Copywriting:
The kingpin of
B2B marketing
and sales results

The art of copywriting and how it governs the quality and quantity of response to your marketing message

Copywriting (or "copy writing" as some call it) is perhaps the most crucial of all elements in advertising and marketing.

A copywriter can do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) copywriting whose purpose is to create high-interest content for each of your web pages while using a good number of carefully chosen search terms related to the subject of that article (words and phrases with which most people search the Internet for web sites).

"Online copywriting" is commonly understood to mean both the creation of content for web sites as well as writing articles to be posted on various forums, newsletters and so on.

But usually copywriting is understood as the art of creating well-flowing text for promotional pieces with the intent of presenting your company and/or its services and/or products in a favourable and desirable light.

The copywriter will create the foundations of what you will receive in results from your outflow, be it online copywriting, copywriter doing your printed promotional materials or copywriting your information flow to existing customers.

Copywriting will LABEL your message for a certain type of recipient.

A challenging (angry) style will invite mainly prospects who are antagonistic and embittered... and who will give your sales people a lot of failures because their main motivation is to prove your challenge WRONG.

Copywriter whose intent is to show his or her own excellence will inadvertently tweak the message to invite similar people on your lines, prospective clients who enjoy endless discussions that, in themselves, are their main goals for the interaction... and you'll acquire few new clients for all your hard work and costly investment.

Copywriting that concentrates too much on understanding the receiver's trials and tribulations — focussing on how badly others have treated the reader AND promising to handle all his problems FOR him — will invite forth people who will be difficult customers because of their emotional disposition.

Copywriting that uses too many big words, engages in vocabulary beyond the educational level of its recipients, will produce few contacts and a lot of confusion AND upset decision-makers since they don't understand the message which then makes them feel unintelligent... which they'll feel as your intention with the message.

Copywriting ignoring the problems that customers feel they have and text that belittles any doubts buyers might harbour will cause resentment and create an image that you've something to hide.

The worst kind of copywriting creates indecision

There are lots of ways to create bad copywriting and the above list is but a short take on all the ways a copywriter could go astray.

But the biggest crime of bad copywriting is to be so wishy-washy and compromise-oriented as to take no stand of any meaningful strength on anything.

It's the copywriting of ignorance, done without any knowledge of what the target group wants and needs, and written with the sole purpose of trying to avoid upsetting anyone.

But to create strong-enough feelings FOR something to tempt prospects into TAKING ACTION, to create sufficient certainty in their minds so they get that impulse to contact YOU specifically... you need to get their juices flowing.

You need to take sides, bring to surface some strong feelings for and against things, make problems realistic AND make him mad / enthusiastic enough to WANT to solve the problem, in order to beget ACTION.

Scientific texts that are minimal in their description of the subject and wholly lack any PASSION about the product / service... well, they just won't stimulate anyone enough to trigger an emotional impulse.

And let's not be cagy about this thing: Any impulse to DO, to reach out, to contact, to find out... is an EMOTIONAL response to SOMETHING.

Minimalist text totally devoid of human emotion, barren of any explanation of cause and effect or the purpose of what's explained... well, the only foreseeable emotional response such text can create is REJECTION.

"But," you may say... "we're obtaining sales nevertheless... so how's that possible then?"

Right you are.

You HAVE sales because of several reasons. The primary of these is that the way you've set up the marketing and sales of your products and/or services has so much more RIGHT in it than wrong.

Yet that doesn't tell you how much you could IMPROVE your sales.

The amazing thing about many industries' promotional copywriting is that EVERYONE uses the same "scientifically dry & minimal expression" in their messages, which then creates a kind of a balance.

Basically this is the end result of group thinking:

We COPY what the bigger boys do and think as we believe that this way we'll be seen as their equals... but do we actually KNOW that the market IS so infatuated with them as we believe?

Professional buyers / B2B customers NEED your wares so they'll BUY... but who's to say that this balance can't be shifted dramatically in your favour by disengaging yourself from the "consensus of conservative copywriting?"

See. Our decision making process is far more prone to emotional responses than what is commonly known.

