When somebody lands on your website for the first time what will they be looking for? Is there something you need to tell them that will convince them to stick around and find out more?

There probably is. Hint: it almost certainly isn't the year your business was founded.

Think about your own behaviour when you visit a B2B website. There are essentially very few things you care about. Usually, it boils down something like this:

  • Do these people understand what I need (ideally better than I do)?
  • Can these people help me achieve something that matters to me?
  • Why should I trust them to deliver?

Note the words in bold: I, me, me, I. Website visitors are selfish folk. It’s their needs that matter.

You will know how frustrating it is when these simple needs are not met. When, instead of talking to you, a business opts to talk about itself. It does this in great detail and leaves you to work out why any of that is relevant to your challenges and ambitions.

When it comes to creating their own websites, business owners and executives often disregard the way they want to use the sites they visit.


A Voyage of Discovery


I was encouraged when I got the call from the team at Connexion Software to help them with content for their new website.

They knew that they needed a fresh perspective. Their old website was too internally focused. Too much technical detail and not nearly enough about what customers could achieve by working with them. They had a great story that they weren’t telling.

A very straightforward principle guided the content that we built together: people do not want to buy technology, they want to buy what technology helps them to do better or cheaper. That might be getting better customer insights, improving the customer experience, making better use of data, or cutting low-value manual tasks out of their business.

The process we followed was largely about discovering and articulating those customer needs and benefits.

We had a shared vision for what the new site needed to achieve so the process was straightforward (apart from the usual agonising on my part over whether a particular word or phrase would have greater emotional impact than another).

The Connexion Software website was a stimulating and enjoyable project to work on. The high degree of collaboration helped move things along quickly and they are great people to work with.

Asking questions about their customers to establish some clear value propositions took up as much of my time and effort as the actual writing - but that’s usually how it works. We certainly spent more time talking about their customers’ businesses than their own.

So if you decide to hire a copywriter for your next website project don’t be offended if they seem more interested in your customers than in you; they are just doing their job.


Richard Hussey is a B2B copywriter and content marketing specialist. Find out more by visiting his website, link below or connect via LinkedIn.

For more information, visit: http://www.rshcopywriting.co.uk