Two questions to improve your B2B website copy

I spend a lot of time looking at B2B websites. (For work, I mean. Not as a hobby.) The quality of copywriting varies from, ‘Oh God, I wish I’d written this’ to, ‘Please God, don’t make me read any more.’

If you’re writing copy for your website, try asking yourself these two questions.

Firstly: ‘So what?’

A typical homepage sentence: ‘We are a leading provider of software services to the XYZ sector.’

So what? No one’s come to your website to find out your SIC code. Prospects want to know what you can do *for them*.

Which leads on to the second question. ‘How does your offering help your customer, on a practical level?’

Also articulated as:

• What specific job does it do for them?
• What might they be grappling with that has brought them to your site?
• How can you bring to life the connection between their pain and your solution?
• How can you help them visualise the tangible difference your offering will make to their business?

Don’t settle for the easy surface description. A thousand other companies ‘offer software services to the XYZ sector’. Drill down into ‘so what?’ and ‘how does it help?’, then write that.

The other thing that springs to mind when browsing B2B sites is ‘Why is everyone laughing at laptops?’ but that’s a whole different question.