Business-to-business content writing is imperative because you’ll use copy to drive traction in ALL your marketing channels.
You use marketing content for websites, email newsletters, Google ads, and social media ads to increase brand awareness and engage qualified leads.
Over 30% of marketers say email marketing is the best solution for lead nurturing. And you need powerful copywriting for targeted email marketing!
Almost 50% of buyers consume three to five pieces of content before engaging with your brand.
Guess what? You need impactful business material for marketing too!
But with such a reliance on relevant, fresh, copywriting that captures your brand identity and values… Writing copy that converts is challenging to craft.
So, what does successful content look like, and how can you write it?
We have a detailed guide exploring how to make the most of your business copywriting, as well as the best tips for conversion-driven copy and some examples of how other brands have leveraged the power of great marketing content.
Plus, we have five ultimate content writing AI tools for businesses to boost your copywriting strategy!
Ready to get started?
Here we go!
Source: Alex Cattoni
Conversion-driven business copywriting starts with an in-depth understanding of your target buyers. Consider your audience, what they want to read, and what they will find valuable to solve their pain points.
You can’t target your entire customer base for every piece of business copy. Segment your audience for more targeted businesses, and write for that specific audience segment.
This factor goes unsaid for almost every marketing strategy because it provides better opportunities to tailor and personalize your copy for your readers. And, of course, personalization results in higher conversions more often than not.
Almost 90% of buyers only want to work with businesses that can prove that they understand their needs and wants.
A common mistake for businesses is that they don’t spend enough time understanding the differences between buyers in this space and how they differ from B2C consumers. When developing their buyer personas, they stick to the cookie-cutter method, only considering basic buyer demographics and pain points.
Business-to-business copy requires much more in-depth detail. Your audience comprises professionals and decision-makers. These buyers need much more persuasion and time before making a purchase, making it imperative to know as much about them as possible.
There are also many types of business-to-business buyers. Understand which group of buyers to target to maximize your copywriting results.
A few of the various business-to-business consumers include:
When you have a clear idea of the type of business-to-business buyers you’re targeting, you can gather more detailed information.
Some of the features you need to evaluate to understand your B2B audience are:
To make this information easily digestible and actionable, create business-to-business buyer persona templates!
Emotion is a valuable part of business copywriting that converts. However, it’s a little tricky because business-to-business buyers must also consider and act on logic and reasoning over emotions when purchasing.
Your audience is more prone to act on your copywriting because your value proposition ultimately contributes to their businesses, not simply because they like you and your product.
It doesn’t mean you can’t embrace emotion for business copy. When used correctly, emotion can help you seem more organic, human-like, and aware of your customer’s pain points. You only need a few emotion-invoking tactics to make a significant impact.
While logic and reason are the two fundamental reasons for strategic business-to-business buying decisions, you must connect to your buyers by embracing emotions they may share.
For instance, if you sell goods to group homes for the youth, a wholesome and motivational approach will connect to your audience. But if you sell technology to small businesses to optimize their workflow, depicting emotions like relief or joy due to the ease of time management may work better.
The secret to emotions for business copy relies on knowing your audience. Knowing your audience and what they need provides insight into how they feel about market challenges and the progress of their brands.
But we’ve already gone through how essential it is to know your audience for business copywriting. So, in which other ways can you tie emotion into your copywriting strategy?
Here are a few tips for successfully using emotion in B2B content:
Using emotion to fuel your strategy for business copy doesn’t mean you must be soppy or sentimental. You can use a playful and fun approach or a direct approach. The basis of emotional business copywriting is simply connecting with your audience.
In all our time writing robust and informative marketing guides and reviews, we know research and industry insights are invaluable. These two features add credibility to any claims and give you authority.
While discussing emotion earlier, we also mentioned how logic and reasoning impact business-to-business purchasing decisions. This is why you need research and industry insights!
Don’t include statistics at every point of your copy. Doing this will make your copy unengaging, and you’ll veer off from your goal. Think about it – would you enjoy reading copy packed with underlined hyperlinks and statistics? Probably not!
