Empowering Your Message: B2B Copywriting Crafted with Clarity and Purpose
How to communicate value to a tech-savvy reader
tl;dr
Effective B2B copywriting requires empathy, clarity, and trust to communicate complex technical information in a way that resonates. Our writing principles of structure, flow, consicision and simplicity help you break down complexity into clear, trustworthy content that clicks.
In writing, knowing your reader is half the battle. Business-to-business (B2B) copywriting works in the service of firms who sell software, products, or services to other businesses. B2B content opens a conversation with new readers and helps bring in new clients—a crucial component of an overall B2B content marketing strategy.
The internet is full of blogs, listicles, and “deep dives” chasing after traffic and conversions with astonishing little to show for it: a whopping 96% of content gets no traffic at all. The mass of content isn’t surprising since many marketers spend almost 40 percent of their total marketing budget on content marketing. How can you stand out amid the noise? How can your writing get ahead of the pack?
Make it new: research, interviews, voices, facts
Stats show that despite the sheer mass of online content, still only a minority of marketers are researching their audience, their content and the search engine results page. Mastering B2B copywriting is about more than just producing compelling content. Your B2B readers may come from the entrepreneurial or technical perspective, so the most effective messaging balances classic qualities of good writing—rhythm, clarity, precision, voice—with technical accuracy and business value. Whether through original research or interviews, bringing original content into the world not only makes the Internet a better, more substantive place for everyone, but it is what Google’s algorithm rewards. Unfortunately, that’s still not enough. Today, a copywriter must also be literate with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) if they want their work to have any impact.
This guide explores Open Strategy Partners’ (OSP) approach to B2B content writing, drawing on our own experience and success stories to offer you actionable insights and inspiring examples. Read on to learn our practical approach to mastering your B2B copywriting.
Key Principles of Effective B2B Copywriting
The first rule is that good B2B copywriting needs to be clear and to the point in describing what a product or service does, addressing pain points, and showing how it provides value. The next significant rule is to know your audience—while some readers are open to big-idea, attractive marketing, others, by contrast (like developers and other tech folks), have little tolerance for it. All our work at OSP is guided by our framework of Authentic Communication: empathy, clarity, and trust.
These help us remember the values that make writing in B2B tech content effective:
- Empathy: Start by stepping into your reader’s shoes. With empathetic research and thinking, you can understand their needs, frustrations, and aspirations—and find language that resonates with them.
- Clarity: Make the complex simple. Jargon and complicated concepts are crucial for technical work but will lose clients who might need to know the business value first. Break down complex tech into compelling content.
- Trust: Build credibility through content. Trust is earned by respecting your reader’s intelligence and competence. Avoid hyperbole, and make honest promises of results for services and products, providing a nuanced understanding of their advantages and shortcomings. Content should be the reader’s first meeting with the integrity and quality of a business and what it does.
Finding hidden value with the OSP Value Map
In all copywriting, but especially for B2B tech products and services, it’s crucial to use language that accurately describes what the product does while articulating the business value clients can expect. OSP’s Value Map is one of our most powerful tools to integrate every aspect of technical specificity and business value into messaging that is clear, to the point, and actionable. It helps you capture the functions and features of your product and organize them into a “pyramid of value,” infusing your brand messaging at every level with the technical accuracy and business value to address diverse stakeholders.
The Value Map helps to connect every product or service message to both its technical truth and its business value—in language approachable to specialists and entrepreneurs alike.
The Value Map enhances competitive advantage for sales, marketing, and engineering teams by centralizing modular communications data across customer engagement stages. It effectively serves both B2C (business to consumer) and B2B tech products, and at times, non-tech products, by creating repository that supports all stages of customer interaction. This strategic approach ensures that all teams have access to consistent, up-to-date information, supporting communication across siloed departments and keeping everyone aligned with company goals.
Don’t fall out of the rank race
In the era of search engine optimization (SEO), it is not enough to write well and with a robust methodology: good content needs to anticipate how it compares to its competition in online searches and how it can go above and beyond what is already out there. Getting traffic and clicks is excellent, but you also need to ensure your content finds the readers who need what your content offers. This means analyzing the keywords associated with the subject of your content, understanding which ones are connected to informational searches and which ones are connected to commercial intent. Finally, you need to make sure that both are reflected in the type of pages you are publishing.
B2B Copywriting principles and examples
Below we consider a few examples of great B2B copywriting and analyze them through some time-tested writing principles and guidelines we’ve developed at OSP—which you can check out in much more detail over at our OSP Writing and Editing Guide.
