Copywriting for B2B businesses needs to be as emotive, compelling and persuasive as any B2C sales pitch - but the key difference is that you need to target specific buyer personas.
In a nutshell, B2B content and copy must help to build trust as a bridge towards a successful business relationship, using terminology that speaks to a buyer's pain points and priorities without telling them everything they already know.
Language, tone and relevance are all equally important, ensuring you create copy that engages with your buyer and drives them to take action.”
An individual website visitor looking for a B2C product or service makes decisions based on very different needs. The core focus of B2C copy is to appeal to broad customer groups, using marketing approaches to attract maximum sales volumes.
For example, if we're selling, say, a belt, we'll probably go for generic colours that sell in bulk, a limited range of the most popular sizes, and advocate for either value for money, product quality or the stylistic appearance of our product when we market it.
Buyers aren't interested in average or generic. They need precision-focused solutions to organisational problems or products that give them a competitive advantage over their rivals!
Every piece of copy, from a headline to a CTA, needs to showcase expertise and underlying knowledge of the sector or client base of your intended buyer.
A B2B procurement professional tends to spend a lot more than a private consumer and will care a great deal about factors such as price points, deliverables, technical specifications and innovations because long-term the knock-on impact is on their business.
Therefore, our first DON'T is to try and replicate copywriting strategies and methods for B2B websites based on standard approaches for B2C - because they won't work.
That basic explanation helps illustrate why crafting content to meet the needs of your audience is so essential.
Next, we'll run through our advice to ensure your B2B copywriting is perfectly aligned to capture your buyer's attention.
Buyers are busy and won't spend hours browsing products, flicking through product catalogues or searching for product features if the information isn't readily available.
Copy should be easy to understand but credible; that means:
A common mistake is to assume that the more technical, wordy and complex your sentences, the more 'knowledgeable' you sound. The real-world effect is the opposite. Let's take a couple of quick examples:
If your buyer is tasked with a website plugin to automate FAQ questions or an AI-enabled bot to power a Live Chat outside of operational hours, they simply want a solution.
A short, simple, to-the-point sentence tells them all they need to know, with the bonus of a hint at providing better UX than their competitors - problem solved, and advantage gained.
Every product or service has some kind of benefit, be that a cost saving, better productivity, improved customer engagement, faster processing speeds - anything that makes life easier, quicker, or less challenging!
Although B2B content must be short, sharp and specific, you must tell your buyer the benefit you're offering.
Think about this (applying the theory to our short seven-word sentence above!).
You don't need to expand on the points because a buyer already knows what the product is they're looking at - they don't need a detailed explanation of what 24/7 means or why the plugin they're considering operates around the clock.
The trick is to think about what benefits your buyer cares about most and cut your copy back to the bare minimum that demonstrates those advantages with clarity and focus.
For a procurement team to select your company, they need to trust that you will deliver what you say you will and will be a reliable supplier.
Case studies, research figures and statistics are excellent ways to define your USP without belabouring the point and show quantifiable reasons why your product is the right choice or how it will actively address problems.
However, you must ensure that any facts or figures you quote are correct and verifiable - which means fact-checking.
Going back to our example, we might say:
You can back that up with a link to a survey or use a longer-form case study to show how you have achieved those performance improvements, assuring your buyer that they can get the same benefits as your previous client.
A poor example, with obviously fabricated or unverifiable metrics, might say:
The problem is that 'millions of times' isn't a real number, and the claim that it triples customer satisfaction rates is either a guess or a made-up statistic.
Be credible, authentic, and trustworthy, and use selected statistics that showcase real-world problem-solving, and your buyer won't hesitate to click on your CTA button because they have the confidence that everything you say is true.
This post was written by:
Stuart is the Managing Director of Tiga Creative Marketing. He founded the agency over 30 years ago.
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