How to Write B2B Marketing Copy That Gets Results – by Christopher Ryan

“Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.”
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Even experienced marketers find the subject of writing copy confusing and intimidating. There are dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the art of writing copy, each with its own unique viewpoint. Certain authors would have you believe that writing copy is like painting by numbers. If life could only be that easy!

Writing winning B2B marketing copy is getting tougher for several reasons. Competition is fierce, since we are all forced to compete for a slow-growing number of prospects. Consumers are better educated, more sophisticated, more aware of promotional strategies, and less likely to fall for hype or gross exaggeration. Advertising clutter is everywhere, and prospects are exposed to hundreds of advertising claims daily, very few of which are actually targeted to their individual needs and desires. The good news is that each of these problems leads to its own opportunity. Good copy can definitely help your organization compete successfully for your prospect’s attention and dollars. 

How to Be a Great Communicator

You build successful B2B copywriting upon a foundation of good communication and you must be willing to accept 100 percent responsibility for the quality and acceptance of your message. It is your burden to ensure that your prospect not only hears, but also understands the message, in exactly the way you intended. And you must do this on your prospect’s terms, not your terms.

Always keep in mind that the prospect owes you nothing. He or she has no obligation to listen to you or even acknowledge your existence. Your challenge is to convince these preoccupied individuals, one at a time, to make your organization and its product or service the most important thing in their lives, at least for a few brief moments. This is a humbling and important task.

So how do you know if you are being a good communicator of the corporate message? Whether you write your own copy or use an outside resource, you need to be able to judge its effectiveness. Good communication should always meet five criteria:

1.  The message achieves its stated objective, whether that objective is to sell products, generate leads, acquire new members, or improve your organization’s image. The good copywriter always keeps his “eyes on the prize.”

2.  It is targeted at the correct audience. You must thoroughly understand your audience to write good copy. Amateurs write copy first and then ask if it fits the audience. The true professional asks many questions about the audience before developing creative themes.

3.  The copy forwards your cause. The advertisement should make friends for your organization, not lose them. This means that you should not follow a short-term strategy of hyperbole and exaggerations, or deliberately mislead your audience. Nor should you write shock value copy. Yes, it would bring you attention, but it rarely pays off in the long-term.

4.  It is memorable. No copywriter can attain immortality, but the closest one can come is to create advertisements that so capture the imaginations of the audience that they are remembered long after the promotions have stopped running. 

5.  It is unique. In a world full of me-too advertising, fresh, vibrant copy will always stand out. Response rates for almost all industries have dropped to the point where the cookie cutter approach does not produce adequate results. Being different does have its risks, but it also offers the greatest rewards.

Before You Sit Down to Write

If you can afford to hire a qualified writer, I highly recommend that you do so (or contact us at Fusion Marketing Partners). However, if your budget doesn’t allow for this, you must prepare yourself for the task. The best preparation for writing is in-depth knowledge of your product or service, backed up by a well-conceived offer. I suggest you spend a greater percentage of your time in the up-front disciplines of research and offer development. While these are not the glamorous parts of the writing process, the extra preparation will make your copy more effective and much easier to write.

After conducting research and developing the offer, you should list every benefit you can think of for your product or service. When you are sure you have an exhaustive list, rank these benefits in the order that you perceive them to be important to your prospects. Your goal is to locate and stress the single most important benefit, plus two or three secondary benefits to emphasize throughout the copy. 

Remember that when you are developing the offer, ranking benefits, or writing copy, you should always be thinking of one individual, not a group of nameless, faceless prospects. If you are someone who cringes at the thought that your writing will be read by thousands of individuals, then you will definitely benefit from this technique. 

This method of focusing on one individual is often taught in public speaking classes as a cure for nervousness. Speakers are taught to pick out a few friendly faces in the crowd, and act as if they are speaking only to these people. I have done this myself. The technique is easily transferable to copywriting, by visualizing one prospect and then writing copy for that specific individual. In fact, it helps if you speak about your product to someone who fits the profile of the target audience. Then, write something that you believe would capture your prospect’s attention and persuade that particular individual to accept your offer.

An Effective Copywriting Formula

To help you get your thoughts on paper (or preferably, computer), it helps to have a formula. One of the better-known and time-tested copywriting formulas is AIDA. It works well and is easy to remember.

The first “A” in AIDA stands for Attention. You must always capture your prospect’s attention as a first step in convincing him to respond affirmatively to your offer. Without gaining attention, there is no sale. Depending on the media used, attention-getting devices can include bold benefit statements, curiosity-provoking questions, strong graphic images, giveaway offers, official looking formats, and many others.

The “I” in AIDA stands for Interest. Once you have captured a prospect’s attention you must then arouse her interest in hearing more about your product or service. Many sales are lost at the border between attention and interest. One technique for building interest is to open your copy with strong benefit statements. Sales trainers teach the concept of selling benefits, not features, and this concept is equally valid in promotional copy.

The “D” in AIDA stands for Desire. After you have captured the prospect’s attention and built interest in your product or service – you must then convince the prospect that what you are offering is worth more than what she will have to give you in return. This is known as proving the value equation. Remember that you must prove the value equation by building a strong case for the value of your product or service as it relates to a specific prospect. 

The final “A” in AIDA stands for Action. This is where you give your prospect sufficient motivation to send in the lead form, go online to register, or pick up the phone and call. Since you have been building the motivation to respond from the beginning of the advertisement, the favorable action of the prospect should be the logical conclusion to the process.

Just as it is important to lead the prospect to say YES, you must never give him a reason to say NO. Terms should be clear and the Web form or order coupon should be easy to read and fill out. It is also advisable to restate the major benefit and guarantees.    

Importance of the Emotional Appeal

Whether you use the AIDA formula or any other process for writing copy, you must keep one important point in mind: Logic follows emotion. Writers who approach the copy process by attempting to logically prove the merits of their product or service are making a big mistake. The fact is, most individuals make the buying decision for emotional reasons first, and then look for logical arguments to justify the decision they have already made. So always look for ways to “Lead with the heart, and follow with the brain.”

Note:  This article is excerpted from the book How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing and Sales Machine, available at Amazon.com: $15.56 or Barnes &  Noble: $17.05