People are looking for you. They want what your company has to offer. They believe that YOUR product or service has a very good chance of solving their problems and relieving their pain points.
So how do they find you? How do you make yourself visible to prospective clients, to those people who are looking for you?
In a word, digital marketing.
Copywriting is a pretty significant part of a business’ content marketing. It is relevant to so many different strategies from web content to social media to email campaigns to blog posts. In fact, it would be safe to say that copywriting touches pretty much every single aspect of marketing in some way or another.
When it comes to business to consumer (B2C) marketing, great copy is essential. It is how you speak to your customers and potential customers, helping them understand how your products or services can solve their problems and change their lives. Great copy is how you attract them, draw them in, and convert them into paying customers.
B2C copywriting is an art. Now let’s talk about how to make yours better.
B2C Copywriting in a Nutshell
B2C copywriting speaks directly to the B2C audience, which is the consumer. For B2C brands, the decision-maker is sometimes just one individual, but at other times, it can be a family. Any copy that your business creates for consumers, including current customers as well as prospective ones, falls under that category. The goal is to provide information that ultimately helps people make buying decisions about your product or service.
While business to business or B2B copywriting focuses more on facts and features, B2C is more about storytelling and making an emotional connection. The style of B2C copywriting tends to be more conversational, friendlier, since you are talking directly to a human being instead of a business. It should draw the reader in, making them feel comfortable and engaged.
There’s a lot of pathos in B2C writing. When done well, it will touches the emotions of the reader, tugging on the heartstrings, making them feel passionate about something, or making them laugh. B2C content is shareable and does well on the social media platforms that are geared to relationships and communities like Facebook.
Visual content is more successful in most cases when it comes to B2C. Long content with consistent branding is encouraged, as are bullet points, subheads, and shorter sentences and paragraphs. B2C content is also typically written at about a third-grade level. Studies show that copy written at that reading level garners around 36% more responses than copy that is written at a higher level.
So where do you start?
How can you write killer B2C content?
Keep reading to learn how.
How B2C Copywriting Drives Revenue
When you go into a brick and mortar store what happens?
You are typically greeted by a salesperson. They approach you and attempt to insert themselves into your customer experience by explaining products, answering questions, and often pushing for a sale.
All too often that in-person shopping trip ends in a pretty aggressive push for a sale. Whether the salesperson means for it to go in that direction or not, it often does unless the salesperson just walks away and allows the customer to browse.
That is where B2C copywriting is different.
In this scenario, the content beckons the customer. It winds up in a search engine, answering the query of a person who is looking for what you are selling on Google, and lands directly in front of that person, thanks to some great SEO.
That is the door to your store. What happens next will determine whether or not the individual decides to open that door.
And that is a process.
They read the title, then the description that usually accompanies the search engine listing.
Then they click on the link – and open the door.
What’s on the other side?
If you’ve done your homework, they’ll find some great content, be it on your landing page, product page, or a blog post.
That content is your salesperson, the difference is there is no push, no salesman in the way, just good, clean content that lets the customer enter into the sale and take it at their own pace.
That is the beauty of B2C copywriting.
Its conversational tone invites your customers to come on in, look around, and check out what you have to offer. It engages them and gets them excited about your product, your service, and your business. Best of all, it is the complete opposite of an in-your-face sales approach. Your customer sets the pace for consuming and engaging with your content, and that is what gets results.
It isn’t just about the content on your website like blog posts and landing pages. There are also email campaigns where customers can engage with your brand right from their inbox. And of course, social media does this as well by initiating customer to business interactions and forging lasting relationships.
In short, B2C copywriting drives revenue by making the sales experience personal and low pressure. It engages, inspires, and excites, drawing your customers in and giving them control of their buying journey.
What Consumers Need in B2C Content
When a consumer encounters your content, they are usually looking for something pretty specific. However, they need several things regardless of what your product or service is. There are certain elements that are necessary for good, solid B2C content to work.
One of the most obvious elements is information. Of course, the consumer wants to get certain information on your product or service, on your company. A little social listening can go a long way in helping you figure out the information you need to provide. Analyzing your target customer is also beneficial for achieving that as well.
Your content needs to provide value to your customers. It needs to offer something. For instance, you can write a blog post about your new and improved widget, or you can write a blog post about how your new and improved widget has helped one of your customers, solved their problems, and made their life easier.
This means that your blog does not have to be all about your product all the time. That will get boring very quickly. Instead, give them other useful posts that relate to your product or service. And if you can work your product into some of those posts that’s even better.
It’s all about giving them the information they need to make an educated buying decision that could be the difference between spending their money on your business or on your competitor instead.
But remember, there’s information and then there’s information.
It’s all how you frame it.
If you are going to provide facts, features, and details on your company, product, or service, you could do a neat little bullet point list with just the facts. You could, but it isn’t a great idea.
