What the Best Copywriters Will Have in Common 10 Years From Now
The Edit #3
The copywriters who will thrive in the next decade share one defining trait: strategic thinking that happens before a single word is written. Craft still matters, but the gap between high-performing writers and everyone else is almost never about sentence-level skill — it's about the thinking, diagnosis, and judgment that precede the draft.
Everyone has an opinion on what copywriters need to learn right now (heck, even I do).
More hooks. Better prompts. Shorter sentences. Longer emails. Be on LinkedIn. Don’t be on LinkedIn. Be on Substack. Don’t be on Substack.
The advice isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s mostly aimed at the surface, and the gap opening up in this field isn’t a surface problem.
The writers pulling ahead aren’t the ones who found a better hook formula. They’re the ones who got sharper about how they think about the work before they write a single word.
And most conversations about “leveling up” are completely missing it.
Why Craft Alone No Longer Separates Strong Copywriters From Average Ones
For a long time, the path forward was clear.
Study the greats.
Learn the fundamentals.
Write more.
Get better feedback.
Repeat.
That path still works. Craft is not dead. Writers who can’t construct a sentence that moves someone aren’t going to be saved by strategic thinking alone.
But here’s what I’ve noticed after so many years in this field: craft rarely explains the gap between writers who consistently produce work that performs and writers who don’t.
The difference almost always lives upstream of the draft. It’s how they approach the problem before they even open a blank document.
The writers who plateau are usually technically capable. They can write a clean sentence, follow a brief, and hit deadlines. But ask them why a piece isn’t working, and they’ll look at the words. Rarely the thinking behind the words.
That’s the ceiling most writers bump into.
And more writing reps won’t raise it.
What Strategic Thinking in Copywriting Actually Means
Strategic thinking about copy means being able to answer four questions before you write anything.
What is this supposed to do?
For whom?
At what point in their decision-making?
What does this person already believe, and what do you need them to believe differently by the end?
Most writers can execute a brief, but fewer can interrogate one.
There’s a real difference between a writer who gets an assignment and starts writing, and a writer who gets an assignment and starts asking questions. Not to be difficult, but to be useful. Because a brief that doesn’t answer those questions is a brief that will produce mediocre work no matter how good the execution is.
This isn’t a complicated idea, but it does require a shift in how you see your job.
Your job isn’t to fill space with words that sound like marketing. Your job is to move a specific person from one mental state to another. The writing is how you do it. The thinking is why it works.
And when you begin to internalize that, everything changes. You stop asking “how should I write this?” and you start asking “what does this person need to feel, see, or believe for this to work?”
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How to Develop an Editorial Eye: Diagnosing Copy Problems Clearly
The second skill most writers have never been taught: how to critique copy clearly.
Editorial skill in copywriting is the ability to name why a piece isn’t working, not just sense that it isn’t. A lot of it’s because they’ve been taught to write, not to evaluate.
There’s a difference between sensing that something doesn’t work and being able to name why. “This feels off” is not a usable note. “The reader doesn’t feel recognized in the first two paragraphs, so they have no reason to keep going” is.
This matters for your own work. Writers who can diagnose their drafts clearly edit faster and better. Those writers stop putting band-aids over symptoms and start fixing causes.
It matters even more when you’re reviewing someone else’s work, or when you’re working alongside AI-generated drafts (because that’s increasingly part of the job).
As teams generate more first drafts by more means, the human contribution shifts toward judgment – toward knowing what’s missing, what’s off, what needs to be rethought. If you can’t articulate what’s wrong and why, that judgment call isn’t available to you.
Editorial skill is learnable. It starts with reading copy the way a diagnostician reads a patient chart, not looking for what’s there, but looking for what the work is trying to do and whether it’s doing it.
Three questions to ask when diagnosing any piece of copy:
Does the reader feel recognized within the first two paragraphs?
Is there a clear belief the copy is trying to shift, and does it actually shift it?
Does the call to action follow logically from the argument built above it?
If you're responsible for developing other writers, this piece on building growth plans for junior copywriters gets into how that judgment-building actually works in practice.
