Category: Technology Copywriting

Webinar: How to build a career in B2B copywriting

Posted on by Katy Eddy

If you’re a talented writer who enjoys niche and nerdy subjects, B2B copywriting is one of the rare ways that you can make a good living while writing full time (and learning about lots of weird and wonderful subjects along the way).

This webinar has now taken place, but is available on-demand here.

But how do you get into the sector, what skills do you need, and (most importantly) what is the job really like?

In this short interview, Senior Copywriter Katy Eddy charts her journey in B2B content writing – from her first experiences as a Junior writer, to crafting content for some of the world’s biggest technology brands. Katy is also now helping us to recruit the next generation of B2B writers.

Watch the webinar on-demand here.

Transcript from the webinar

David McGuire – Creative Director, Radix Communications.

Katy Eddy – Senior Copywriter and Content Lead, Radix Communications.

David:  Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for this short webinar and Q&A interview with Katy.  B2B copywriting, B2B technology copywriting in particular, is one of the few ways, I would say, that you can write full-time, make a pretty decent living, and find out about some weird and wonderful niche subjects in the process. But it’s not a thing necessarily, that people, you know, grow up wanting to do. I certainly didn’t. And, so it can be a thing people fall into, that’s a bit of a mystery. So we thought we’d try and demystify it a bit today for you.

We have an excellent interviewee, I’m building you up now. Katy Eddy joined us just a few years ago as a Junior Copywriter, has made her way right through the system and we will talk about our development process later, but has made her way right through in record time to be a Senior Copywriter, and is now involved in the recruitment process at Radix.

So, there really is no one better to tell you, you know, what it’s like to get into copywriting as a career. And we will talk about that in a moment. I will ask a few questions, but then we’ll head over for some questions of your own if you have those.

We have a chatbox, we have a Q&A box. You can try and raise your hands but I can’t see all of you on here at once. But if you want to click the raise your hand and then you can and I will try my best to stay across all of those things.

So Katy can answer all of your questions for you which doubtless will be more interesting than mine If you want to continue the conversation after this or outside this forum probably the easiest thing you can find us on Twitter or on LinkedIn. @radixcom is the main handle for us. I’m  @McGuireDavid, Katy is @Starlingsky. I haven’t asked her permission to share that, I’m sorry. But first, we will get started just by finding out who’s here from among you as attendees, to get an idea of whether you are people that already know a bit about copywriting or people who are completely new to it. So we will give you a few seconds.

So, Katy, I think I might kick off just kind of by asking you, the audience. A lot of them are copywriters already. So they may well already know. But what does a B2B tech copywriter do?

Katy: Well in the land of Radix. Forgive me if I am sort of explaining terms you already know. Business to business is entirely between two organisations. So we don’t do any of the business to consumer stuff, the stuff you see, you know in ads and magazines and that kind of thing. We write exclusively about business technology.

So, we largely write about the new age of cloud, even though it’s been happening for about a decade now. We’re always waiting for the next big thing. And we were told it was blockchain, but I don’t believe anybody when they say that. We mostly focus on marketing materials, sales enablement, that kind of thing. So as I tend to explain to people in the pub when they look at me blankly, when I tell them, my job role…

David: Has nothing to do with copyright. Yes?

Katy: Yes, I do get asked a lot if it’s copyright law, which I think is probably quite familiar to a lot of you. It’s essentially that we write the kind of stuff that companies like Microsoft use to sell to other companies.

David: Cool. So when you say, the kind of stuff, what sort of formats and subjects do you find yourself writing?

Katy: There are sort of too many to list. I will focus on the ones that I do the most at the moment, which is case studies. So interviewing clients and writing their stories up. They’re always a massive pull for people because they like to see success and imagine themselves in that position.

And I write a lot of white papers and reports. So long-form stuff that is further down the funnel piece. But is good for convincing people once you’ve already got them on the hook. You can get more into detail about your product or your offering. More generally like lots of blogs, tweets, anything you’d use to share longer-form content as well. So email campaigns, that kind of thing.

David: Sure. And what kind of clients? Can you tell us about who you find yourself writing for now?

Katy: So I’m going to describe them in vague terms. And you can name them if we’re allowed to name them. Obviously, there are NDAs involved in a lot of them. Primarily at the moment I write for a company that does a lot of speech recognition and voice biometrics work. I do write for Microsoft, loads of the big business names that companies like Salesforce, they’re a big one for us. Honestly, if you can name a business, we’ve probably written for them at some point. We’ve got well over a hundred that we’ve worked on.

David: Yeah, I think, I think that’s, I think that’s fair. It’s like, you know, most of the big software companies that sell technology to sell to other companies, either we work with them directly, and we also work through their marketing agency. So one way or the other, we will have worked with a lot of them. I think that’s fair.

So when you’re writing for something that might be for Microsoft, one day, you’re writing for something, you know, for a big cybersecurity company, or a speech recognition company, or a Salesforce or something like that another day. Do you find you have to use lots of different writing styles, or in effect, are there a limited number of styles that people actually use?

Katy: I think you have kind of a set of core styles, that each company has their own individual quirks on. So obviously, you have your UK and US that have their own quirks. But yeah, generally, the massive companies in particular, they’ll be very stringent about how you write about their stuff because they can’t have anything that goes out under their name that doesn’t fit with their brand image.

So you do work a lot with style guides and things like that to make sure it’s in line. And internally, so if we take Microsoft, for example, I have built quite an extensive guide, essentially, for all the writers that I work with. To make sure we’re hitting all the very, very specific things that you might not necessarily think about just as you’re writing, but will be picked up when it gets to sort of the review process on the other side.

And you will have to change very quickly in between clients. And that does take a bit of a knack. Occasionally, you do find yourself slipping in a word that you think, Oh, yeah, they would not want to use this or I mean, backspace and move on.

David: Wow, it sounds like it’s a lot of kind of hat switching there. Could you tell us a bit about, you know, what an average day looks like for you? Um, you know, obviously, things are a bit different now, but kind of pre-COVID times or now.

Katy: I think not too much has changed in the way my day operates. Just less obvious face-to-face contact. One of the great things about Radix is, when we are all allowed to be in the same room together, you do have between ten and fifteen writers, depending on where we’re at in terms of recruiting. You have that many people all in the room together, which means you have a lot of kind of informal chats. And you have a lot of very immediate support, which we’ve had to, you know, try and translate into the world of Slack and constant Zoom calling.

Generally speaking, so at Radix, we have our morning meeting, and we run through the diaries. So the diaries, we don’t have to worry about that. We have an account management team, and they’re the people that handle the client-facing stuff. And they’re responsible for squishing everything into our little Outlook calendars, which I don’t envy: it is a skill. And it really is a skill really.

So you’ll set out your day there. And you’ll work out when things need to be shared across the team. So generally speaking, I tend to do maybe three client calls a week at the moment. I do a lot of stuff where I’m left to my own devices because I’m working on big projects. But yeah, generally speaking, maybe four hours of writing. And then we have some review time which is our internal process for checking that everything’s good to send clients. And days tend to be split across that. And with the odd meeting, interspersed, depending on who you need to talk to, and what your projects are.

David: Sure. But it’s a lot of kind of writing time and kind of working with the account managers who you know, do all the stuff about, what we’re going to deliver when, and what we’re going to charge for it. And all of that stuff that you know, freelancers, writers and things would need to look after themselves. That’s kind of mostly done for you and you know, you can kind of focus on the creative bit.

Katy: Yeah, we do have input on how much time we want and how much we need, because I do spend proportionally most of my time writing these days. And I think that that’s something that can be lost. If you’re a freelancer, and you do have to do all the juggling yourself, you end up you know, writing in your evenings and weekends, because when else do you do it.

David: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, you’re a Senior Copywriter now, as we mentioned, you actually started at Radix? Actually in the scheme of things. I mean, you’ve done this in record time. So only a few years ago you were a Junior Copywriter. So what’s the difference between those two roles?

Katy: It will be five years on September 1 that I’ve been with Radix. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind. And I would say the main difference is when you get to Senior, you’re very much trusted with anything that a client can throw at you.

Even you know, if it comes with and near non-existent brief, you do have that kind of basis of knowledge that you’ve built up working with so many different clients, on so many different projects. So yeah, anything. We expect you to be able to write a tweet, we expect you to be able to write, you know, in the very rare cases that you write a 10,000-word report, but it does happen. We trust you to be able to do anything in that mix.

And I think our founder, Fiona, she always said that she thought it took five years to get really, really good at this job. And I think probably about two and a half years in,  I was like, “I feel like I’m pretty good at this job”.

And then I reached this point, I was like, now is really the point where that experience really does start stacking up, because you have worked for you know, six, say cybersecurity companies over the years. So you learn things from your first one that you then add on for each one. And you can play different bits of knowledge to a new client when they come in. So you’re not it’s very rare that you’re learning a technology from scratch these days because you have a good basis.

There’s a lot of learning that goes on in the first year of being in tech, right?

David: Yeah, I bet. Thinking back, if you kind of cast your memory back all of that way, what kind of skills and experience did you have? You know, people often wonder, I suppose how much you need to know before you get into B2B copywriting? How much skills and experience Did you have before you started as a Junior?

Katy: I was pretty much as fresh as they come. I actually, the week that I interviewed for Radix, I had graduated, the Monday of that week – a very rapid turnaround. So I didn’t really have a lot of time to go out and do internships or any of that kind of stuff. So I had some writing experience, obviously, I did an English degree. So I had, you know that basis and in being able to write, but you do actually have to unlearn quite a lot of stuff that you learn, because an academic essay and a white paper really do not share that many features, apart from telling a compelling argument from start to finish, I think is the main thing you learn from that.

But I had done a little bit of work with a lighting designer, so a lady called Eleanor Bell, who is an electrician, and lighting designer who needed a new website. So I had a very tiny amount of knowledge about lighting, because my dad is an electrician, and has been for aeons.

