If you don’t have much experience creating content, then you probably don’t fully understand the difference between writing blog posts for businesses and putting together website copywriting.
Did we lose you yet? Let us explain: The length, tone, and approach of your core website pages should be different from your blog posts.
While it’s true that both forms of writing are used in marketing strategies, they each possess different characteristics that make them their own form of writing. If you learn the nuances of how to write a business blog article vs. other pages on your site, you can maximize their effectiveness and reach your target audience.
Although business blog articles and standard website copywriting are both used as part of a marketing strategy, they have a few key differences.
For starters, there’s a big difference in what you’ll find in a business blog article when compared to standard website copy. When it comes to the rest of your website, the primary focus is on sales. This means you’ll provide specific information about your product or service and how it solves your customer’s pain points.
On the flip side, blog posts tend to be more educational and informative and don’t try to push a specific product as its main focus -- at least not in an obvious way.
But just as important as what’s written is how it’s written.
The goal of a B2B marketing blog is to add credibility to your brand and help you connect with your ideal audience. Blog posts should be carefully constructed so that they focus on a singular topic while providing important information that a customer would find helpful.
Why’s it important to understand how to write a business blog article? Keeping an updated and relevant blog is one of the best and most cost-effective ways to increase your sales. A blog allows you to broaden your reach online and prove that you’re a leading authority in your industry.
Below are a few key elements to consider when writing blog posts for your business.
Always, always, always keep the reader in mind. Every audience member that you reach is a potential customer, or a current customer with potential to buy again. Readers should feel like you’re writing the blog post just for them.
Consider any questions your readers might have. Do your best to answer them all one post at a time, and remember that B2B marketing blogs can be fun and interesting -- even if your product or service is “boring.”
It may be easy to overlook the importance of a good title, but it’s a large part of the equation of how blogs work for businesses.
Choosing a strong and relevant title makes a big impact when trying to rank in a search engine. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes: How often does the title of an article affect your decision to click on it?
Long-tail keywords are great for blog post titles because, while fewer people may search them, the people who do could be highly relevant leads. From an SEO (search engine optimization) standpoint, this is one of the big differences between blogs and other pages on your website. Blogs should have narrow topics and keywords. Core pages like your homepage and About Us page can use broader keywords because they’re more likely to rank for them.
The incorporation of questions and action verbs are also effective, especially with the rising popularity of voice searches. When choosing a title for your marketing blog try and think about what would catch your eye if you were looking for that exact information.
What’s better than big chunks of text that are hard to read through in one sitting? Pretty much anything else.
And by anything else, we mean visuals.
A simple strategy to help engage your potential readers is to include visuals such as photos, graphs, videos, gifs, and infographics. Even if you don’t have a huge marketing team with graphic designers and videographers, you can still use free platforms like Canva to design attractive graphics.
Never forget to make sure the content on the page is truly relevant to the subject at hand. This is a key factor in establishing your business as a leading authority in your industry. The rest of your website is usually relevant and focused by default, but it’s easy for a blog to veer into irrelevant and self-promoting territory.
For example, if your business specializes in producing custom-made bike parts, it would be a waste of your and your readers’ time to post content that delves into the world of politics or your company Christmas party.
Along those lines, your B2B marketing blog should focus on answering all the questions surrounding your customer’s industry. By doing this, you will gain loyal listeners who use you as their lead information source as they continue along the buyer’s journey.
Standard website copywriting has a specific focus on generating sales while remaining customer-centric and helpful. It’s vital for web copy to be succinct and appealing as you’re scrolling through a page because its success and failure is dependent on its first impression.
Unlike many B2B marketing blogs, standard website copywriting tends to be short and to the point.
If you’re writing website copy for your business, you’ll want to keep in mind these key elements.
Even if your marketing team is full of the world’s best writers, many readers still won’t read your excessively long paragraph about a product or service. B2B website copywriters need to make their content easy to digest at a glance.
Bullet points and numbered lists are great tools to use for copywriting. You should also aim to keep your paragraphs short and directly relevant to the point you’re making. The next bit of advice is true for blogging but especially so for website copy: Structure your page with the most valuable (to your customer) information up top.
You don’t want to seem aggressive in your sales tactics, but you also don’t want to beat around the bush and lose the focus of your audience.
Website copywriting is all about your customer’s problem and your company’s mission to solve it. Because of this, there’s no sense in bogging down, say, a homepage with 800 words on your company’s ownership history. Once you have the attention of your reader, you want to move them to the next step in their journey.
Try and be as persuasive as possible without seeming too “pushy.”
Not everyone has earned their master’s through Harvard, so it’s best practice to keep your web copy simple and easy to understand.
In other words, don’t try and make yourself sound smart in an attempt to earn your readers’ trust. The only thing that will do is make your audience feel uncomfortable or in over their heads. Instead, try writing your copy the same way you talk.
Website copywriting services write this way because it’s engaging and gives the brand a “human” touch.
To sum things up, the biggest difference between business blog articles and standard website copywriting is the purpose in which they’re written. Blogging, tends to take a more personal approach and, for B2B companies, takes into account the long sales cycle of B2B industries. Copywriting is short with the main focus of making the buying process quick and smooth.
Both these forms of writing, however, play a crucial role in B2B business strategies. They both serve as customer-facing content that not only helps to drive sales, but helps build your brand as well.
To get a 101-level education on all kinds of marketing copywriting, download the free PDF below (it's not just for medical marketers -- all marketers will find it incredibly useful!):