The goal here is to back up significant claims with research. So, if you’re claiming that 50% of B2C consumers respond well to business-to-business brands who sell your product, what evidence do you have to validate this?
Without research and insights, your copy will come off like one big chunk of text trying to convince your audience rather than sharing your value.
Not every piece of your copy is for one stage of the buyer’s journey. Craft content for different stages of your sales funnel to target specific audiences. Create a visual idea of your sales funnel to help you choose what copy to write.
In the awareness/problem identification stage, buyers require more persuasion compared to B2C consumers. Therefore, persuasive copy is essential to convince them.
When your buyers move into the solution exploration buying stage, it’s okay to be a little more forceful in converting them. But don’t obligate your audience to convert or purchase from your brand.
Besides considering the features of your business copywriting for different buying stages, you must evaluate which mediums you’ll use for each piece of copy.
For copywriting at the problem identification stage, consider how you can make targeted buyers aware of your brand. Rather than directing your copy to make a sale, use your copy-to-market whitepaper or case studies to help these buyers evaluate your business.
But when you’re crafting copy for the solution exploration buying stage, buyers will be motivated to visit your website and schedule a consultation. You must create your copy accordingly. Consider how to direct your business-to-business website copy toward converting web visitors.
You must also consider how your copy creates links between different buying stages. We mentioned whitepapers are common in the first stage of your sales funnel. So, you’ll use copy to promote these resources. But a sales call is more favorable for the next phase. To link these separate stages add a CTA at the end of your whitepapers, convincing buyers to schedule a call.
Summary: What Makes Powerful B2B Content?
While content writers elaborate on topics, business copy should be concise and direct. Don’t veer too far away from the purpose of your copy, and use minimal words. In this case, the shortcut is better. Keep to simple (but impactful) words and short sentences, and eliminate any complex phrases.
Using the active voice for your copy ties in well with the previous tip. The active voice helps keep your business copy concise and offers more of a narrative. Your copy will naturally flow from start to finish, making it easy for readers to understand your value proposition and follow through on your CTA.
The active voice enhances the CTA specifically, too. You can use words to motivate your audience to take action for your business, helping your chances of conversion.
Okay, but what are concrete nouns? You can see, touch, taste, feel, and hear these nouns.
Abstract nouns describe ideas, feelings, and concepts and are intangible. Some business-to-business writers use abstract nouns for a formal tone. But abstract nouns can make your copy harder to understand.
Concrete nouns directly speak to your audience. For example, you’re a business-to-business company in the finance space, and use copy like “Helping companies achieve financial freedom.” But this copywriting is too vague. Almost like you’re offering a false or unquantifiable promise and saying exactly what the next business is.
Be specific, like “Helping companies cut costs by 11% per month”. There aren’t any abstract nouns in that sentence, only concrete nouns telling the reader the brand’s value. If you’re shooting for a more playful tone, consider cracking a joke or sharing a relatable, funny story in a few lines.
Fantastic business copywriting also requires power words. These words add depth to your copywriting and help catch readers’ attention. Powerful words provoke a psychological reaction because these words are emotionally charged and spike high points of interest.
A few power words include:
What makes power words different from typical adjectives and verbs is because of the emotional weight they carry. Words like innovative, unique, and interesting don’t engage them. But be modest with power words because you don’t want to bloat your copy with words that don’t give readers accurate and detailed information.
Your tone matters because it reveals your brand identity. You’ll also have to stay consistent in your tone all the time. If you know about branding, you’ll understand why you must pick a voice for your copy and stick to it.
Your audience must associate you with a specific identity or “persona” and developing your brand voice makes a difference.
Social proof is the mother of a credible online reputation, and that’s why it needs to feature in your copy. There are many types of social proof to create a trusted image. Some business-to-business writers opt for the wisdom of the crowd and mention or provide figures about their online communities.
If that’s not your ideal approach, you can add certifications, accreditations, recognitions, or reward badges to your images.
Here are other examples of social proof for B2B content:
Social proof can take some time to generate, but it encourages you to get feedback on your buyers’ brand experience.
