High-quality content is the backbone of your inbound marketing strategy. Copywriting brings persuasion into your marketing communications. It nudges your dream clients towards more interaction with your brand. In this blog, I will share five tips on how content and copywriting can help you reach your B2B business goals.
What’s the difference between copywriting and content?
The difference between copywriting and content seems to be an ongoing discussion. It’s enough to browse through the blogs of different marketing agencies to find that the definitions vary.
The distinction between the two may be an important part of the professional identities for creative writers in marketing agencies. Copywriters often have more commercial experience in marketing. Content writers often have their background in editorial writing. This is of course not always the case, but I think it’s a useful generalization.
In practice, the difference between the two becomes blurrier. Both involve doing research on the topic, customer personas and the stage of the customer journey. Both serve a purpose in a larger strategic context. Eventually, both help you reach your business goals.
To succeed in the modern digital marketing landscape, you often need a writer who can ace both.
Let’s start with definitions.
What is copywriting?
Copywriting means writing persuasive, compelling and memorable marketing messages or promotional texts. Ads, website landing pages, marketing e-mails, video or audio manuscripts, call-to-actions, titles, slogans and descriptions are some of the many examples. Excellent copywriting gives promises to be fulfilled and encourages action.
The most important job of copywriting is to guide potential customers towards the desired action. Such action could be downloading a guide, filling in a contact form, or making a purchase.
What is content?
Content is often defined as valuable, interesting, editorial, entertaining or informative text. Examples include blogs, articles, guides, infographics, magazines or e-books. Content creates meaningful interactions with your potential clients along their customer journey. It can also be sharable or downloadable.
Unlike copywriting, content usually does not serve an immediate commercial purpose. Instead, it aims to engage your audience and make them spend time interacting with your brand. It also provides them with useful and interesting information and helps boost your brand’s visibility in organic search results.
5 ways that content and copywriting help you achieve business outcomes
At The F Company, we see it this way: valuable content helps your potential clients remember you when they are ready to buy. In other words, they will go to the company that has provided them with the most value along their journey.
Copywriting brings persuasion into your marketing communications. It helps you drive traffic to your website, encourages your clients to consume your content and helps them move onwards on their customer journey.
All interactions between you and your client are opportunities to build trust and a stronger brand. Here’s how you can use content and copywriting to achieve your business goals and eventually, generate revenue.
Stay relevant at each stage of the customer journey
B2B customer journeys are long and complex. This means that your potential customers will interact with you several times before arriving at a buying decision.
This makes content the backbone of your inbound marketing strategy. Content marketing helps you generate demand by creating touchpoints at each stage of the customer journey.
Therefore, you should create content specifically for each stage of the journey. Address your potential customers’ problems and needs in an accurate and timely manner. This allows you to guide them further along on their customer journey until they become an actual client of yours.
Educate your potential customers about your offering and its benefits
Are you selling a complex B2B product or service offering? Then you might need to educate your potential customers first.
What problems or challenges are there in your industry? How does your offering help in overcoming those challenges? What kind of benefits are there? What is the value that your customers would gain?
Share your expertise with your potential customers. Help them understand why your offering is the way to go.
Drive traffic to your website
Content boosts your brand’s visibility in organic search results. It truly does wonders from SEO perspective! But you should also distribute your content organically and with paid social to reach your audiences. This allows you to reap the benefits of content marketing.
That’s also when copywriting becomes important. Copywriting helps you persuade your audience to click on an ad – or the link on your organic post – and consume the great content you have produced.
Experiment with value propositions to learn what appeals to your audience
Copywriting is the easiest way to experiment what type of value propositions and messages appeal to your audience the most. Should you go with informative, personal, brief or provocative style? Why wouldn’t you try them all instead!
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions in marketing communications. Learn what works for you by running ads with wildly different variations. When you run these experiments, you can then determine what kind of messages you should use to get more bang for your buck.
Make your content stronger by making it persuasive
Incorporate a little bit of copywriting into your content. Catchy headlines and engaging writing style keep the reader interested. When someone is consuming the content you have created, copywriting may then encourage them to take further action.
Later, the reader might be interested in consuming more content. They might download a guide, sign up for an event or a newsletter or even leave their contact information. Include suitable call-to-actions and links to your content to make your potential client’s job easier.
In the end, both copywriting and content creation are tools to fulfill one important purpose: helping your dream client take steps towards buying on a complicated B2B customer journey while creating valuable interactions with your brand.
If you need any help with either copywriting or content, you know who to contact!