#1. Narrative structure and logical rigor
In presenting the hyper-condensed genre of the landing page, just as much as in any form of writing, it is best to structure it with a narrative that develops logically. One of the most useful narrative structures in B2B marketing, as on OSP’s landing page, is the pitch structure:
- Who you are
- What you do
- Who you work with
- Why work with you
- How to work with you
Let’s run through some of the most important points.
- State your thesis. Make a claim - A thesis statement is the central claim of a piece of writing. This should appear early on, and develop over the course of the opening, middle, and concluding sections. Your thesis answers the question, “What is the pain point that your product or service addresses?”. OSP’s landing page gets right to it:
Your tech is complex.
Your message shouldn’t be
- Know your audience: The tagline directly addresses the target audience with a relevant claim. The products of B2B tech companies are not always easy to understand, but how they talk about it to others needs to be easily comprehensible. Yet many struggle to do this.
- Develop your thesis. This answers the question, “How do you do it? Modules below the hero elucidate key components of OSP’s approach: → strategize → plan → create → enable
- Be specific: In a longer genre like a blog post, you can bring in examples and details. Further on down the landing page, descriptions and testimonials back up our thesis with evidence.
- Narrative Structure: On OSP’s landing page, the narrative moves from contemplation to action, promising to leave our clients not only with improved marketing results, but also the know-how to repeat those results.
#2 Flow and readability
Headings, lists, varying text lengths and visual aids are a great way to make your work flow and be more readable. They guide the reader towards the most relevant information and outline the hierarchy of information. A few best practices for titles and headings with an analysis of the multisite and multilingual page from TYPO3 CMS:
Tight & Specific
- Strike a balance between suggestive words that activate the reader’s imagination and definite words that make it clear what your firm actually does.
- Use key terms in headings to improve SEO and help search engines locate your content correctly.
How does this work in practice?
- The two sections here briefly establish the benefit, pain point and stakes of resolving them.
- Feature descriptions on the web page balance crisp, active taglines with information-rich descriptions packed into concise bullet lists.
Compelling & Functional
- Use visual cues to mark and direct the reader’s gaze and help them understand the hierarchy of information on the page.
- Alliteration highlights the two main features emphasized here: multisite and multilingual.
- Bold font, relevant visuals and contrasting formatting break up the page, underline how the two features complement each other, and make it easy for the reader to navigate the information on the page.
#3. Style and phrasing
Economy of words is another time-worn principle. Make each word count!
“The goal isn’t brevity for its own sake but clarity”—Frank Conroy
Editing is where you turn a mediocre piece of copywriting into a great one. Using a Palantir page on their services for Drupal websites, let’s alk about paring your text down.
- Cut out relative clauses that weigh down your prose, as well as unnecessary or superfluous adjectives.
- Not: “Real success is a continuous journey, not a one-stop destination”
- Instead: “Success is a journey, not a destination”
- Stick to active verbs that have a subject
- Not: “When more than just support is needed”
- Instead: “When you need more than just support”
- Avoid dragging out your prose with gerunds (words ending in -ing).
- Not “Unlocking long-term success”
- Instead: “Unlock long-term success”
Palantir’s tagline offers an evocative, short aphorism: “Success is a journey, not a destination”. We then immediately see concrete information about Palantir’s services for Drupal websites.
- They use different-size fonts, colors and bold to give visual emphasis to the copy, so that each phrase or sentence stands out, and your eye is naturally directed to the most resonant claims first and then reads through for the details that back them up.
- Showcasing the value of empathy, Palantir anticipates the needs and frustrations of the readers who need their services—offering the solution to “the cycle of support tickets and short-term fixes” with long-term, continuous support and expert consulting.
#4. Word choice and mechanics
Simplicity in word choice and use is essential in copywriting. You are writing for both non-experts and non-native speakers, even if some of them are specialists. A few guidelines:
- Use technically accurate language: Rely on subject-matter experts (SMEs) for veracity, and avoid buzzwords and hyperbole. For example, rather than "best-in-class", use technical truth to offer specific detail.
- Double-check meanings: If you’re not sure of the meaning, look it up on Merriam-Webster.
- Find the right word: If it’s not quite the right word, OneLook and Power Thesaurus are tools that can help you find it.
- Readability first: Check your grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Some prime tools include:
We've got many examples of word choice in our writing principles and guidelines. Read the OSP Writing and Editing Guide!
Bring your copywriting to the next level
At Open Strategy Partners we turn technical complexity into compelling product communications. From web tech, software-as-a-service (SaaS), developer tools, to Web3 and much more, we are experts at aligning your marketing content with your vision, strategy and technical truth.
To learn how OSP can transform your B2B marketing, contact us today.
Image credits
Scribe image by DALL-E in collaboration with the author using a medieval illustration of a scribe.