So I had, you know, the very, very basic amount of knowledge, and went into this entirely new world that I had to learn what an ingress protection rating was, and all this kind of stuff. And I wrote her entire website, which was project pages, case studies, that kind of thing. All of her ‘About Me’ copy, that kind of thing. And that was really cool. The main chunk of experience I had before I came into this job. And I think that set me up really nicely because I knew how to attack a completely new subject from scratch.

David: Yeah, I mean, did you know a lot about the tech that we write about? So you said it was a learning curve, was it just, kind of, you picked all of that stuff up really quickly?

Katy: You do have to learn really quickly, I think I know the basics, I think it’s hard to avoid the basics, really, because a lot of it eventually filters down into consumer tech. So things like The Cloud, which is, you know, 90% of people’s messaging. You sort of fundamentally understand that if you’ve ever used Dropbox or something like that in your everyday life. And, you know, I played enough online games to understand the ‘as a service’ model, just about.

So, the basics are definitely there. But then you talk about, you know, hyper-scale cloud computing, and that’s just that’s the level of stuff we don’t you don’t see in the consumer space. So yeah, a very basic understanding that was built on very rapidly. But that’s the benefit of having such a big team of specialists behind you because the knowledge is there.

David: Yeah, we could I guess we’ve kind of skipped ahead a step. So you’ve worked with Eleanor, you were just about to graduate. So what made you go look at Radix and go, Ah, B2B copywriting. That’s for me, I’ll have a go at that.

Katy: So I’d like to say like, I came out of the womb, knowing I wanted to be a B2B copywriter…

David: Didn’t we all!

Katy: But the truth is, you don’t really know it. I think no one talks to you about it during school or university, it’s like you’ve got an English degree…so you’re going to be an English teacher. That’s about what they’ll see. But I, I hit on kind of the jackpot, really, because Elena Bell’s office is in the same building, as Radix’s office.

So I had lunch with some of our account managers in the kind of communal space of the building and it’s just sheer luck that I knew you were there. And I looked at the company, I was like, that’s probably a bit more legit than I am at this point. At this point, I felt like I was very new to it. And then the junior copywriting position went up online. And I spoke to Eleanor a little bit about it. And she was really pushing me to apply because thankfully, she liked the work I’d done.

David: She was very complimentary about you as well, as it goes.

Katy: That’s, that’s good to know. And yeah, I started to look into it a little bit more and kind of educate myself a little bit about copywriting. And realise that it was, you know, a very viable career path because my other plan was to go back to working at HobbyCraft and writing in my spare time. But um, yeah, the idea of being paid to write full time was just, it was too hard to pass up. So I took a shot. And here we are.

David: So let’s talk briefly, and I’m kind of aware that I want to leave time for people to ask questions, if you have questions, do pop them in the Q&A, or in the chat or whatever.

I wanted to talk about kind of that career path. And obviously, you’ve been on a journey from Junior Copywriter, through Copywriter, Content Lead, and now Senior Copywriter. What does that process look like? How long did it kind of take each stage? And how did that kind of work?

Katy: So I think I probably speed ran.

David: Yeah, I think that’s fair.

Katy: Yeah, four and a half years, I think is genuinely the record. But there are other writers snapping my heels now because we have a lot of very good people. I spent about six months as a Junior. And that’s really all learning all the time.

You spend a lot of your early time shadowing other writers to get up to speed on things. Because we don’t expect people to know intuitively how to write a good marketing blog, because it isn’t anything like you know, LiveJournal, is Live Journal still a thing, or am I showing my age a little bit there. It’s not like you know, everyday blogging, you do have to have a very specific set of skills.

So you spend a lot of time doing that. And yeah, running email campaigns, tweets, that kind of stuff like that. The smaller form things that are easier to get to grips with. And then I started as a Copywriter. And that’s when you start moving into the longer stuff, so you have your eBooks and your white papers, that kind of thing.

I spent about a year and a half as a Copywriter. And then you become, you have a little add on, which is the Content Lead, which is essentially you get a client or a set of clients that you’re in charge of. So everything that gets written for that client will come through you for review, which it’s one of the ways that we can expand the team to write on a client while ensuring that everything’s the same level of quality.

And, like you said, in keeping with style guides, and their tone, and their voice, and all that kind of thing. So I have one of our Microsoft agency relationships is one of mine, for example. And I’ve had a few that have moved around, depending on capacity and things like that over the years.

So I’ve got probably three or four that I’m in charge of now. They’re quite chunky clients. And then, yes, I hit Senior Copywriter last year. And like I said, that’s the point where we expect you to be able to survive anything that gets thrown at you, and support everybody, below you as well.

David: And I think one of the things that’s probably quite unusual, I guess, is, you know, going through, you know, these various bands and these kind of grades and things, you know, is that we do have, you know, quite a clear banding about what people need to do across all of these skills at each stage. Was that introduced before, or was that introduced while you were in the process of developing.

Katy: So I think, um, a lot of it was kind of refined as we went through it. So when, when I was hired in 2016, we had me as a Junior, and we had two Copywriters that came in at the same time. And that was when we really started paying attention to giving a really specific structure to how we grow.

I think Radix had been around for about seven years at that point, and we were starting to grow the team. And we were starting to really understand what you need to be able to do to get really good at this job.

So yeah, we have a very set process, but it is quite flexible, depending on what you need support with. So one of the main things that we do in our, our catch-ups every quarter is we identify the bits that we’re hitting and the bits that we need support with. And that’s what we focus on for each person.

David: Cool. We actually have some questions coming in. So let’s take a break out to do those because we’re, you know, we’re zooming through the time. So James asked, What percentage of your time is spent understanding or dissecting briefs set by clients, versus actually writing the copy? In the event that the given brief is limited? Do you end up mapping out your own?

Katy: That’s a really great question. It does vary. Sometimes you will get a very straightforward, very detailed brief. That maps out everything you need. And it’s just a case of looking at it, comparing it to our sort of, we have a bit of a menu of different content types. So sometimes it’s really as simple as just matching it to one of those and that’s about it. And then you can crack on.

Others take a bit more dissecting. So I would say you probably do spend 80% of your time writing. Sometimes clients do need a bit of support to get to where they need to be before you can actually start writing, and then it’s a bit more of a back and forth process. But a lot of our clients do look to us for support in that and they do understand that we probably know better than them about the copywriting requirements.

And there are some clients who will just send you a sentence and you run with it. And that’s sometimes that’s a blessing and sometimes trending towards a curse. It depends on how easy it is to research. But yeah, we don’t expect a Junior to look at a one sentence brief and be able to run with it. We will give it to one of the Seniors to kind of pick apart, and make sure they’ve got enough structure to work from. But I do really enjoy that there are some clients who say, “We want to write a blog about this… go!”. There’s one in particular that we do a lot of desk research for. And we’ve been able to research things like, what happens to ugly fruit around the world, and how that’s repurposed, and things like that. And that’s the real niche stuff that you can have a little bit of a jolly with, which I really enjoy.

David: I want to skip on to the fact that you’re now part of you’ve been through the whole process. And you’re now part of recruiting for the next Junior Copywriter. Interested know what you’re looking for? And as part of that, we have a question from David, who says, he’s a physics graduate, who became a journalist 30 years ago has worked a fair bit on business magazines. copywriting experiences is limited unless you count added to advertorial supplements is very good at writing interviews and case studies. He says I’m in my early 50s, were my age be a hindrance when it comes to getting a foothold in B2B copywriting?

Katy: I mean, I think absolutely not. I mean, I know I probably, a bit rich coming from someone who started at 21. But the thing we’re really interested in is, the stuff that you mentioned, the stuff that shows that you can adapt quickly, and you can learn the ropes quickly and that you have skills that are transferable.

Because the thing is, when we have people apply for the job, we just asked for a writing sample. And to be honest, we don’t really care too much what that sample is. Just as long as it’s good. That’s the main thing I submitted. I submitted three pieces. I submitted the introduction to my dissertation, I submitted a review of a video game. And another one of my essays, I think. And none of that was anything close. I submitted some of my stuff from Eleanor’s website as well. Yeah, nothing close to B2B tech copywriting. But obviously, there’s stuff that’s recognizable in it, even if it’s not exactly that.

David: Yeah, I think a lot of it is about kind of getting that complicated stuff and making that really, really simple and that kind of thing. Yes, we are getting towards the end of our time. I think we will be wrapping up very, very soon.

But we have a couple more questions. Anthony wants to know about whether to change to a limited company rather than being a sole trader? I’d say Anthony, that’s something probably I have more experience than Katy. So if you want to find me on LinkedIn, David McGuire and ask me that on LinkedIn, I’m happy to chat about that, because I have some experience of that.

And Sayed wants to ask about writing for a US audience versus writing for a UK audience. Do the voice and tone differ between the two things? Because it is the thing where, you know, we have to write for people around the world, right?

Katy: Yeah, I think in terms of voice and tone, I don’t think they necessarily differ between the UK and the US. I think that just tends to be a company to company thing. The funny thing about writing in US and UK is there are a lot of very tiny things like toward or towards, that you don’t think about. It’s not the obvious doesn’t have a ‘u’ in it or not. Which I do spend a lot of time thinking about and picking out of people’s copy, I think they hate me for it. But that’s one of the main things I think.

Where you do experience more difference is where you’re writing for primarily non-English speaking countries. So things that are going to be in English for people who have it as a second language or stuff that’s going to be translated because a lot of the turns of phrase that you use quite naturally in the UK in the US just do not translate well. And particularly when we write for German translation, you tend to have to write quite economical copy, because words are just so much longer. It’s stuff like that you don’t always think about to start with I think that’s the main thing like not dropping in super-specific Cornish idioms that no one’s going to understand.

David: We haven’t mentioned that we’re based in Cornwall, but we are and it’s beautiful. Tamar –there’s a Cornish name – Tamar says, “Is there scope to enter the field at a higher level coming from a B2B tech marketing background? Writing all company copy rather than from scratch as a Junior?”

