What Could Your Day Look Like as a B2B Copywriter?
By Lisa Christoffel

Imagine having this schedule for your day: You come into your home office. You’ve got an email confirmation of your afternoon meeting. Great!

For the morning, you’re talking to your client’s sales team in about 15 minutes — you’re going to ask them a series of questions you have prepared about their product, their customers, and their process.

Then, based on what they tell you, you’re going to write 10 emails of no more than 120 to 150 words each — and bill your client $2,000 or more for them. It will probably only take you about 8 hours so to write these emails.

For the afternoon, you’re going to meet with a guy who called one of your clients raving about how their product saved his business. For that call, you just get to ask him questions about what his business was like before he found your client’s product, what his frustrations and challenges were … and now how things are going (you already know they’re going really well!).

After that conversation, you’re going to write a couple of pages of copy, a story, really, of a hero’s journey for your client’s customer … about how your client’s product allowed him to help his own customers and save his business. For that call and some writing following a formula, you’re going to make another $2,000.

Think this is a fantasy world?

This was a real workday for me recently.

Another day last week, I was touring a manufacturing area and asking questions to understand how my client’s product was made, because I will be creating some web copy, a brochure, and potentially writing an article for them in a trade magazine.

B2B writing projects are fun and the work you do is appreciated.

What kinds of things can you expect to write if you decide to pursue B2B copywriting?

Web Copy

Pretty much every B2B company has a website. 89% of B2B buyers will visit the company’s website before making a purchase. And those potential buyers need to find what they’re looking for, or they’ll leave and go find someone else.

What web copy projects might you do as a B2B copywriter?

You could write or revise product pages, lead or landing pages, homepages, About pages, offer pages … pages and pages of pages!

You could even write or rewrite an entire website. I did that once. The site was so ineffective as it was, that I worked with my SaaS client to revise pretty much every page they had (which wasn’t many … another reason they weren’t getting much traffic, but we’ll get to that later).

As long as you give your client’s visitors what they’re looking for when they visit the website, you’ll be helping your client close more sales.

Content — Blogs, Articles, E-books, White Papers

One of the reasons my SaaS client was getting no web traffic. They had almost no content, and what content they had wasn’t accessible to Google to be indexed.

Your B2B clients will need a lot of content, on a regular basis, to ensure they get those potential buyers to their site, prove they’re in the right place, and demonstrate they’re the best solution for those buyers.

And B2B content articles are not difficult to write. They’re usually under 1,000 words and focused on showcasing your client’s expertise. Here’s an example: I have a client who makes inks for printed materials. My client’s expertise was built up over decades of developing ink and ink technology.

Their customers are in different segments, all needing different materials.

The content we provide serves to build confidence that my client knows what they’re doing and is able to provide a high-quality product.

Longer content documents might be white papers or e-books. These serve the same purpose, but they will be more comprehensive or more detailed.

And all of those projects are for one product for one client. Can you see why there’s a huge demand for B2B copywriters?

Case Studies

I have to admit, these might be my favorite B2B projects. Usually, you’re talking to happy customers whose work lives were made better by the decision to purchase your client’s product.

You get to ask them about their buyer’s journey.

And then you get to write their story. You follow a simple formula, and the copy is typically 1-2 pages in length. Pretty awesome, even if that’s all you got out of it.

But I have found that those case studies have provided me with far more content and ideas than just for that case study.

Remember that happy client I mentioned? Not only was it fun to talk to someone so happy to have found my client’s product, but he was a wealth of knowledge that I used to create all kinds of other content.

He told me all the obstacles he’d faced as he built his small printing business and looked for all the right inputs to create a product he was proud to sell. And I was able to use the things he talked about as ideas for articles, blogs, and updated marketing messaging, which I pitched to my client.

He also told me which competitor’s products he’d used and where they had failed him. And why my client’s product was just what he was looking for. This provided great information to create information like battlecards my client’s sales team could use to close sales.

And he told me how happy his customers were and provided the language they used with him to tell him why they liked his end product so much better after he started making it with my client’s input product.

This language allowed me to ensure our product pages and our content really spoke to all relevant target audience segments.

As a B2B copywriter, you can focus only on doing case studies … or you can use the information you learn in the case study to write a number of other well-paying projects.

The Opportunity Is Real

The examples above were just a broad brush of the kinds of opportunities available to you if you decide to become a B2B copywriter.

I’ve been writing B2B copy part-time for almost seven years now. And I’ve had fun on almost every project I’ve worked on — learning new things, perfecting my craft, getting to know new people, and forging relationships around the country and around the world …

And you don’t have to have in-depth knowledge of the area to do a good job for your client. I write copy for a specialty chemicals manufacturing organization — without a degree in chemistry or science of any kind.

It certainly helps to have a background in the industry your B2B client operates in. But it isn’t necessary as long as you know how to write the projects, you have curiosity enough to ask questions and do research, and you look at each new opportunity as a new way to expand your knowledge and your expertise.

If you decide to pursue B2B copywriting, you’ll have an endless amount of interesting work and great clients available to you. You just have to decide to go for it.

Do you have any questions about getting started as a B2B copywriter? Let us know in the comments.