Business readers and consumers are very different.

Understand the challenges of the business audience and you will increase your success when communicating to them in writing.

Expert copywriter Clayton Makepeace recently interviewed the king of copywriting, Bob Bly.

Clayton asked Bob this important question, “Are B2B and B2C copywriting techniques the same or are they really different from each other?”

What follows is a summary of the important distinctions when communicating with business audiences (according to Bly):

1. Business want to buy. Consumers want to save.
2. The business reader is more sophisticated. This means the reader often has more knowledge than the writer. Bob says, “When you’re writing a promotion to sell artificial joints to orthopedic surgeons, you could never know a fraction of what they know about orthopedic surgery.”
3. Business readers read more content. Bob explains, “If your prospect’s job is to purchase maintenance services for a big factory, and your copy’s all about how to save money on factory maintenance, he’ll read it.”
4. Business readers must take many steps to make decisions. Consumers often buy on impulse.
5. Multiple audiences must be appeased to make a sale. Bob explains, “In the corporate world today, most buyers need someone else to approve larger purchases. And the more expensive your product is, the more buying influences are involved.”
6. Business solutions are often more complex. This requires more explanation of features and benefits.
7. The business buyer has dual motivations. Bob explains, “They buy for their company, but they also buy for themselves. So if I’m an IT professional, I might buy the software that I know will help my company run its business more efficiently but I’m not going to buy that software if it’s going to be a headache and a nightmare to install on my existing systems. “

Thanks to The Copywriting Maven (Roberta Rosenberg) for writing about this.

How do you take the above points into account when writing to businesses?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Freelance Writing, Writing White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.