Katy: Yes, for sure. I think we’ve recruited copywriters that come in at a higher level and kind of have, maybe not necessarily the copywriting experience. But do you have the grounding in marketing or tech, that means you can get up to speed quickly? You can come in with one of those skills, then we can help fill in the other, I think that’s the main thing.

David: As long as you can write. If you can write well, and succinctly and stuff, that’s pretty non-negotiable, I think. We’ve had a good set of questions. And you’ve gone into lots of detail for us, Katy. So thank you very much.

I’m aware that there were other questions, we’re over time. But just to finish up, was there one more question that you wanted to address around, whether it’s good and bad things about the job, or what you’re looking for in the next writer, or what you wish you’d known at the start of your time at Radix that you know now.

Katy: I think it’s a bit of a cop out, say, I’d like to have known everything about B2B copywriting before I started being a B2B Copywriter. I think I’d like to talk a little bit about what we were looking for. We are actively recruiting for a Junior at the moment.

David: We are. Spoiler alert: yes…

Katy: That’s right. You can apply. Like you said, the main thing is, we just need to know that you can write. So honestly, your CV is kind of secondary, because we’re looking at your cover letter, and we’re looking at your writing sample. And it’s very easy to see from those if people have a knack.

And we know that people get nervous. And we know it’s not, you know, writing covering letters is not a natural skill for everybody. But we can, we can see in that if you’ve got, I guess, like the spark that we can, we can turn to B2B copy.

And I think enthusiasm is enormous. You do have to be a person that is really keen to learn about things. And to be a little sponge for highly technical information. We’re not technical writers, but we do write about technical subjects. So you do need to have, you know, a base understanding. I will say like, when I was a Junior, there were times where I was on the phone to a client and they’d mentioned a term and I would just have to sneaky Google it, while they were talking.

That does happen because you do talk to people who have PhDs in this stuff, and they will always be the best source of information. So don’t expect to have to learn absolutely everything you can trust the client to give you that information. But yeah, being really keen to learn is really important and just keen to work in a big group of very lovely, very talented people. I think that’s the main thing that we’re looking for.

David: Lovely, I was waiting for the “But…”

Katy: No “But…”. Just a big room full of nerds.

David: They’re all nerds. Lovely, talented, supportive nerds is definitely what our team looks like. Other agencies may vary. Other agencies in fairness, you’ll probably be able to earn more, but they will probably expect longer hours and you might not be quite as fluffy as employers as we, but who knows.

Katy: They rarely have waterside offices as well. Oh, yes. Yeah, we saw dolphins.

David: We had literal dolphins in the river outside our office it’s true. And they came at lunchtime, which I thought was really considerate of them. Anyway. We are, I’m afraid out of time, and there’s so much more that we could talk about, you know, development and review and the quality assurance process.

But, Katy, I’m so grateful to you for agreeing to do this and to talk to these fine people.

Katy: Thank you so much

David: And thanks all of you as well, who have come along and submitted your questions, got in contact with us, and spent your time with us. I really do appreciate it. As we say, if you are interested in B2B copywriting as a career, we are currently recruiting for a Junior Copywriter.

But to Tamar’s point, we are always looking, for good writers with potential who may well come in or also at a more senior level, we have a careers page on the Radix website that can tell you a bit more about that as well. So if you have any questions, do contact us: [email protected]. You can find us on Twitter @Radixcom, or Radix Communications on LinkedIn.

Very happy to chat and answer any more questions in those forums. But as for now, we are thoroughly over time, I’m afraid. So we’ll have to call it to a halt there. Thank you very much, Katy. And thanks, everyone, for coming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Podcast 98: How to make your B2B content more readable and accessible

Posted on by The Radix Team

In this month’s episode of Good Copy, Bad Copy, we’re talking about how to make your B2B content readable and accessible for the widest possible audience.

And who better to talk to on this subject than Sarah Winters, founder of Content Design London? In our feature interview, David and Sarah discuss how our readers really take in information… and how we can make our B2B content accessible and clear, even when writing about technical subjects.

Radix consultant writer George Reith is co-hosting, and talks to David about using contractions in B2B copy. Can they be a shortcut to friendlier sounding B2B content? And when are they best avoided to boost readability?

And as always, we’re sharing another tip from our own team of experienced copywriters. This month Consultant Copywriter Kieran Haynes is on hand with a counterintuitive way to beat the clock when you’re on deadline.

You’ll find a full transcript of our podcast at the end of this post.

What steps can B2B Marketers take to make their content clear and accessible? 

Between 2010 and 2014, Sarah Winters and her team at the Government Digital Service invented the discipline of Content Design, applying new techniques that shifted the focused to user-centred content.

According to Sarah, a lot of people approach writing B2B content differently to content created for consumer markets. Sarah shared some simple things to keep in mind that will boost accessibility and readability for your B2B reader.

Remember your reader is human… just like you

Essentially, readability is about talking to the human; the fact your user is representing a business shouldn’t change that. So, think about the way people take in information. Then, consider what they’re trying to achieve – whether that’s registering for your latest webinar, or gaining a deeper understanding of a technical subject in an eBook. Finally, serve them the information they need to complete their task, in the clearest way you can.

User researchers are your new best friends

It goes without saying that strong user research makes for better B2B content and streamlined online journeys. But it also eases the content sign-off process with stakeholders. You’ll find challenges and push-backs are resolved more easily when you can show your content decisions are insight-led and backed by research.

Some jargon is good (yes, we really mean that)

B2B has a bit of a bad rep for loving a buzzword. We’re still not fans of those. But sometimes a specialist term is really the right word to use for your audience. Sarah suggests the best approach to technical language and jargon is to offer an explanation the first time you use it on a page, and make sure that the words around it act as markers that offer context.

Tiny changes can make a big difference to accessibility

If your content is not accessible, it’s not useful. To boost accessibility in your B2B content, Sarah suggests thinking about language first. Small changes to sentence structure and length are an easy place to start. And will make all the difference to everyone who reads your content.

At Content Design London, Sarah’s team don’t talk about Plain English, which sounds boring and makes people switch off. Instead they champion Clear English. And being clear is all-important for frictionless B2B marketing content. Making content easy to read is a great starting point for making it accessible to more of your target audience.

Sarah shares many more insights and examples with us in the interview, so have a listen… and if you’d like to know more, it’s worth diving into the Readability Guidelines wiki and Sarah’s game-changing book, “Content Design”.

In the rest of the podcast, you’ll also hear an insightful conversation into the best use of contractions in B2B copy between David and George. Spoiler alert: if you find yourself writing shouldn’t’ve, you’re doing it all wrong.

In this episode, you’ll find…

00:57 – A warm welcome for our Radix guest co-host, George Reith.

02:18 – David talks about accessibility and readability with Sarah Winters.

17:15 – George and David discuss jargon, the best use of contractions in B2B writing, and the apps and algorithms that can help boost readability scores in your writing.

35:10 – We announce the winners on our Content Design London resource packs, and hear their winning tips for making B2B content readable and accessible. Thanks to everyone who entered and shared their advice with us.

41:00 – Kieran’s copywriting tip of the month: how to plan your writing time.

Was this your favourite episode yet?

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Tweet us at @radixcom on Twitter or pop us a message on [email protected]. (Or, if you fancy your chances of appearing on the podcast, send a voice memo our way.)

How to listen:

Transcript: Good Copy Bad Copy 98: Readability and Accessibility

Speakers:

  • Sarah Winters, Founder at Content Design London
  • David McGuire, Creative Director at Radix
  • George Reith, Consultant Writer at Radix
  • Kieran Haynes, Consultant Writer at Radix

Sarah Winters: The people who are the most well read, don’t want to marvel at your GCSE English skills…

David McGuire: Hello listener and thank you for joining us for episode 98 of Good Copy, Bad Copy, the B2B copywriting podcast. We’re really very grateful for your company.

George Reith: And this month we’re going to be talking about how to make your B2B content readable and accessible to the widest possible audience. And we have an in-depth interview with an expert on that very subject: Sarah Winters from Content Design London.

David: My name is David McGuire, I’m Creative Director at Radix Communications, which is a B2B tech copywriting agency, and I’m delighted to be joined by a familiar guest co-host for this episode. It’s the smooth sounds of Radix consultant writer, George Reith. George, welcome.

George: Hi David, and hi listener, thank you both for letting me come back again.

David: It’s always a pleasure to have you here apart from that you made me sound bad.

George: I was just going to say it’s sad that you’ve given me such a warm welcome. I wish I got this kind of welcome everywhere I went really.

David: I can’t speculate why that might not be the case. So speaking of going places, I think by the time this is broadcast, or podcast. The Freedom Day will have come and gone. Are you feeling the freedom yet?

George: David, I’d ask you know, are any of us ever truly free? Even when Freedom Day comes and goes, I’ll still be bound by the meat cage that is my body, and pinned by the weight of existential dread, so…

David: Okay so moving swiftly on. George, I’m sure you know the drill by now please can you tell the listener, how they can get in touch with us.

George: Sure thing. Listener, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions you can get in touch with us via email – [email protected]. Or on Twitter – @radixcom

David: Thank you very much.

George: So David, you’ve wanted to get this month’s guest onto the podcast for quite a while, haven’t you?

David: Yeah that is absolutely true, actually. So, when I saw Sarah Winters speak at The Copywriting Conference, it completely changed how I thought about those conversations that you have with stakeholders about making content clear and readable. I mean, she’s genuinely just one of the best speakers I’ve ever seen.

Sarah is the founder of Content Design London, and she’s the author of one of my favourite books, and she was really fundamental in making gov.uk an accessible site. So she knows a thing or two about that awkward chat where you get accused of dumbing things down. I was obviously really delighted when she agreed to talk about making B2B content clear and accessible. So I started by asking her, “Why should a B2B marketer care about readability anyway?”

Sarah Winters: It’s interesting because a lot of people will pull B2B away from any other market and it’s daft, because there are humans in businesses, there are humans that run businesses. So essentially readability is about talking to the human. The fact that they represent a business is neither here nor there, really.