Oh, it's blatantly obvious in some people, but we assume that because we are business people who behave in such conservative manner and take decisions carefully, then we aren't prone to the same emotional responses as the rest of humanity.

But we are. Business clients are human beings too. And as human beings, they're prone to being influence by emotions.

Now, in consumer advertising this is used unethically in that billions are used to get people to eat or drink "fashionable" foods which aren't good for them, for instance.

But in B2B, you cannot sell a technical product or service to someone who does NOT need it... and you cannot hide its specifications either, so it's a different ball game altogether and there's no chance of MISLEADING customers with copywriting or advertising.

But there is a way of ENHANCING the likelihood that YOUR company will be chosen above others if you utilise the aspect of emotions. If the specs are equal but the customer LIKES YOU MOST... whom do you think he'll choose?

Right.

Any decision is, in the final analysis, brought to fruition along AN EMOTIONAL CARRIER WAVE.

Positive emotion is a MUST whenever a positive decision is made. A decision to engage in something, to commit to something, to start something CANNOT be made without positive emotion.

Reversely, a negative decision cannot be made without NEGATIVE feelings of some kind or another.

And INDECISION is caused by one of two things.

The first and most usual reason is that the copywriting, promotional actions and sales pitches did NOT create either positive or negative feelings OF SUFFICIENT MAGNITUDE in the mind of the prospect to sway the scales either way.

It could also be that you've created BOTH positive and negative in more or less the same ratio, in which case these neutralise each other.

The second cause of indecision is that the person trying to make the decision has not enough courage to do so alone and the sales people have not enough courage to HELP him make the decision, to stick with him and "be a pest" until he achieves sufficient certainty to decide either way.

Of these — and speaking particularly about copywriting — the first reason is the most prevalent by far. Only with copywriting you'll never know because you DON'T SEE those who cannot decide one way or another since they never contact you.

With copywriting, the copywriter creates an "advance reception station" for your company in a way.

Copy is read by those whom you don't often know at all, especially so with online copywriting (creating content for your web site). They view it and the result of this evaluation is a decision or indecision.

The decision could be "no thanks, don't want to know more about these guys" or "I'll have to think about it..." or it could be what you hope it would be.

Indecision will always passivate the person and he will do absolutely nothing... which means he won't contact you.

The painful truth about copywriting is that it produces a lot more results that what we commonly understand... and some of it not at all good.

There are always results from copywriting

What's not commonly understood about copywriting is that NO results (from the message created by the copywriter) doesn't mean "no results."

Copywriting always creates both good and bad results.

The idea is to be very certain that the GOOD results are created with those who are (future) ideal clients for your company and the bad results are both minimised and created with those whom you would NOT want as clients anyhow or who could not be clients.

No results in terms of no response DOES create results... only not the kind that you wanted.

Wrongly positioned copywriting creates negative results.

It can set up an invisible wall around your company, shrouding it with phantom reputation you never see (or find out about too late) and cut you off the communication lines of your area.

No response can mean bad response conveyed among peers through word of mouth.

I'm not saying it IS doing that. I merely state that bad copywriting CAN cause such unwanted results easily although they're not easy to see (early enough) because it all remains sort of hidden from view.

In the worst case scenario, you'll end up PAYING a lot of money for creating a smear campaign against your company and its products and/or services.

So, with all that scary stuff out of the way, let's concentrate on the positive and finally look at what GOOD copywriting consists of.

Professional copywriting: Creation based on certainty of underlying data about your target group and the goal of your campaign

In its purest form, professional copywriting has nothing to do with winning awards in one of the many self-promotional events that the advertising industry sets up for itself annually.

Instead, professional copywriting concerns itself wholly on hitting the target accurately, using creativity solely within the confines of the set guidelines and data.

A truly professional copywriter gives NO thought to how his creation will forward his own goals of fame, praise and fortune.

Creation for creation's sake is nuts... commercially speaking.

Witness some of those silly television ads that tell puzzlingly intricate stories which have absolutely NOTHING to do with the PRODUCT being advertised.

