What is Business Writing?

Your company’s content should adhere to your brand values, reflect professionalism and help you achieve specific goals. However, sometimes your content can fall short.

This article will explain how to improve your blogs, emails, social media posts, press releases and other content so that your content marketing not only wins with Google in search results but also reaches the eyes and ears of your potential customers and clients

We’ll focus on:

Understanding your audience
Re-thinking your message and tone
Supporting your statements with examples
Making your content short and simple
Including a CTA

Business writing is a professional form of written communication typically made for your target audience, although it can also refer to internal communications.

We’re talking about:

Sales documents
Business proposals
Blogs
Emails
Reports
Social media posts

Your business writing should always have specific goals. Do you want people to sign an agreement, engage with your content, respond, buy or something else?

Whatever the goal is, you must ensure you clearly communicate it. It’s also important that every piece of content fits into a larger picture for your brand and brings people to the point of decision through what is known as a “call-to-action“.

Don’t create only stand-alone pieces of content that don’t tie into your marketing strategy. You’ll have difficulty achieving your long-term goals if you don’t have a well-planned strategy.

But what else do you need to keep in mind? To improve your business writing, we’ve created a simple guide that can help you no matter your industry.

Top tips for business writing

Your business writing can help you stand out from the crowd, reach new audiences, and create loyal relationships with your existing customers.

Think about the amount of content your target audience encounters every day. Research shows that a regular person is exposed to 6,000 to 10,000 ads daily, making it essential for you to create better and more enjoyable content.

Here’s how to do that.

Understanding your audience

The more you can personalise your business writing, the better. With 87% of surveyed consumers saying personalised content positively influences how they feel about a brand, it’s easy to see why personalisation is essential.

Your audience is made up of different individuals. They differ based on their needs, wants, customer behaviour and other factors.

That’s why getting to know your audience and segmenting them into groups with like-minded people with similar interests. The customer profile or persona you are going to create is going to help you focus your writing.

Start by going through any analytics you can. Google Analytics, social media analytics and more. It will give you a good overview of your audience.

If you use a CRM, you’ll have further information on your client base, such as:

What are the needs of your clients?
Why did they choose your service or product?
What are their budgets?
Which of your product features are most important to your clients?

Once you have this information, you can successfully personalise your business writing and create engaging content that helps people connect to your brand.

Segment your audience most effectively and create different types of content for each group.

Think about your message and tone.

Once you understand your audience well, it’s essential to look inward. What messages do you want to get across to your audience?

Is the purpose of your business writing to educate or activate your audience? Depending on your message, your content will significantly change.

The rule of thumb here is – the more complicated your products and services are to explain, the more content you’ll have to create. We’re talking about longer blog posts, a sequence of emails instead of just sending one, more detailed case studies etc.

Start by creating an outline of your content and build the business writing from there. You must keep a storytelling aspect throughout your writing.

Don’t just shout at your audience about what you want them to do. Getting your products and services and going beyond the short-term value of buying from your brand is essential.

There is a difference between writing about the features and benefits of your products. Features are important to you, but the benefits are what your audience is interested in.

An excellent example of this is how HelloFresh promotes its ingredient delivery service. They heavily focus on the benefits: saving time, eating healthier and a larger variety of foods, less food waste and such.

Source

That way, customers can see what will happen once they pay for the service, and there will be no guesswork.

Support your statements with examples.

A great way to win over your readers is to support your statements with facts, research, examples and other materials.

Using statistics to back up your business writing will increase your credibility and help you present yourself as the authority in the field.

Not only is it important to use examples and research, but the quality of that content is also important. Use only credible sources and educate your audience on the importance of fact-checking.

Moreover, create your own educational content that can be used to support your brand statements.

You could create:

Reports
Case studies
Infographics
Ebooks
White papers

Make it short and simple

We’ve already mentioned how much content your audience is consuming on a daily basis. With those numbers in mind, it’s important that you create content that is easy to read.

Furthermore, research shows that the average time spent reading emails has decreased to 10 seconds.

Since people often skim emails, it’s important to format your content accordingly. Use bullet points, put the most important words/sentences in bold, and ensure you’re opening with the most important pieces of content.

Don’t bury your lead.

Use the inverted pyramid structure and ensure that things like discounts and other valuable information are visible from the start.

Break up your content into paragraphs and keep those paragraphs short. No longer than 4 lines of text.

Also, assessing when you should use infographics, photos and videos instead of written content is important. Visual pieces of content can help you better explain your products and services, so make sure you’re using a combination of text and images.

Always end on a call to action

All of your business writing should have a singular and easy-to-understand CTA. Don’t go overboard with multiple calls to action because that will only confuse your audience.

We recommend you use a single CTA in a piece of content like an email. However, it’s important that your CTAs are easily understandable.

Sometimes brands have extremely complicated sales processes, and it reflects in the call to action they create.

You can only expect so much from your audience. Don’t ask them to sign up for 3 different newsletters by giving multiple pieces of information such as their birthdays, location, phone numbers and such.

If you want them to buy from you, send them directly to the product/service page. Don’t make the whole purchase process more difficult than it needs to be.