The way that we take in information and the way that we process it in our brains goes one way, regardless of your language, regardless of your culture, regardless of where you’re sitting on a neurobiological level, it goes in one way. If you have a cognitive challenge or you have a disability, then of course your other senses, or the other ways that you take in information, will do their funky thing but essentially it’s still processed the same way, unless you’ve had like a lesion on the brain from when you were born.

So I find it really odd that people care about readability, depending on the way that you define it, in their day-to-day lives. But they completely divorce it when it comes to business. They’re like, in my day to day life I want you to get to the point, I want you to be amusing or engaging, or, you know, funny. I want you to be tearful, I want you to be, whatever. But I want to essentially complete your task, but when I’m at work I want something completely different.

That doesn’t happen. Never happens. You are a human and you bring everything with you, all the time. You do change slightly when you go to work, and you will maybe introduce specialist terms, or jargon, and that’s fine. There are ways of getting around that so that you’re inclusive and specific. But readability, depends on how you define it, and why you don’t care about it, rather than why you should care about it, if you see what I mean.

David: Yeah, so, how would you define, are there ways of defining that you think are particularly helpful?

Sarah: For us, we just term everything as accessible and inclusive.

David: Right.

Sarah: A lot of people will talk about plain English, and we tend not to. We changed it a little while ago, we’ll now talk about clear English, because if it’s plain, people think boring. And if people think readable, they think, boring. And that’s not the case at all. It just means that you’re being clear, and I think though a lot of people, particularly in a B2B setting, they need to be clear because there’s competition for everything. Right? If you’re not frictionless. If you’re not able to get people through a process, or into your sphere to become your brand champions, whatever it is, if you can’t do that in an easy clear way your competitors will. And you will have lost out.

David: I think one of the things I guess that comes into it, is where you talked about the technical specifics and the jargon that people need to use. Is that something that you find in the clients that you’ve worked with?

Sarah: Yeah, it’s stupid things. Nuances, like, “I’d like a 72 word sentence please with all high punctuation”. It’s like: “Why? You know that you’re going to dump 90% of your audience once you start hitting 14 to 19 words, don’t you? And it’s just about why are you losing so many people?” That’s my kind of question. But you could do really easy things with your content to make it open and inclusive.

David: So, what sort of things would you suggest?

Sarah: So, one is actually to know your user journey. And I don’t mean the sales funnel, I mean the user journey. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking a brand new idea, you’ve got seven to nine, or seven to twelve, unconscious thoughts before you can make a conscious decision about anything. That language is coming from somewhere. And is it the specialised language or not?

So by understanding the journey that people go through to get to you, and what language they’re bringing with them, and what preconceived ideas that they have, you can actually work out where those specialist terms should be.

So, if you work from a user-centred perspective, you would have, I don’t know, social media and mainstream media and all of these things that kind of inform the way that you think about something. And you can use more lay terms there, and introduce specialist terms.

The way to introduce specialist term is to just introduce it the first time you use on a page. That’s it. But often people will pull things that should be two or three steps down the line, up-front. And that’s where they lose people. And nobody by the way, is using terms like “synergy”, or whatever it is that you’re using. You know what I mean, you can use them, but know where it is in the journey. That’s the crux of it.

If you’re introducing a term, like I say, use it the first time you use it on the page, and work out all the words around it, so you’ve got context markers throughout a paragraph. Any paragraph, doesn’t matter how big or small, you will have context markers. So your brain is kind of telling you something about the content before it happens. If those are too heavy. You will get people switching off.

And again, they’re going to go to your competitors, they’re not going to stay with you. So you need to work out how much emphasis you want to put on your jargon and on your specialist terms. And what it’s going to cost you.

So if you have a 72 word sentence, loaded with jargon, loaded with buzzwords, you can do eye tracking, you can get eye trackers really cheaply now, and watch people skim through the middle of it, get to the end and either bounce out or carry on. But where they trust you less, because you can test for that as well, or that they’re disengaging with you.

So you’ve really got to have that conversation with stakeholders, I normally term it as, “Do you want them to read it, or do you want them to act on it?” Because often, those can be two different things.

David: Sure.

Sarah: And then with the reading thing, “Do you want them to read it, or do you want them to engage?” Because those are two different things. And so you have to have that balance because if you get boring the brain shuts down and then that’s that.

David: Because people will say, our audience are very, very, very, very smart, they’re very, very educated. If it doesn’t sound like a PhD thesis, no one’s going to read it. But that’s not true.

Sarah: That’s not remotely true. There was a study, I’m trying to think of it off the top of my head, where somebody was saying, the most intelligent people on the planet are the most well-read. And the people that are the most well-read. Don’t want to marvel at your GCSE English skills.

David: True.

Sarah: They want to get what you have to say, and apply it to their own lives, to their own context because they’ve got a lot of reading to do, they’ve got a lot to get through. And it’s not to wade through your sentence structure. And often readability, accessibility, usability has nothing to do with intelligence. It has more to do with boredom, Are you boring me, because you’ve got a long sentence, you’re not getting to the point fast enough, you are not engaged.

I’m not talking about funny cat GIFs, or whatever, shoving those everywhere, not that. People come with a task, again, knowing your user journey. Where’s the task ? Where am I able to be amused? Where am I able to be engaged? And where do I want to do a task? And then reflecting that journey back to them. That is the most effective way of getting to people.

David: I’ve noticed that one of the things that you’ve researched is the impact of contractions on readability and accessibility. I think as copywriters, particularly in B2B, you know, people want the copy to sound friendly, they want it to sound conversational, like you’re talking to a human being. Contractions are a huge go-to. It’s like, yes, use them, you know, please. It’s not as simple as that, is it? There’s another side to it.

Sarah: Yeah, there is. Jo Schofield did a Medium post. She was working for Co-Op or DWP at the time, and they did some testing on contractions. English as a second language, particularly, find contractions very difficult. And other people are looking for the word, ‘not’.

So, when we read, you have three eye fixation zones and the third one is where your brain says, “Do I need to read that word or not?”. Now the word ‘not’ could be the only thing that turns that sentence or that paragraph from positive to negative.

And when people have that in mind because they are task orientated rather than engagement orientated, and they miss it, they could literally read a piece, think it’s positive, and it won’t be. It’ll be negative, because it’s literally hanging off an apostrophe.

So you need to be careful. Of course, if you go, “would not, could not…” Well that has a tone, but remember, it’s only one contraction into two words, that’s it. The rest of your piece can handle it. So if you think that your, your entire work is hanging off a contraction, then I would probably look at all the things that are going on in the page.

But, just be aware that particularly negative contractions can be difficult for English as a second language, and people with learning disabilities. There’s 1.4 million people in this country with a learning disability. They have jobs. They will be on the other end of the business that you are trying to engage with, so just, is it worth it? That is the question.

David: That seems like a good way to segue into making things accessible for people with disabilities of one kind or another. Readability and accessibility are quite closely linked, in that sense.

Sarah: I think they should be. If it’s not accessible, then it’s not useful. Basically, there’s 13.9 million registered disabled people in this country. That’s not even including temporary disabilities like migraines, stress – which a lot of people in this country will understand now.

David: So, I mean in a B2B context, when people are making content for B2B marketing, what are the main things they should be thinking of from an accessibility point of view?

Sarah: Probably, language first. What languages and where. Sentence structure and length. These are all tiny things that just make such a massive difference. And it is that jargon, it’s that jargon. There is a stack of research out there, that people can use to kind of bash their stakeholders with.

And even in this country, a B2B example will be the Health Regulatory Authority took the government to court, because their website was legally signed off by lawyers, it was 100% legally compliant, but it was confusing because there was too much content on the pages.

So a High Court judge declared it in favour of the defendant – in this case, Richmond Pharmaceutical Company. And so the government had to pay loads of money, and loads of charges, and all this sort of thing. Because the website was confusing. So a High Court judge set a precedent in this country: you can be legally correct. If you’re confusing, you can be taken to court for it.

David: Where can the listener find out more about you, and more about the resources that you share?

Sarah: So everything is on Content Design.London. We have a Readability Guidelines Wiki – it’s in the book as well. It’s in a free wiki that you can just go and see. And it’s everything that I’ve talked about, has research backing this up. And so when you go into a conversation, you can pretty much stay quiet and say, “You see this research, you see this research, you see this research, what you want to do?”. So if you have a look at Content Design London, or we’re on Twitter, which is @contentdesignln. And we put a lot of our research out there as well, so everything that we say is backed up by usability.

David: You said this was a market you really wanted to talk to. So, what did you really want to say to B2B marketers, while you have their ear.

Sarah: I see you. I know how difficult it can be. We’ve done it as well, so I know how difficult it can be to explain to stakeholders that they do not need to have all the marketing, and all the jargon, and put out everything that they’ve ever thought, ever, onto the internet. There is research out there and your best friend will be a trained user researcher. Because they can go out and get videos, really quickly, of people failing and getting bored, which you may not be able to get from your analytics, but you will be not grabbing them to convert. So, your best friend will be a user researcher.

David: Thank you so much, Sarah, it’s great to finally hear from you on the podcast, and so much practical advice for our listener. George, what stood out there for you?

George: So what stood out for me, is that I think Sarah has somehow dived into my brain, or at least my copy, and is personally calling me out for my use of contractions. In all seriousness, a lot of really interesting points here and things that I sort of, I think, take for granted sometimes. Maybe just do by default, and suddenly listening to that I’m now starting to interrogate that a little bit more.

Because to me, I’m just, like, contractions all the time. Obviously it makes things sound more casual, it’s like a free way to kind of get a bit more flow in your copy, and especially when you’re writing about something quite dense and technical and abstract and complicated. Having that kind of free, easy way in the copy make things a little smoother, a little easier to read, to a native English speaker, of course, that’s the default for me.

But obviously I’ve foolishly not really considered how it might read for somebody who doesn’t have English as their native language and might be using it as a second language, and therefore contractions suddenly reduce readability. That was an interesting one for me.