That's just silly. It's creation gone mad, decisions that should be taken by the advertiser given over to the ad agency... and the results are nothing short of ridiculous.

Although we live in a world of artistic symbolism — where any oddball "artwork" will find its proponents who claim to see the "logic" (symbolism) that it communicates — which tunes down the criticism against such irrational money-down-the-drain campaigns, it does not mean we should believe they make sense.

Obviously, these ads are in the realm of consumer advertising so they're not really an option for the business-to-business sector and I'm just using them as a sample to illustrate creation taking over totally in the copywriting (and advertising) activity.

Professional copywriting is something different altogether, especially so if done within the B2B sector.

Professional copywriting has very specific guidelines which it needs to follow closely.

1. Defining the goal of the campaign for copywriting

The goal of the copywriting has to be named and defined closely before the start. And when I say "defined closely," I really mean in the smallest detail so that the message is planned to support YOUR goals for the campaign.

Unless closely defined guidelines are detailed first, the copywriter will create something that's creative all right but not directly supportive of your objectives with the campaign.

In fact, a creative writer will create always but there are millions of possibilities in terms of what to say, how to say it and which points are emphasized and how... and where it all leads.

If you would hire a thousand copywriters to do the same assignment, you would acquire a thousand DIFFERENT creations of a message. Each would have different nuances, different words / sentences / concepts, individual accentuations and personalized emphasis on unique combinations of benefits, highlights and what nots.

The creative power of the copywriter becomes a loose cannon, shooting randomly... and hitting the intended target seldom (if ever).

Truthfully, there's SO MUCH of this around that the LACK of cohesive copywriting combined with actual DEMAND is the thing that mostly governs why advertising works at all.

After all, the first step of advertising is making yourself know, informing your target group that you EXIST, explaining (however cursorily) what solutions you provide and how you can be contacted.

But that's a far cry from having copy that's planned from the start to produce a carefully thought-out set of results, progressing through known steps toward the set goal that best supports your objective with copywriting and advertising.

Amazingly, this is more or less unknown to most ad agency copywriters. And while they might agree with the concept, they actually take pride in the "raw creative power" of their copywriters... which means they think the copywriter knows better than you what the message needs to accomplish.

So be sure to define your goals for the campaign and its parts (including copywriting) before you let those "raw creative powers" loose.

2. Researching the target group before copywriting

The views of the TARGET GROUP need to be researched so we KNOW what they think, want, dislike, know and so on.

Here, it is especially vital to chart their EMOTIONAL RESPONSES to the products / services / industry / problems in question as well as their feelings about their own goals and wishes.

Any target group can be found to possess certain cohesion in terms of having similar views, emotional charges, points of irritations, wishes, desirable idea scenarios and so on.

After all, they are subject to the same tasks, problems, responsibilities in their jobs... and often possess similar backgrounds, preferences and education too.

One does not become an engineer by chance. It's not an accident that people acquire the education required and seek out the jobs that are of technical nature and consists of certain responsibilities.

It might be a mystery to the engineer why or how HE / SHE got to this point, but it's not so for the competent marketing researcher.

Individuals within any given target group ARE quite similar.

They often read the same literature, newspaper, technical publications, they go to same/similar seminars, talk with similar colleagues, and so on. People who make purchase decisions in B2B similarly experience near-identical problems and stresses in that task.

So although it might APPEAR that the target group is just a bunch of totally individual personalities, their views on their JOB are amazingly similar.

But not ALL their views are similar.

And, more to the point, THEY would not be able to formulate those views in any meaningful and make-sense way... because of the emotional charge they have that makes them disavow or balloon those views, depending whom they talk with and what the situation is.

Let me explain.

Personalities are different from one person to another and so it is within any target group as well.

Thus, the timid person would not ADMIT having negative thoughts about this or that, especially so if the target of those thoughts asked about it.

Similarly, an aggressive or angry personality (or someone who feels that way at the time) would come out with an untruthful description of the problem... it would be all condemnation and nothing positive... which would not be a useful point to take into your copywriting.

It really takes a professional to PLAN the questions so that the interviewed target person focusses his mind exactly on the correct issue.