What you get is a lot of blah, blah, blah that is as dry as the desert sands but a lot less lively. At least a cactus will grow there, and you can see an occasional lizard or horned toad.
In this content wasteland, there’s no sign of life.
And your customers will see it too.
Your customers don’t want to be told; they want to be shown.
Anyone can tell people about your service, product, or business through a boring list of facts, but it takes a real artist to show them.
Bring it to life with words that allow your customers to see, feel, smell, and taste. It should draw them in and make them feel as if they are there. Yes, even a product description can do that. Don’t be afraid of words like lush, crackle, zing, and even the more relaxed “smokin.”
These words and others like them take you off the page and out of the boardroom. Suddenly you are sitting down with your best friend over coffee or shooting a few holes of golf with your buddy. The consumer stops feeling like they are being sold to and starts feeling like they are having a conversation. It becomes easier and much more relaxed. They start to feel like they are a part of something and they belong. You’ve sparked those emotions and you’ve got their attention.
What are you going to do now?
Put the product in the hands of your consumer. Place your consumer in the middle of a situation where they are receiving your services. Make them feel like they are there.
That is what great B2C copywriting can do and that is what consumers need more than anything from your content. That is what will get them excited about your company and what you have to offer. It is what will have them talking to their friends and family about you. It is what will keep them coming back again and again.
Most of all though, consumers want to feel like the brands they choose are choosing them. They want to feel like they are seen and heard. They want the brand to speak to their needs, desires, and dreams.
Buying is a very emotional process.
B2C Content Examples: Brands that are Getting it Right
You can reach your customers with strong content that is full of imagery. Take a page from some of the biggest brands that know how to make their customers feel something. You can pick up some effective B2C copywriting tips by simply observing how other companies are doing things.
Avis
Avis also has a pretty interesting strategy when it comes to their tagline. The car rental company was definitely not a market leader but still moved into a winning position with the heart-tugging “We try harder.”
While it may seem like a weird move to let everyone know that you’re #2 in the industry, they took this idea and made it a central part of their marketing. Because they can’t just rely on being the “best in the business,” they try their hardest to take care of their customers. This is a message that certainly resonates with their hard-working customers.
Nike
Nike, the famous footwear and athletic brand has had not one but two incredibly inspiring tag lines that inspire and motivate consumers from world-class athletes to tired moms doing the best that they can. The first “Just do it,” was short, simple, and to the point. The next was just as simple and just as powerful, “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
The copywriting in this campaign is a great example of writing that impacts the consumer emotionally. Buying from Nike becomes about more than just buying a pair of shoes. It is buying from a brand that aligns with your personal morals.
Dove
Beauty brand Dove has been working for several years to shatter the stereotypes of beauty in our society. In their Courage is Beautiful video they showed front line heroes working in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Over the years they have run many different campaigns that are designed to make us look at beauty in a different way, to debunk society’s skewed definition of beauty and bring it to a more realistic and inclusive landscape.
Geico
Then we have insurance giant Geico, the proverbial class clown. Their advertising is fun, light, and friendly. They have a way of making everyone feel like they belong. Some of their most notable writing is in a series of ads they did on YouTube. The ad would start and almost immediately the voiceover would begin, “You can’t skip this ad because it’s already over.”
But it didn’t stop there. The actors would indeed freeze, but the camera kept rolling and there were some funny situations that occurred. It made people laugh, it was memorable, and it gave the feeling that the company Geico didn’t take itself too seriously.
Take some time to look at what some of your favorite brands are doing and what kind of copy they are publishing. Look at websites, blogs, social media, any place that they are posting content. You can learn a lot just from seeing what they do and incorporating certain elements into your own marketing strategy.
Best Practices for B2C Copywriting
B2C copywriting can make a huge difference in not only how you reach out to your customers but also how they react to you, especially for small businesses.
B2C copywriting isn’t something that you can master overnight. It takes time and requires some understanding of certain elements like SEO. But nothing can prepare you for when you actually start bringing the human element into your business.
These B2C copywriting best practices will help you craft great marketing materials from start to finish. By incorporating some of these best practices into your content creation, you will be able to build trust and relationships with your customers by developing content that resonates with them best.
1. Pinpoint your reader’s problem.
Your customers’ pain points can be very straight forward, or they can be pretty obscure. Get to know your audience and get a good handle on their problems or pain points.
Once you have that information and you’ve really fleshed it out, you can create content that speaks directly to readers in a way that resonates with them. You don’t have to know everything about them, but you should know enough that you can produce content that still hits their hot buttons.
Then you can weave a story around those problems and pain points, showing how your product or service helped relive the problem. Case studies are excellent forms of content that do exactly that.
2. Get up close and personal with your audience.
The more intimately you know your audience, the more adept you will be at marketing directly to them. Take some time to get to know them through market research, customer surveys, and having actual conversations with your best customers.
Find out information like:
- Demographics – age, gender, location, occupation, etc.