David: Yeah, I mean because you’ve got the whole thing with English as a second language, or you’ve got whether they’re reading on, say, a mobile device, which adds a whole bunch of cognitive load anyway. I get it ,but still, at the same time, from a voice and tone point of view, if you don’t use contractions at least some of the time, your brand can sound like a pompous ass.

So, I think there’s a balance. Our colleague John actually wrote a really good blog post about this, he had a dive into the research. I think, you know, the bit that Sarah was saying about the negative contractions, in particular, I think those are the ones that are particularly important.

I think, some kind of simple positive contractions are fine. But then there are ones that are either excessively complicated or they’re negative. You know, if you find yourself writing ‘shouldn’t’ve’, or something like that, then maybe think twice about it. But I think there’s a balance, I think maybe some contraction use is okay.

Are you one for being very standard within the client’s brand, copy, about which words you will contract, and which words you won’t? Because I tend to feel like, again in the spirit of writing as you’d speak, I wouldn’t always contract, or not contract, certain words. And, so I mean, I’m actually deliberately inconsistent about it in the content that I write, but I don’t know if that would just really wind people up.

George: Yeah, it’s interesting, actually, because I, I think I’m alarmingly consistent at just contracting absolutely any word, where it’s appropriate, and probably some where it’s inappropriate to be consistent.

David: You’re just alarmingly consistent in general.

George: If you say so. But I’m a big ‘contraction-er’, I don’t know if that’s a term. I’m going to make it one.

David: You are now.

George: So yeah, but this is really interesting. The idea that some stuff adds more cognitive load when it’s contracted than others. So the negative element is a really valuable point. Especially, Like Sarah said, when the only thing that signifies you’re talking about negative is the contraction.

But then it’s also easy to miss if you’re skimming through a document. So I guess there must be a line there right of sort of where it seems inconsistent versus where actually you’re doing the reader a favour, and I think finding that line is going to be an interesting one and I guess it will depend massively on what you’re writing.

I suppose, like if it’s, you know, quite short, to the point important message about what a reader should do about something, like a practical guide, maybe you don’t want to contract as much. But if it’s a much longer piece maybe contractions would be okay, because you’ve got more text to kind of work around and show when you’re switching to a negative.

Although, that’s contradicting myself straight away, maybe a longer piece you can get away with less contractions. Because it’s such a long piece, there’s already a lot of cognitive load associated with it. Does that make sense?

David: I think so. Yeah I think so. I think some of it is about where you are in the document and what you’re trying to do. I think sometimes you can be at a part of the document where you want to slow things down, and be really serious. You know, like I said, sometimes in an email, you know, you might want to say, “we won’t bother with so and so…”  or in another sense you might say, “we will not do this”.

George: Yeah, I just wanted to say about how refreshing it was to hear somebody talking about B2B content, and saying hey, a little bit of jargon is fine. And that’s nice because whenever I attend a copywriting conference, someone always goes like, “jargon is the worst thing you got to get rid of all of it, that’s the main culprit of overly complex writing in B2B.”

And I sort of get where they’re coming from and obviously some jargon is less helpful than others but you know. Yeah, it’s nice to hear somebody really knows what they’re talking about saying hey, you know, jargon is how people understand their industry. And sometimes it’s fine. Assuming you can get the rest of the sentence to be pretty straightforward, having specific terms that apply to that industry is important and useful. Those terms do mean something. And it’d be silly not to use them.

David: It’s all about speaking the language isn’t it. It’s all about speaking their language that they actually use. I think the issue that we have, particularly in B2B writing and B2B tech writing, is that people have come to, I don’t want to say misunderstand what jargon means but certainly the meaning of the word jargon has expanded, the accepted meaning. So, strictly speaking, it is that the terminology of your industry.

So we’re both copywriters, I can talk about an Oxford comma and you’ll know what an Oxford comma is. Now, it has kind of expanded to when people talk about jargon to include all of the kind of business bullshit terms that go in. You know, “oh it’s innovative solutioneering”

George: Synergistic! I actually don’t think ‘synergistic’ has actually been used by people for like, what 15 years at least. That used to be the standard, okay here’s you know, business BS right here.

David: Yeah, “Let’s leverage our solutions”, all that stuff. But, you know, I think that because there still is a certain element of technical specificity, which is hard for me to say, on a Friday.

If you think about it, what I like to do is think about the water cooler or the break room where your audience works.

And if you think about two engineers or two technical people. Two experts, you know, they’re not going to say, “the big machine’s broken again, the red light is flashing. It’s hurting. Can someone make it less sad? Can they come and make it all better?” They’re going to talk about the specifics.

But neither are they going to say, “Ah! The Flugelbinder is operating at sub-optimal efficiency once again, this is a most inconvenient turn of events. We should arrange for a Maintenance Solution to leverage his expertise forthwith.”

George: I’ve never written about a Flugelbinder before, but I really want to now. It sounds quite exciting.

David: I’m going to have to invent it. So that you can. See, there’s a bit in between, where we use technical specifics but in short, easy to understand sentences.

Because when you talk about talking their language in a B2B tech context, you talk about technical specifics but presented in a simple way.

George: Yeah absolutely and I think as well, if he tried too hard to simplify something, and avoid those terms that that people are actually using, I think it just sounds weird, you know. Like an engineer would look at it and be like, “Why aren’t you talking about these things?”. “What are you talking about? You’re not using any of the terms I would expect to see in a document about, I don’t know whatever it would be, DevOps or what have you…” I don’t think there’s any point avoiding it for the sake of it, right?

David: It’s all about the context. It’s all about the audience and speaking their authentic language. I think when you’re talking with jargon, a lot of complexity gets dragged in. And so, it was a while ago now, but you did look into readability and things for us and you wrote that fabulous blog that has sections of different Flesh Kincaid grade levels, and that kind of thing. I mean, do you find yourself ever kind of looking to algorithms and things just to kind of give you a steer if your content is in the right kind of area readability wise?

George: Yeah I did try to. I do, but in a quite a gentle way. I mean, you know I’ve been doing this a fair few years now. So, more often than not, on a default job I’ll kind of just assume the stuff I write is at least mostly readable, like you’d like to think after eight years I can at least do that, right?

But, if there are special requirements, if I’m writing something that’s definitely going to be translated into other languages, then I suddenly think, okay, well, the burden of readability here is going to be greater, because you know there’s a lot of stuff that will translate quite poorly. Or make the translators job the hell on earth and I don’t want to do that.

I’ll run through stuff, just to make sure I’m certain that nothing is really going to throw a spanner in the works. I do find them useful as well in general, just every now and then, just to make sure things are on track, but I think I get a bit frustrated sometimes with how they’re used in other organisations.

So I’ve only had a few clients before that have said, “Right, this piece of writing, it’s got to hit 9 on the Flesh Kincaid grade, anything above a 9 we won’t accept.”  And you know, I’m looking at how that algorithm works and I’m like, yeah, but you know the whole blog is about DevOps solutions and the single phrase ‘DevOps solutions’ spikes that algorithm by like a point in whatever sentence it’s in.

That’s a bad example but you know you get these terms that are quite long quite complicated terms. You can’t not use them because that’s what the blog is about, and you’re sat there arguing with somebody. “I know you said you needed a 9, but I’ve got, got it as a 9.2 Is that okay?”

And as long as people are willing to flex a little bit here and there, I think it’s fine to ask a writer to do that sort of thing. I’ve had some awkward conversations about, no, no, it’s got to be below nine, it has to be. And I’m sat there thinking, I don’t think it’s possible when you’re talking about server virtualisation. there’s too many syllables in that word, I cannot get this down further.

And I appreciate I’m going places about this, I have way more thoughts about this topic than I thought, David, you’ve awakened something within me. One more thing I found as well is that I’ve noticed recently I’ve had quite a few clients ask me to run this stuff through the Hemingway app.

David: Oh yes?

George: And I think the thing that I find interesting about that is, I did a lot of stuff in the Flesh Kincaid reading score. I quite like that, as a readability metric to aim for, because it’s very transparent what it’s calculating. You can look it up, it’s a known thing online. And it’s just sort of the amount of words in a sentence,

David: It’s words and syllables.

George: Exactly. So that’s great because I can look at it and if my score is crazy high, I know what to do to fix that, I need to go back and reduce the amount of words, reduce the amount of syllables in the words, and I’ll start getting somewhere.

Some of these algorithms though, like the Hemmingway app, it didn’t feel quite as obvious or transparent to me. Now I haven’t done a lot of work in it, maybe there is a really obvious algorithm that I just don’t know about yet.

But it’s when I don’t know what it’s looking for, I’m there like, how do I start reducing this number? What do I need to do to make this more readable according to this specific app? So I think that’s a bit of a danger there, I prefer something that’s less of a black box, but there we are.

David: And you’re a kind of expert on Grammarly at Radix, as well…

George: Well, I wouldn’t call myself an expert I think I’m just by default the guy that was left holding the bag, when people went, “Right, someone needs to train everyone on Grammarly and everyone ran away, and it was just me left standing there.”

David: As most technical person in the organisation. With Grammarly you’ve got different flavours, it asks you to suggest which kind of flavour of copy you would like.

George: Yeah I’m quite impressed with Grammarly on that front actually. Because I hadn’t used it for a while, and you know I remember seeing early reviews of it, it sounded like it was all quite general. But seeing they’ve now implemented these things, I don’t know how long this has been in there, but now I’ve started using it again. You know, you have these radio buttons, you can dial in, “How technical is the person you’re writing for?’ That kind of thing. “Is this for business, or consumer stuff?”

That’s really cool to be able to narrow that down, but again I do sort of feel sometimes, it’s very simple to use, which is great, but as a result they don’t give you a huge amount of info on all these different things.

So I’ve set mine to obviously be for a business context of writing. And then I’ve set it to be for professionals. But I could set it to be for academic people. And I’m like, what would it pick up for academic people that it won’t pick up for professional people? Where’s the line there for Grammarly?