What Performance Literacy Means for Copywriters (And What It Doesn’t)
Writers don’t need to become analysts, but they do need to care about whether their work is doing its job.
Performance literacy for copywriters means maintaining a working relationship with data (e.g., open rates, click behavior, conversion trends, etc.). Not to become a numbers person, but to close the feedback loop between what you write and what happens when a real person reads it.
The writer who never looks at results is guessing every single time. Their intuitions might be good, but they’re not getting sharper because they’re not being tested against anything real.
The writer who only looks at results loses something else: their instincts, their voice, their willingness to try something that doesn’t have a precedent in the data.
What you’re after is informed judgment. You read the signals. You develop a point of view about what they mean. Then you make a call. That’s different from chasing whatever the numbers say, and it’s different from ignoring them entirely.
Closing the feedback loop doesn’t require a data background. It requires curiosity and a habit of asking: did that work? Why or why not?
How AI Tools Fit Into a Copywriter’s Workflow (And Where They Don’t)
Here’s where most conversations about the future of copywriting spend most of their time.
(Honestly, I’d rather spend less.)
Not because AI isn’t relevant. It is! And writers who are pretending otherwise are making a choice with real costs.
But the thing worth understanding isn’t how to use AI. It’s why some writers get so much more out of it than others.
The writers getting the most from AI tools aren’t the ones using them the most. They’re the ones using them most deliberately. They bring a clear question. They evaluate the output against their own judgment. They know what they’re looking for and they know when they haven’t found it yet.
The risk on the other side is real and worth naming: if you outsource your thinking to an AI tool, you don’t develop the judgment that makes you irreplaceable. You get faster at producing something. That’s not the same thing.
Where AI tools genuinely help copywriters:
Pressure-testing a direction before committing to it
Generating alternatives when stuck on an angle
Surfacing patterns in performance data faster than manual review
Drafting structural scaffolding to react to and edit
Where AI tools fall short:
Determining what the work should accomplish
Judging whether it’s accomplishing it
Supplying the emotional authenticity that comes from lived experience, which, at the conversion layer, is what closes the gap between copy that reads fine and copy that actually works
I wrote about this in more depth earlier this year — specifically about the one thing AI can’t learn no matter how good your prompts get. The TL;DR version: at the conversion layer, emotional authenticity comes from lived experience. No input closes that gap.
The writers who will matter in the next ten years aren’t the ones who learned to prompt well. They’re the ones who kept sharpening the judgment that prompting is supposed to support.
The 4 Traits the Best Copywriters Will Share in 2035
The next generation of strong copywriters won’t be defined by how much they can produce, and they’ll likely share these four traits:
They think before they write. Strategic clarity about audience, moment, and belief-shift happens upstream of the draft.
They diagnose, not just produce. They can name why a piece isn’t working and fix the cause, not the symptom.
They close the feedback loop. They treat performance data as a sharpening tool, not a report card to ignore or a script to follow.
They use AI deliberately. They bring judgment to AI outputs rather than delegating judgment to them.
None of these are new skills. But in a landscape where production volume is increasingly cheap, they are the skills that compound fastest, carry the furthest, and matter most when the tools change again.
And they will change again.
So the real question worth sitting with: how much time do you spend thinking about the problem before you start solving it?
Your answer could very well separate you from the pack.
👀 If you’ve been looking for the operating logic underneath the craft…
Most copywriting education teaches rules. What to do. What not to do. When to use this formula, when to try that one.
That’s fine as far as it goes, but rules conflict! And when they do, you need something that tells you which one wins.
That’s what I’ve been building.
The Conversion Copy Operating System is a premium reference manual for senior copywriters, content leads, and marketing managers who already know how to write but have never had a governing structure for the craft. Five principles that sit above the rules. A headline system. The Five-Layer Edit. A QA rubric for reviewing others’ work. Decision logic for the frameworks you already use.
Not “tactics.” Not “templates.” The underlying thinking that makes everything else make sense.
It’s built for practitioners with 3-10+ years of experience who sense there’s a structure underneath what they’re doing but haven’t had it mapped out clearly.
Launching soon, but the waitlist is open now.