping on a huddle to briefing in small tasks, but your client portal is where we’ll add tasks, track progress, store feedback, etc…
Oh, and we’ll work in your tools where possible (Klaviyo, Figma, CMS) so you’re not stuck copy-pasting from a Word doc like it’s 2009.
How quickly can you turn things around?
That depends on the brief, but the whole point of fractional is momentum.
We’ll get to work on your projects as a priority and get you a draft to review fast.
Do you just write copy, or do you help with the strategy too?
Oh, definitely strategy too. We see copy as your brand strategy in words, and we try not to write a word until we’ve done the deeper, more strategic thinking.
(Because that’s how you end up with copy that sounds nice but doesn’t really reflect your brand or grow with you as you grow.)
TLDR: we’ll help you figure out what to say, who you’re saying it to, and what needs to be true for someone to buy… then we’ll write the copy.
Do you use AI at all?
Ah, this is the big question, isn’t it? Yes, we do use AI but almost entirely only for the boring bits.
(We use it to organise our research, run sentiment analysis on customer reviews, double-check trends and studies, etc…)
Occasionally, we’ll use it to explore new angles or to speed up our own process for writing low-impact batch work (like product descriptions).
But all of the thinking, positioning, drafting and final writing is done by us, the old fashioned way.
So you can rest easy that we’ll never send you anything with an em dash or a “this is not X, it’s Y” structure.
Oh! And if you’re a team that uses AI, we build every team that does a longer engagement with us with their own customGPT that writes email captions, social captions and other day-to-day copy in their voice.
Which one is the better copywriter?
Our lawyers have advised us to say “no comment”. And considering games of FIFA used to end in thrown controllers and getting separated, that’s probably for the best.
Will you feel like part of our team, or like “external agency people”?
While we’re more than happy to be hired guns, we absolutely love teaming up with brands where we feel like part of the team.
So, in other words, whatever works for you. But we much prefer becoming part of the team. (And we think the work is better for it, too.)
Do you join calls and standups?
Oh yeah, 100%. We’re happy to do a regular check-ins (and jump on calls for launches / handovers / stakeholder wrangling), but we’re also very pro async too.
Can you work with our existing brand voice?
100%. If you’ve already got a voice, we can write it that voice from day one.
And, as you grow, we can help you update it so it never feels restrictive or like you’re outgrowing it.
If you don’t have a brand voice yet, we can help you put one together as part of our monthly tasks.
What if we’ve got a launch coming up and everything’s urgent?
There’s always going to be months where you’re swamped and everything is urgent. We get that.
In times like that, proactive communication helps us allocate hours to jump in and help out.
(Plus, while we can’t bend time, we’re pretty good at triaging and getting shit done. We’re also cool with you “borrowing” hours from the following month too.)
Is there a minimum term?
There’s a 3-month minimum commitment.
That’s because fractional is more like hiring a team member than outsourcing a task.
And that means that the first few weeks are about getting properly embedded with your team, learning your product, your customers, your data, and how your team works.
By month three, everything has usually compounded and we feel like part of your team.
At the end of month 3, you’ll be able to let us know if you want to continue fractional support, no pressure.
If you’re not sure Fractional is right for you right now, a Punch Up or Sprint is a great “try us” entry point first.
Can you write everything for us? (Product descriptions, blogs, socials…)
We can definitely help with a lot, but we’re not a content mill.
Fractional works best when we’re focused on the stuff that moves the needle: messaging, conversion journeys, launches, key pages, emails, retail decks.
Blog content doesn’t usually fit into that bucket. (But we have been known to do it on occasion if people ask nicely. So yeah, pretty much everything.)
Can we pay by card? Or split the invoices?
Yes, 100%. We know that cashflow is a tricksy beast.
So we accept corporate cards (including Amex), and if you need to split billing out over up to 4 months, it’s no biggy. (No fees or anything like that. Just let us know and we’ll divvy it up.)