I’m sure there’s all sorts of complex rules in place to make a distinct way of writing for both of those people and give you different suggestions. I haven’t played around with it enough yet, but I would love just to have a list of things that I could look at on Grammarly’s website, or a wiki somewhere, or something, so I know what kind of things it’s going to be looking out for.

Because, who knows maybe ‘academic’ would be more suitable for some jobs? I don’t know yet. And I can’t find out unless I start playing around with it. Maybe it’ll be homework for me I don’t know.

David: Sarah also talked a bit about making content accessible, as well as readable, to make sure that people with different  abilities, and visual impairments and things, can access your content. Are we seeing our clients doing anything new or different? Or giving us anything kind of standard in the style guide and things? I mean, some things we just, you know, have been left I think in some cases to work out for ourselves as writers.

George: Yeah, I mean, you know what I still feel that’s what’s happening. I mean you know I would really love to have been able to give you a great answer here of, look at all these clients they’ve been doing all these amazing things, really putting it front and centre.

I’m not quite seeing that myself just yet. I may have been unlucky, or maybe I just haven’t asked enough questions for them to talk to me about accessibility thoughts they’ve been having in their content.

But you know, I know there are some specific elements of copy though that a lot of people have been talking about industrywide for a while. I know CTAs have kind of been the big one for a while, particularly. I think, there seemed to be an era, about five or six years ago, where every CTA button was “Get it now” or “Learn more”, or something like quite high level and vague.

And then I feel like we had a bit of a turning point, where a lot of people picked up that this is awful for screen readers. They’re like, get more info on what get what. And so you’re seeing a lot more specific CTA buttons. Text that says, you know, download the eBook, get the ‘name of the report’. So I was sort of seeing small nudges towards accessibility like that.

But for me, it tends to come from like other writers, rather than clients pushing it from the top down. Which is fine, I think, but it’s a shame. I think if more clients started thinking about it and telling their contractors, their writers, their employees, to push these things we might see change happen faster, so I’d love for that.

David: Yeah and it might be something that actually we need to get a style guide together and push on it, because it’s not right that people just can’t access your stuff. I mean, from a moral and a business point of view.

George: Obviously accessibility is mega important for people who, you know, can’t listen to things because of a hearing impairment. But also just in terms of usability for somebody who can hear, it’s a great thing too. Because you know, if you’re on a crowded bus and you haven’t got any headphones, brilliant. I mean, I used to have that thing, ads are getting smarter about this now, I’m sure you’ve had it where you’re scrolling Facebook or Reddit, or what have you, and you see an ad pop up, and it’s got audio, and no subtitles.

And I might actually be quite interested in what this ad is promoting, but at the moment there’s no audio. I’m sat on a bus, I’m not going to turn on audio for an ad and blast that out of out my speakers on this bus, right? No chance, I’m skipping that. But if you’ve got subtitles, I might look and go like, “Oh look this man’s waiting for a call from someone, but his phone’s waterproof, so it doesn’t matter he dropped it in a puddle”. But, no subtitles? No chance, I’m not buying it.

David: I’m chuckling about this elaborate bus story, when actually you’re talking about browsing Facebook in the office. aren’t you?

George: Oh yeah, I mean, to be clear I haven’t ridden the bus since the beginning of the pandemic. So yeah I tried to make myself sound really down to earth, “Yeah, I get on the bus too, you know, I do the public transport”. No. I’ve just been a hermit for ages, so no bus and no advert about people dropping phones and puddles. But you can see it happening, right? That that wasn’t a terrible example.

David: So I think that one of the things that we said is that it’s good to have guidelines and to get some stuff in place. And actually we’ve got an opportunity for some people to win some  guidelines. So let’s hand them out, shall we?

George: So David, are you telling me we have honest to God prizes to hand out this month?

David: Unbelievably, that is true. After we finished recording, Sarah generously offered us three prize bundles to give away. Each of them, comprises the Content Design London readability guidelines and a copy of Sarah’s book Content Design, which I highly recommend.

So, I took to social media and asked the audience. I said, “What is your best tip for making B2B content readable and accessible?” And we picked out three favourites, and we’ll send each of you a pack. George, do you want to know what they are? He said, rustling his papers.

George: Yes, I do.

David: Okay, he said, having destroyed some trees. Okay so we have some great responses. And the ones that we picked as our favourites are in no particular order… Livi Cracknell, who’s a Digital Content Strategist at Accenture Interactive, responded to us on LinkedIn.

She said, “I would approach it from a strategic point of view to ensure consistency and longevity. So first establish the guidelines that content must meet to be deemed clear and accessible. And when does it fall short? Group these into categories. Translate this into a framework, or a scorecard, or a checklist that could be used to govern the content creation process. And run all the content through this framework during the production cycle.”

Jennifer Law, who’s a Digital Marketing Manager at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, responded on the B2B Marketing Propolis hive for content and brand strategy, and she says, “Some of the things we do within my team are,” (There’s a bunch of these, but they’re all good – I said that, she didn’t). “Attend accessibility forums, held with various user groups in our organization to understand barriers, and then take these learnings back to see how we can apply them to our content.

“Number two, my team holds monthly accessibility meetings to agree on outcomes we are trying to achieve, to improve accessibility within our remit, We look at things like images, documents, page content, etc, and choose which ones to tackle next.

“Number three, we create short guides and ‘lunch and learns’ to educate stakeholders and business units involved in content creation, and to educate the agencies we use on our requirements.

“Number four, we regularly take time and read up on accessibility to understand more about this topic and discuss our meetings and agree on the next steps.

“Number five, we use Semrush and SiteImprove to run audits on our content. If we don’t own the content we talk to the business owners, about our findings and discuss potential changes we can make.

“And number six, we regularly conduct SEO audits to understand questions and the language people use to make sure that our content is readable and resonates with the needs of our audiences. PS, we have also recently completed an accessibility audit on some of our websites, and we are about to do the same on some of our downloadable content to understand how accessible they are.”

Wow, there’s a whole load there from Jennifer, who has more than earned a prize bundle, I think. And we didn’t just need, you know, reams and reams of suggestions. We also, on LinkedIn, had a response from Chomparani Ali who’s a content specialist in Germany. I think she’s in Germany. She says, “Clearly structure content with subheadings and bullet points, a lot of B2B blog posts ramble on with long sentences and paragraphs”. Amen to that.

George: I was going to say, we’ve all seen that. Fair play.

David: A wall of practical, usable advice and I think that they’ve all, earned themselves prize bundles, so we’ll be in touch to get your addresses and send those out to you. Well done to you, and thanks to everyone else who took the time to engage and sent tips. Obviously we can’t read all of them.

George: Okay, well, now it’s time for our copywriting for the month. This time it’s from Radix Consultant Writer, and International Man of Mystery, Kieran Haynes.

Kieran Haynes: Hi, I’m Kieran, I’m a Consultant Writer at Radix. My favourite copywriting tip is: don’t start writing before you’re ready. When I first began working as a copywriter, I can’t have spent more than twenty percent of my time planning what I was going to write. I would rush to get some words on the page, to protect me against the ever approaching deadline.

Then I’d edit, I’d rethink, I’d freak out, I’d unpick and I would restructure. It wasn’t a fun or effective way to work. Today I probably spend the majority of my time planning. I set out a narrative flow. I know what all my references and proof points are, and where I’m going to use them. I trust in my writing process even as the clock is ticking down, and my work has is much better as a result.

David: He does sound like an international man of mystery in that piece.

George:  If anyone in this business was going to turn out to actually be a spy or assassin, that I never knew about, I think it would be Kieran. Don’t tell him I said that, I don’t want him to get too big for his boots. But I could see him just going, “Yeah, I’m just going to Switzerland for a week”. And I would just be like, I know what you’re doing, you’re not going skiing.

David: I don’t know I think that Kieran would be too obvious.

George: I thought you were going to compliment him and say, “He’d be too nice. But no, too obvious…”

David: He’s too cool, He’s too cool. But yeah, as ever, Kieran, making the rest of us look bad, with his sheer thought process and discipline there. Do you agree with him, George?

George: You know, we were talking about this just earlier today, David. I mean, you know, I have an immense amount of respect for Kieran, because I see him as like, my polar opposite in how he approaches work. You know I feel I’m quite workman-like when it comes to approaching copy, but Kieran is ever the artiste. He is a man who accepts nothing less than perfection, and his planning process is in and of itself a work of art. I think he really commits to it and it produces really great content, so I can’t argue with the results, also unfortunately it couldn’t be me, I just dive straight in and get going and pick it apart like a sculpture.

David: I’m afraid that is all we have time for this month. Listener, join us again next time, when we’ll be talking to Paul Cash about emotion in B2B. In the meantime, George, would you thank our contributors and remind the listener, where they can get in touch, please.

George: Sure thing. So thanks again to Sarah Winters for such an informative discussion. Thanks to Kieran for his copywriting tip and continuing to make me look bad. And thanks and congratulations to our three prize winners, but most importantly, thank you listener for your company.

And please don’t forget, if you’d like to contact show you can do so on email: [email protected], or on Twitter: @radixcom. And if you’re listening on Apple podcasts, please leave us a review; it would be great.

David: And thank you George for co-hosting, have you enjoyed it.

George: I always enjoy it, David. It’s always pleasure.

David: You never look like you’re enjoying it.

George: I’m one of these people, I’m cursed with everything I say sounds sarcastic, And it gets me in a lot of trouble. I’ll be talking to one of the guys in the office, and say, “That’s a really good piece of work, I guess”. And somehow they like think I’m making fun of them. I’m not, I genuinely mean it.

David: I’m one of the few people that’s old enough to remember that guy on The Mary Whitehouse Experience but, you know, none of the audience, none of the listeners, none of our colleagues will know who that is. So I will move on. Until next time, listener, remember, nobody will ever complain that you made something too easy to understand. Well, except for that one stakeholder. You know the one. Sorry.

David and George: Goodbye!

