When it comes to business-to-business (B2B) marketing, great copywriting is crucial to truly connecting to your audience and boosting awareness, leads, and conversions. There are a ton of tools and tips at your fingertips that can make your job marketing to a B2B audience easier, but not all are created equally. In short, crafting the right strategy is as important as the message itself.
In this blog, I’ll walk you through some of the tips I’ve learned in my time creating content for a variety of B2B clients.
Step 1: Know your audience
It should go without saying that you need to know whom you’re marketing to in addition to what you’re marketing. Doing the pre-work on developing your customer personas is absolutely necessary to writing the kind of content that will speak to your customers’ needs.
There are many different kinds of persona templates you can follow, but at the very least, it should include vertical, title or titles, pain points, if the persona in question has buying power, and common objections. Of these components, pain points, or problems the prospect or customer is trying to solve for, are perhaps the most important to crafting solid B2B copywriting. That’s because you can tailor your content to these specific pain points that your prospect or customer may be searching for on the internet, thereby catching their attention.
With B2B marketing, you can probably skip the personal demographics portion of a persona, such as age, hobbies, and interests. While interesting on their own and valuable for B2C marketing, they may not be very helpful in B2B marketing.
2. Be clear and concise
How many times have you visited a B2B site only to walk away wondering, what the heck do these people do? Given our shortened attention spans, clarity and brevity are incredibly important. Avoid jargon, unexplained acronyms, and overly complex language that might confuse your audience early on. If you clearly articulate the value proposition of your product or service, you’ll separate your ideal customer from those who may just be browsing. And don’t be afraid of humor — there’s no reason B2B copy needs to be dry.
One caveat about all that jargon: Sometimes you do need to include it, if your audience is highly technical and searching for something specific the layperson won’t understand. (This is where working with an SEO specialist to find the right terms can be helpful.) Just make sure the leading copy in what you’re writing is clear and to the point. Then, if needed, you can drill down into more technical language further down.
3. Highlight benefits over features
You’ve spent time doing research into developing a killer app, amazing service, or product you believe will leave the competition in the dust. “If you build it, they will come,” goes the old adage. But sometimes, despite your best efforts at coming up with an incredible product or service, the leads don’t come pouring in. What gives?
The answer may be that you’ve focused on what your product or service offers rather than why the person reading about it should care. When your customer or prospect lands on your website, receives an email from you, or reads one of your blogs or other assets, a silent question may be playing in the back of their mind: What’s in it for me? This concept (WIIFM for short) is well known in marketing as a guiding principle that encourages focusing on what your customer or prospects gets out of the product or service — helping you get to the point quicker.
Features should definitely come into the picture further down the line, especially in more technical offerings, such as SaaS products. But start with the benefits to really grab your audience’s attention, backloading the features so they read about the why before the what or how.
4. Establish credibility
In the B2B world, everyone’s an expert. What can you do to set yourself apart?
One of the best ways to establish credibility with your audience is to develop evidence-based assets. Scan through your customer base for friendly voices that can offer backing to your claims, and be sure to include ROI stats and quotes that state your value proposition clearly. In absence of case studies (or in conjunction with them), a research-based white paper can do wonders for clearly stating the problem your customers are facing, creating trust that helps position your offering as a solution.
5. Use a strong call to action (CTA)
There’s nothing wrong with actively promoting your product or solution within B2B content. You just have to do it in a way that doesn’t turn the reader off.
A best practice here is to back into the sales pitch by first offering genuine value to the reader through your content and then concluding the piece with a strong CTA. This could be a contact form, encouraging them to schedule a demo, including a purchase link, or simply inviting them to learn more about your offering by guiding them to other assets you’ve developed.
Though conveying a sense of urgency often works in the B2C world, it’s often a longer sales cycle when it comes to B2B marketing; you need to strike a balance between encouraging action and gently nudging them down the sales funnel.
Pulling it all together
Strong B2B copywriting is an art as much as a science. That’s why you need a copywriter who is well-versed in the nuances of marketing and can work across the aisle between product, sales, and marketing teams. And now you’ll see step five come into play: I bring more than a decade of work connecting with audiences and driving leads across B2B industries including SaaS, audio/visual technology, and healthcare. Book some time to chat about your needs and how I can help you create copy that connects.