The interviewer must be professional also in being able to discard the emotion and write down the ESSENTIAL part of the answer.

Last but not least, the party doing the survey interviews would have to be an impartial one in order to create a safe atmosphere for the interviewed person to open up... which is the case with a marketing research company... but not if the B2B company interviews its own target group.

It's a mistake to assume that the service provider (the person selling to this target group) knows the answers.

He does not but admittedly the viewpoints of his target group are usually quite similar albeit seen from the OPPOSITE viewpoint and quite often containing surprise elements of which the service provider was not at all aware. And always some vital points are just enough OFF to not hit the target...

But more important is that the order of importance of grievances and desired improvements for your target group can only be found out by interviewing sufficiently many decision-makers within your specific market.

While YOUR view of these is more correct and logical, it won't do the trick in copywriting, advertising or marketing... simply because every human being is built on the concept of "I am right" ...so you have to start your copywriting from THEIR "rightness" and then slowly bend their views to what's logical (what YOU know is right).

Most important of all, the precise wording of each problem, benefit, desired improvement and reality can only be found out by conducting a professional marketing survey.

There's a tremendous benefit if you can write your copy with their words and speak about the problems and improvements they want most and with the very words they use.

So, it's not a good idea to decide for yourself what your target group wants, needs, and thinks. The odds are huge that it'll go astray.

And it's far worse to let a copywriter decide these things in your stead as he/she won't have a CLUE, see?

The safest, most results-producing and ultimately most inexpensive way is to have a proper marketing survey conducted first.

That approach alone will position you well above the field... and that's why it's so vital to conduct a survey before copywriting.

Know what's important to them.

Call things as THEY call them.

Talk about the problems THEY see to exist in your industry's services and take their side... and then explain YOUR solutions with their own words describing the way things should be.

Explain realities as THEY experience and explain them.

That way, you'll create positive difference between yourself and the rest of your industry. And you can be absolutely certain that your copywriting and campaign appeal to the majority of your target group.

Also, with certainty of research, you can emphasize those aspects in your message and thus have the luxury of being able to take a strong stand in your campaign (knowing it appeals to the majority of your target group AND the kind of clients you want), thus being free from having to create text that "offends no-one."

Copywriting without such certainty will always end up sickeningly propitiative as one tries to please everyone... which cannot be done in real life.

So secure the knowledge and certainty so that you can then create copy that takes a stronger stand on those issues you KNOW will please the majority (or intended) part of your target group.

It works much better... and it FEELS better too!

3. Employing high creativity in copywriting within the confines of the goal and research data

This point was more or less already explained in the two previous ones... but to emphasise, it's vital that CONTROL is exerted on the creativity of the copywriter.

The truly professional copywriter will understand that he/she needs to work within the confines of the ultimate goal of the advertiser (you) and use the exact data from the marketing survey.

Creativity must be given the exact guidelines and boundaries WITHIN WHICH it can then flourish freely. Total freedom of creativity is just about the nuttiest thing for any professional copywriter creating a message for a client.

Freedom of creation is fine if a person does something for himself just for the fun of it. It's great if an artist creates his artwork to be sold in a gallery or an author writes from the heart to achieve peace of mind... but NOT if the task involves commercial goals.

In any commercial activity, "total freedom of creativity" is always going to produce results OTHER than desired.

Interensted to receive an analysis on your advertising and copywriting?

If you feel this article makes sense then perhaps you would want to take a further step and have your marketing materials evaluated from these points of professional copywriting, along with any recommendations for improvements?

If so, why not read the presentation of our Marketing Analysis introductory service which could offer a lot more information on the copywriting and marketing of your company along with recommendations on what can be done about any potential opportunities.

If web site presentation is important to you, click here to read about our Internet Marketing & Search Engine Optimization Analysis.

In any case, let me end off by saying that I hope this article has changed your criteria on copywriting forever!

Best wishes,

Harry Kafka
HDK Consultants Ltd
32 Manning Close
Richmond Square
East Grinstead RH19 2DR
West Sussex, United Kingdom
Tel. 01342-328 116
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