How to Choose a B2B Copywriting Niche
By Casey Demchak

Casey Demchak

Imagine. Living the writer’s life as an in-demand B2B copywriter who is well paid and highly respected. Shaping your own schedule. Working at home. Giving yourself permission to take vacations when you want.

Now take it one step further and imagine writing for a B2B niche industry that really stimulates your intellect and captures your interest. But don’t stop there.

Picture yourself reaping the respect and financial rewards that come with being one of the top B2B copywriters in your industry niche.

Making this vision of the writer’s life your everyday reality is well within your reach. All it takes is commitment, persistence, and some entrepreneurial moxie.

As part of AWAI’s 4 Weeks to B2B Mastery Virtual Workshop, I will be hosting a Master Class titled, How to Choose and Dominate a B2B Copywriting Niche.

Here is sneak peek at the proven insights from my B2B copywriting career that I’ll be sharing during this special live event.

Choose Your Niche

Consider your background and experience

If you’ve been a sales representative in the oil and gas industry for several years, writing B2B marketing copy for this industry may be your quick ticket to freelance success. However, if your immediate career experience doesn’t translate as cleanly into a B2B copywriting career, the answer could be to dig deeper into your previous experience.

For example, perhaps the knowledge you gained from a high school or college job could be used as a springboard for developing your B2B copywriting niche.

For example, during my high school and college days, I spent several years working part-time as a swimming pool cleaner in California. Had I chosen to, I definitely could have used this experience to gain a foothold in this industry as a B2B copywriter.

Bottom line, if your recent professional experience doesn’t lend itself to choosing a B2B copywriting niche, it may just be a matter of digging a little deeper into your background for experience you can leverage.

Gravitate toward your interest

Say for a moment you’ve always harbored a secret passion for the world of aviation, but you have absolutely no professional experience in this industry. You might think this makes it impossible to break into the aviation industry as a B2B copywriter.

However, here is an action plan for getting around this obstacle — and you can apply it to any B2B industry niche in which you have interest. For this example, let’s assume you have your eye on aviation.

The first action you can take is to read a lot about the aviation market. Next, attend aviation industry events and cultivate new contacts.

Arrange interviews with these contacts and write special reports, articles, and blogs about aviation industry news and marketing trends. Offer your content for free to aviation marketing professionals through your website.

Repurpose your content as LinkedIn blogs that can be posted and shared within LinkedIn aviation groups — and suddenly you are a highly-recognizable fixture among aviation marketing professionals.

Blend a few aviation marketing spec pieces into your portfolio, and now you have all the credibility you need to position yourself as a B2B copywriter in the aviation industry.

Allow yourself to fall into a niche

Sometimes you don’t choose a B2B copywriting niche — it chooses you. Or as I like to say, you fall into a niche. That’s how I became a respected B2B copywriter and consultant in the medical device industry.

Here’s how it happened …

I was in my late 20s and I couldn’t sell my screenplays in Hollywood. At the time, I worked as a computer operator to make ends meet. I asked the owner of the company for which I worked if I could write some marketing materials for his business. He said, “Yes.”

This allowed me to build a portfolio, which I shared with companies that were hiring in-house copywriters. At this point, I would have taken a copywriting job with a dog food company. But as fate would have it, I was hired by a healthcare company in Newport Beach, California.

This led to being hired as the Senior Copywriter at a medical device company in Santa Barbara, California. Five years after that, I started my independent B2B copywriting career, and 16 years later, I’m still going strong as a B2B medical copywriter.

And it all started by falling into an industry niche when I couldn’t sell my screenplays.