- Interests – What are their favorite brands, publications, hobbies? This information can help you understand what they like to read about and how it may relate to your products or services.
- Research behaviors – What steps do they take to research their problem? Where do they go for research on products? Learn more about their research process and where they get their information from.
- Buying behaviors – What goes into your target buyer’s purchasing decisions? Understanding what behaviors they have surrounding buying can help you better understand how to reach them in the right place at the right time.
Any information you can gather on your target audience will be helpful in deciding how to speak to them. What are their dreams? What keeps them up at night? What makes them smile? How do they spend their free time? Create a customer profile and gather as much information as you can to really round it out well.
3. Tell a great story.
When it comes to writing B2C marketing copy, there is one thing that’s for certain – people remember stories. They remember content that made them feel something. If you can make them laugh, cry, think, or experience any other emotion, then you’ve done your job.
The best way to harness this B2C copywriting technique for your business is to tell stories about your brand, product, service, and (most importantly) customer. Including “touchy-feely” content like testimonials and content that is rich in pathos in your blog posts and on your website can help you connect and engage with your target audience.
For inspiration, check out your favorite lifestyle brands. Lifestyle companies often do a great job of telling stories because the value of their products or services goes beyond just the product or service – it’s the lifestyle they are selling. To apply this to your own brand, toss out that list of features and just start telling a story with your product or service at the center.
And always remember the number one rule of great copywriting. Don’t tell. SHOW.
4. Avoid industry jargon.
When you are writing to people, especially the average layperson, avoid industry jargon and acronyms. While you may know exactly what the terms mean, it doesn’t mean that your readers do. Your audience is on your page to solve their problems, not wade through dense material that is filled with industry speak they can barely understand.
If your audience can’t understand your content, this can certainly be a dealbreaker, stopping a reader in their tracks. It can bring them to a point where they won’t come back. If you must use an industry term, take a sentence or two to explain it. If you use an acronym, spell it out in the first instance and include the acronym in parentheses directly after.
5. Create an attention-grabbing headline.
Creating great headlines that grab the attention of their intended audience is an art.
Your headline should incorporate your primary keyword, but it should also grab the reader’s attention and draw them in. When it comes down to it, the headline is what is going to prompt the reader to delve into your content, whether its a blog post or a landing page.
Since your headline can mean the difference between your reader clicking on the piece of content or leaving and never returning, you need to give it some careful consideration. Think about what you want your headline to convey but avoid clickbait or gimmicky headlines that are misleading or designed to get a person to click on it without delivering actual value.
When it comes to headlines, quality is important. Don’t discount it.
6. Don’t put so much stock in features.
Benefits and features are important in sales, but in B2C copywriting, features take a back seat to benefits.
Imagine you are looking at two blog posts on similar products. One contains a boring, bulleted list of the product’s features, and the other includes a story about a person whose life was transformed by the product. Which one would you be more interested in?
While features tell you what the product has, benefits show how the product adds value to the customer’s life. Focusing on benefits or transformation in your content helps the reader imagine what it would be like to use and benefit from the product.
7. Add some visual appeal.
When writing B2C content keep in mind that you are writing to humans and humans are visual creatures. Not only should you include interesting and valuable images and videos on your blog posts and website pages, but you should also consider how the content on the page itself is designed.
Huge blocks of text don’t garner much interest. People are drawn to pictures so adding some good visual content to break up the text makes it easier on the eyes and the attention span. You can also use elements like bullet points, numbered lists, bolded and italicized text, and even white space to create content that’s more visually appealing and easier to scan and read.
8. Don’t stress over length.
Content length is important, but you shouldn’t force it. Sometimes it will be easy to determine the length of the piece before you start writing. Other times the length will present itself as you write. Don’t stress over content length though. It is better to have a shorter piece that packs a punch than it is to have a rambling, wordy piece that puts your readers to sleep instead of inspiring and engaging them.
That being said, you should also aim to create long-form content when discussing comprehensive or complex topics. While short blog posts are great to share and take less time to write, the longer, more in-depth pieces are great for SEO and allow you to provide even more value for your audience.
Writing great B2C copy is an art. Anyone can slap a few pretty words onto a page, but it takes a real artist to bring those words to life and turn them into a living picture that your customers will flock to like moths to a flame. It takes skill and technique to execute it properly, and not every B2C brand has someone on their team that has the right skills and experience to create compelling content.
That’s where WriterAccess comes in.
We’ve got a stellar lineup of elite B2C copywriters who are just itching to breathe life into your brand and give you the copy that your customers will love. Whether you need catalog writeups, product descriptions, website copy, blog posts, or social media content – we’ve got you covered.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how you can leverage our community of talented B2C copywriters.
Stephanie M. is a writer living in southern Louisiana. She provides a customer-centric approach to her work, crafting each piece with the care and attention that results in professional, polished, SEO rich content that engages readers and does its job.