With every aspect of business-to-business marketing comes trial and error. Test different approaches and various copies before pinning down what works. Allow yourself to do this without assuming you know everything about your audience and copy to engage them.
Successful copy is finicky. Businesses must continuously track and evaluate their performance before achieving their desired conversion rates.
The best way to go about this is through A/B testing. Create two versions of the copy for a specific purpose and determine which garnered more interaction. You can do this for all business content, like email copy, landing page copy, and paid ad copy.
How you run your A/B testing relies on each piece of copy. For example, if you’re doing business copywriting for Facebook ads, Facebook has built-in A/B testing features. But if you want to A/B test web copy, you can use tools like Omniconvert and Unbounce.
Summary: 6 B2B Content Writing Tips to Perfect Your Copy
This content writing example proves how a powerful headline for your web copy can persuade your audience. JotForm uses a concise headline using concrete nouns to grab readers’ attention. In only a few words they’ve described why buyers need their products.
The key takeaways:
HubSpot is a popular choice for both B2B and B2C brands. This company provides a vast selection of high-level software to manage all aspects of your sales funnel and customer communications strategy. It’s no surprise HubSpot uses impressive and persuasive copy to entice web visitors.
The key takeaways:
This eCommerce giant takes fantastic business-to-business copy to the next level with an eye-catching billboard. As one of the most trusted platforms for eCommerce stores, Shopify has gathered loads of data to determine what copy engages its audience. And this billboard they used for the “Let’s Make You a Business” campaign confirms it.
The key takeaways:
MailChimp is an email marketing tool that helps businesses start and scale thriving subscriber lists. This software offers a range of robust and reliable solutions for successful email marketing. And they also know how to write captivating business copy without saying too much.
The key takeaways:
Linked University used a strategic and direct approach for its Facebook ad copy. It engages readers from the first word and makes it simple to understand what it offers.
The key takeaways:
Looking at another example of exceptional business copywriting for Facebook ads, SurveyMonkey makes it look easy. This brand keeps its copy short and sweet, just leaving enough information to secure high CTRs.
The key takeaways:
You don’t get a lot of words to use for Google ad copy. But it doesn’t mean you can’t convince buyers to convert. With such a tight limit it only encourages you to use words that matter and engage targeted web traffic, which is exactly what ClickUp does here:
The key takeaways:
Targeted small businesses, Xero states how they can help brands achieve better and faster results for creating invoices. You don’t need to read much to confirm this is what you’re looking for because Xero makes it obvious from the get-go.
The key takeaways:
The key takeaways:
We tested 11 AI copywriting tools and these five are the best ones:
Best AI Copywriting Tools | Pricing | Our P2P Rating |
Jasper (formerly Jarvis.ai) |
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Writesonic |
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Hypotenuse AI |
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Grammarly AI Writing Assistant |
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Hubspot AI Content Writer |
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SemRush AI Writing Assistant |
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AISEO |
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Copy.ai |
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Business-to-business content writing is not a walk in the park. But with these proven strategies, you can achieve the results you want. It’s imperative to do extensive audience research first, enhance your copy with emotion, and use concrete nouns. Businesses must also tailor each piece of copy to specific buying journey stages.
With the best business writing tips, components, and examples, you can craft copy that converts. But remember, this will take a little practice to perfect, so be open to learning curves and track your copy’s performance.
To write B2B copy that converts you must understand your audience well, craft B2B copy with emotion, research and use industry insights and you must write copy specific to buyers' journey. Read this article to find out how to write B2B copy in 2024 and the best examples to learn from for successful B2B copywriting.
The top examples of B2B copywriting that works comes from brands like HubSpot, JotForm, Linked University, SurveyMonkey and Shopify. Brands like Clickup and Xero have also crafted unique copywriting to engage customers and raise brand awareness. This article covers the best B2B copywriting examples and what you can learn from them to create great B2B copy.
The top B2B copywriting tips includes writing specific and concise copy, using an active voice, writing with strong verbs and concrete nouns, and considering your brand tone. Businesses must also include social proof and leverage A/B testing. For details on creating B2B copy and what makes for successful B2b copywriting, read our full article.
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