Acknowledgements and thanks

Thanks once again to Sarah Winters; it was great to finally hear from you on the podcast, and we hope you’ll come back soon.

Thanks also to George for co-hosting so smoothly, to Kieran the international superspy for making us all look bad with your copywriting tip. And thanks and congratulations to our brilliant competition winners: Livi, Jennifer, and Chomparani (who is indeed in Germany, it turns out).

Hello to Jason Isaacs.

And last but not least, thanks to Bang and Smash for mad podcast production skills.

How to write great content about HR technology

Posted on by Katy Eddy

In the past few years, organisations have started to embed more tech into their employee relations processes – using tools to centralise case management and self-service portals to engage employees.

That’s led to a crowded HR tech market. To stand out, you need content that’s sharp, relevant, and reflects the reality your audience faces at work.

In short, don’t be so focused on the “tech” part of the equation that you forget about the “human” bit of “human resources”.

Here are seven suggestions to help you get it right:

1. Understand your audience, and their skills

Globally, an average of just 45% of those in the people profession say that “human resources” describes their role most accurately.

That means there’s a lot of generalists working in the industry, especially in smaller organisations, and they’ll likely be most interested in tools that can make the more complex parts of their role easier.

Specialists, on the other hand, will be looking for hyper-specific tools that are catered directly to their skills, like learning and development.

Only a third of HR professionals say they have the skills to cope with more demanding duties beyond their current roles – which is the perfect starting point if the solution you’re marketing can ease their workload.

2. Recognise that all workloads aren’t created equal

It’s worth considering how busy your target audience is, and the size of the business makes a huge difference.

Small to medium-sized organisations often have a better HR-to-employee ratio – almost four in ten report having 1:20 or fewer, while a similar proportion of large enterprises have 1:100 or more.

Because larger organisations are more likely to stretch their HR resource, each exec will be dealing with far more people and have even less time to manage each case. So pay attention to that ratio, and consider how it affects their day-to-day role – and how your solution can help.

3. Don’t forget about line managers

HR tools aren’t just for HR personnel – and that means they might not be your only audience. A lot of employee relations tools affect the working lives of direct and line managers, who often handle frontline HR responsibilities like absenteeism.

For HR personnel, a key part of the role is equipping line managers to work effectively with their people, which in turn reduces the number of cases that need to be escalated to formal procedures. So, make sure your message clearly communicates how the benefits of your solution filter down through the reporting levels.

4. Balance the needs of people and the business

This is an incredibly complicated Venn diagram. While most departments in a business will be trying to balance profit with people’s happiness, HR is the place where those two factors face off directly – and an organisation’s HR personnel are caught in the middle.

A great HR tech proposition sits in the sweet centre spot where the circles overlap and you can help them support their people meaningfully while meeting their business goals.

The trick to writing effective HR tech content is to keep one eye on the business (processes, efficiency and cost savings) and the other on the people (employee satisfaction and engagement).

Research suggesting that happy workers are 13% more productive can help unify the two ideas. Which reminds me…

5. Statistics make for compelling messages

HR is a stat-friendly industry – and social proof is always a compelling way to communicate your message.

There’s always new research to draw on, both from the big analysts like Gartner and specialists like the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

For example, Gartner’s recent HR report, Top 5 HR Trends and Priorities for 2021, includes responses from more than 800 CHROs and other HR leaders from 60 countries, while CIPD has an extensive collection of research papers and articles covering all sorts of HR topics.

If you’re trying to get into the same headspace as your audience, that’s a good place to start – and a stat-packed infographic is always a good way to tip a prospect over the edge of the funnel.

6. Don’t get bogged down by tech talk

Fundamentally, HR is about the people. And that means you shouldn’t get shoulder-deep in the tech weeds (most of the time, anyway).

However, focusing on the people doesn’t mean ignoring the technical aspects of a solution entirely. When you talk around technology too much, you risk getting vague – and then you lose the sense of authority you’ve been working so hard to build.

So, work to establish the right level of detail for your target audience, whether they’re the CHRO, an HR manager, or a direct manager, clearly linking features to benefits. (Which, let’s face it, is best practice when you’re writing for any industry.)

7. Use writers that know the industry

It sounds like a cheeky point, but it’s true. Through our years of writing tech marketing for HR, we’ve learned a few things about what works (and what doesn’t).

Visit our HR tech sector page to see more about how we write compelling, valuable content for the HR industry – and which content types we think work best for getting your message across.

And, as always, if you have a product or service to sell to HR and lack the copywriter (or time) to do it, you can always ask us.

How can I make complex B2B content readable and compelling? | B2B Content Tuesday

Posted on by The Radix Team

Great B2B content is clear, understandable and engaging – however complicated the subject. But it isn’t easy to simplify technical content without losing technical authority. In fact, we’ve written this blog about readability scoring in B2B, this blog about readability techniques, and even recorded a podcast with readability professor Chris Trudeau on tackling the task.

So when we were asked to cover the topic in our B2B Content Tuesday Q&A webinars, we jumped at the chance.

In this blog, we’ve put together our top three tips to help you reduce unnecessary complexity, and answered some of the great questions we were asked during the live session about readability tools.

(And if you’d like to watch the discussion in full, you’ll find the video at the foot of this page.)

Three tips for simplifying complex B2B content:

Tip 1: Complexity and jargon are not the same thing

Understanding the difference between jargon and complexity is vital. Jargon is the technical language your audience uses every day in their jobs. But complexity can also include the overly long sentences or unnecessary buzzwords that creep in with technical specifics. And that’s the stuff you can do without.

Look out for passive voice, nominalised verbs or anything that could be considered marketing waffle.

And “use” is almost always better than “utilise”.

Tip 2: The water-cooler test

Imagine you are reading your copy, out loud, to a single reader in your target market. Does it make you cringe? Are you being patronising? Or feel like you should be explaining something?

Try running it through the water-cooler test (patent pending):

Two IT engineers (or whoever you’re writing for) are conversing by a water cooler. The language they use will be absolutely specific to what they do, and they’ll use the correct technical terms. But they won’t surround it with any really complicated stuff – or speak in a way that you need a degree to understand.

(They might well say something like: “This is the third time the nozzle-alignment flangelator has corrupted this morning. I think the embedded system needs an update.” They certainly won’t say: “I am experiencing significant downtime as a result of nozzle-alignment flangelator’s sub-optimal reliability. Surely we must acquire and implement an automated embedded system update solution without undue delay.”)

Ask yourself: can you imagine what you’ve written being said over the water-cooler?

Tip 3: Readability algorithms are helpful – but not the be-all and end-all

From Flesch-Kincaid to Gunning fog, each readability measure has its own nuances and measures different things. Indeed, tools like Readable will let you grade a piece of text against several scoring methods at once.

As a general rule, the more complex a topic is, the harder you should work to make the copy easy to read and understand. Because readability algorithms tend to measure combinations of word difficulty and sentence length, they can help you to retain this balance – forcing you to make your prose simpler to compensate as jargon increases.

Having an objective readability score can also help you to avoid disagreements over your copy’s style.

If you don’t write for a living, it can be easy to think that complicated writing is somehow “better” content – although in fact it’s quite the opposite. Using a readability measure can help you move away from subjective conversations about writing style towards concrete, objective criteria.

Remember, though, that calculations based on word count and difficulty are still a fairly crude measure of our content’s quality. Algorithms can be a useful guide, but don’t be too slavish about aiming for a particular number.

Q&A: Measuring readability in B2B content

Q: What readability scoring model is best for B2B?

David: “Flesch-Kincaid grade level is quite simple and user-friendly. However, the way it’s aligned to an educational grade system might prove confusing for some stakeholders.

“For example, I’ve seen pieces of content about managed IT services, that have a Flesch-Kincaid readability level of 21 – that’s incredibly difficult, post-doctorate level text for an eBook on managed services. But if you talk about it in those terms to a stakeholder, they may point out that your audience do have doctorates, and assume it’s fine. In fact, they might decide anything less is “dumbing down”.

“But the truth is, most of the content we read at work is much, much more readable than that. Broadsheet newspapers have a Flesch-Kincaid grade of around 9, and they’re hardly simplistic.

“In that case, a model that gives you a readability score rather than a grade level could be more useful.”

Q: What readability score should B2B content aim for as a general rule?

David: “That really depends on your audience. For example, you might think about how many of your readers will engage on mobile, or have English as a second language.

“But in the areas of B2B tech where we work, I commonly see Flesh-Kincaid grade levels of 15 and more. Some sectors, like consultancy, are higher still. So if you want B2B content that is more readable than most, but without ever appearing simple, a Flesch-Kincaid grade of around 10 or 11 will help you to stand out. At that level, you can include pretty much all the technical detail you need, without overcomplicating things.”

Q: What tools can I use to judge the readability for microcopy?

David: “Unfortunately, most of the algorithms need 100 words or more to provide you with a reliable answer, as otherwise one long sentence could throw it off.

“But there are a few that could be useful for judging its readability: take a look at Readable and Hemingway.

“And for conversational interfaces, or chatbots, you could take a look at the XKCD comic site. They have a text editor that will keep you to the 1,000 most common words in the English language. It’s surprising how much you can write within that limit.”

Thanks again to everyone who attended the webinar, and took part in the Q&A. Here’s the full discussion:

How to put a positive spin on your cybersecurity content

Posted on by George Reith

Cybersecurity can feel like an inherently negative topic. Even if you’re a brand that’s trying to focus on the protection and peace of mind you deliver, you still have to talk about the many dangers you mitigate for your customers.

But there are good reasons why cybersecurity vendors should avoid dwelling on the doom and gloom. So how do you put a positive spin on the topic without downplaying the risks – and the need for strong measures to combat them?

In this article, I’ll look at four ways cybersecurity brands can create strong content – without getting bogged down in the risks, threats, and what-ifs.

Why cybersecurity content needs a balanced approach

When writing content for cybersecurity experts, there’s a big reason to avoid too much negative-speak: notification fatigue.

Network analysts, CISOs, and anyone else involved in the security game will get notifications about potential threats constantly. Some are legitimate issues that require attention, but these are needles in a haystack of false positives. When you’re exposed to so many notifications constantly, it’s easy to start tuning out all the alerts and alarms.

So when a cybersecurity vendor comes in with a big, scary headline and an urgent intro, their audience is likely to dismiss this as yet another alert that doesn’t mean anything. They’ll tune your content out, just like they ignore the hundreds of empty alarms that flash up on their monitoring platforms.

And even if they do take notice, the engagement you get from negative content may not be the kind your business is looking for. Research on negative news articles by the American Psychological Association found that while they pique interest, they also cause readers to feel “stress… anxiety, fatigue or sleep loss”. Not feelings you want your content to evoke if you’re looking to develop a positive, mutually beneficial business relationship.

Four ways to balance your content

So how do you strike a positive chord with your content when your entire solution is designed to avoid a negative outcome?

Of course, you can’t just ignore the reality of security threats altogether. But there are a few tweaks you can make to highlight the wider benefits of your solution and tackle the subject of cybersecurity risk in a more balanced way.

Focus on real benefits

One tactic you can take is to shift the message from the damage your solution avoids to the concrete benefits it delivers. For instance, you can talk about how you offer:

  • Cost savings compared to other security approaches
  • Time savings that can help teams reinvest resources elsewhere
  • A more strategic, proactive approach to security
  • Simpler reporting to stakeholders on the security and cyberthreat landscape
  • Peace of mind for cybersecurity teams and business leaders

When deciding on a different messaging approach, think carefully about what to focus on. Depending on what solutions you offer, some of these messages might not be appropriate. There’s also a chance your competitors are already making some of these claims, and you don’t want to march to the beat of their drum if you can avoid it.

Don’t overclaim the risks

Overpromising is the enemy of all good copy – especially when you’re dealing with a negative topic. Yes, you can say DDoS attacks are a business disruption and impact the user experience. But will they irreparably harm brand image and put the whole business at risk? It’s unlikely, and your reader knows it.

While you clearly want to make your piece stand out and show the real threats out there, don’t get too carried away. Otherwise, you’ll undermine your credibility and erode your reader’s trust.

Avoid the urgency

Most cybersecurity professionals run on a strict time limit. But they know this intimately, and don’t need you to remind them. There’s simply no way you can frighten someone that deals with risk for a living. So, if your content is built around trying to scare people, it won’t work.

That’s not to say you should avoid writing about deadlines completely. Release dates, end-of-support deadlines, and upcoming events in the cybersecurity world are all great topics for your content. But don’t talk in generalities about how the clock is ticking and how they’re letting cybercriminals get ahead. Cybersecurity professionals are well aware of the pressures they face.

Make it specific

Negative talk is always at its worst when it speaks in generalities. So, if you are going to talk about big cyberthreats and risks, back it up with a specific example to keep your content focused.

Writing in vague terms about irreparable brand damage is tired, and likely to paint your content a dull shade of grey. By contrast, referencing specific big attacks that have affected brands in your sector (they’re only a quick search away) will bring some much-needed colour.

Specifics aren’t just a nice way to make your content stand out – they also help your reader build their own business case. Content that shows the reality of high-profile breaches will grab attention, and that will aid your customers in securing executive buy-in for new cybersecurity initiatives.

If in doubt, seek a second opinion

Make no mistake, finding the balance between realism and feel-good benefits isn’t easy. If you’re trying to identify the right approach yourself, a second pair of eyes can give you a great steer on whether your content is too negative (or not negative enough). You can get this from a colleague, from industry peers in other businesses, or you can ask your friendly neighbourhood copywriter.

Better yet, you could ask a specialist tech copywriter who has strong industry credentials and experience working with brands to get the right tone and voice. That way, whether you need to tweak your messaging around cybersecurity or make some changes to your tone, you’ll get the advice you need to appeal to your target audience (without spiking their heart rate).

Keywords and a crowbar: a rant about SEO copywriting for B2B

Posted on by The Radix Team

Keyword stuffing is cheap, tactless and ugly. And yet, it continues to go unchallenged by some as an acceptable SEO practice. Why? Because in the early days of SEO, keyword density mattered.

Today, in theory, quality is what counts. But even in an era where purposeful, relevant and well-written content is the benchmark for all B2B marketing, copywriting briefs still regularly come with a whole spreadsheet of awkward keywords attached.

Let’s make one thing clear: there’s nothing wrong with expecting a copywriter to adhere to your SEO strategy. But when that strategy is “use abstract keywords from this oblique spreadsheet as many times as Google will allow it”, we need to talk.

Keyword stuffing: as rubbish as it is pointless

OK. Imagine you’re an exhaust pipe manufacturer, and you’ve got an exciting new website that you want customers to find with ease. You’re also convinced that you’re the best in the business, and you won’t settle for anything less than hitting the front page of Google for all the most relevant search terms. But those relevant terms? “Car”, “Exhaust”, “Rust Resistant Exhaust Pipes”.

One of these terms is reasonable enough. Use “Rust Resistant Exhaust Pipes” in a couple of strategic places – in a piece of web copy about rust resistant exhaust pipes – and sure, we’re cool.

But asking your writer to stuff “car” into your web copy as many times as they can is just undignified. It’ll only make for word soup. More to the point, it’s a waste of time: do you really think you’re going to outrank the combined might of the entire automotive industry? (Also, an honourable mention to Fintech startups who insist they want to rank for “bank”. Just stop.)

The same goes for vague, overly-long technical terms. By all means, commission a compelling deep dive into your latest tech innovation, but don’t expect multiple instances of “z-buffer techniques for legacy GPU emulation” to make for a graceful read. Just ask Harry Kapur about life before he became Head of Writing at Velocity Partners.

I once had to crowbar “personalized phone cases for Samsung Galaxy S7 or S8” into multiple 400-word articles. 8 times each. I do NOT miss ‘article marketing’.

 – Harry Kapur, Head of Writing, Velocity Partners

Ouch.

In short, keyword stuffing is a quick way to make your copywriter hate you and (more importantly) instantly undermine your credibility with your audience. And the worst part? It doesn’t even work.

Google’s relationship with keywords: “it’s complicated”

With the launch of its Panda algorithm back in 2011, Google began demoting low-quality, duplicate, and unhelpful content. Subsequent updates like Google Penguin homed in on keyword stuffing, actively prowling copy for the unnatural use of keywords as well as low-quality backlinks and narrow anchor text.

To quote John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google back in 2014: “Keyword density, in general, is something I wouldn’t focus on. Search engines have kind of moved on from there.” In fact, many SEO influencers now argue that the ideal keyword density percentage is a myth, and the recommended minimum target density of 3-5% once preached by “experts” is now moot.

The law of SEO changed again in 2013 when Google launched its Hummingbird update, shifting the way Google reacts to different types of queries. Rather than locating content containing similar terms to those typed by a user, it takes a more natural, conversational reading, and locates content that best matches the user’s intent. It’s an approach called Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): a quick introduction

LSI keywords are conceptually related to the main subject. They help search engines to understand content at a deeper level, including what it is about, and what search terms it relates to. For example, if a blog contains keywords like “stylus”, “cartridge”, “oxidisation”, and “anti-static brush”, the search engine might identify that the content is likely about record player maintenance (regardless of how many times the actual words “record player maintenance” appear in the text).

Why? Because, as Google says, it uses “words frequently occurring together” to understand the content topic. That’s why using keywords like “car” in a blog about exhaust pipes acts as more of a backbone to the wider piece, just not the exact word you would want to rank on.

The trick is to separate your LSI keywords (other relevant terms you’d reasonably find on a page about this subject) from the thing your content is actually about.

What’s more, Google has become smarter about offering up content types based on conversational searches. So by searching “how do I clean my stylus”, you’re likely to end up with a blog about record player maintenance. Or, for example, by searching “how many albums has Radiohead released”, you’ll get both a quoted number in bold, and a top link leading to the band’s discography.

Be realistic about your keywords

Google’s search algorithms are now so sophisticated that they can tell pretty much off the bat whether your copy is junk or not. So, the trick is not to have your writers write for Google, but for people who use Google.

As long as Google exists, it’s unlikely that keyword research and lists will go away. But the job now is to use that research as information, to help us create content that matches user intent. Let me sign off with this quote from our very own Creative Director, David McGuire.

As B2B web writers, we need to remember that our reader is not Google… but they are using Google, and we need to make that easy for them. The job is really to look at each search term, picture the page that user most wants to see, and write it.

 – David McGuire, Creative Director, Radix Communications

 

Podcast 82: B2B copywriting v technology

Posted on by The Radix Team

In this month’s episode of Good Copy, Bad Copy (recorded in a simpler time, while the world was still relatively normal), we’re talking about the technology that’s changing how we write – from the digital tools at your disposal, to the AI writing bots taking over the boring bits of your job.

David interviews Parry Malm, digital anarchist and CEO of Phrasee, a London-based software company that develops AI for marketing. He asks: “Can your AI really write better copy than I can?”

Turns out, it can. And surprisingly, that’s actually a very good thing.

You’ll learn how AI could make your writing more effective, why you won’t be able to spot AI copy – and that you don’t need to worry about technology stealing your job. (At least, not yet.)

And if you want to hear more from Parry, take a gander at his Twitter. It’s great lockdown fuel.

Can anything beat Fiona’s trusty notepad and pen?

Although some of us are steadfastly loyal to old-school writing methods, there’s a whole world of helpful digital tools that can improve your copy. Radix copywriter and content lead Katy Eddy joins David and Fiona to give us some top tips, including:

  • Word macros – handy little Word add-ons that highlight your bad habits as you go (shoutout to Lorraine at Lighthouse Proofreading for introducing us to them; you’ll find more detail in her super-helpful blog post)
  • Evernote – for keeping even the biggest projects organised (without thousands of scraps of paper)
  • ABBYY – the mighty Rose Newell introduced us to this screenshot reader, which solves feedback-on-a-jpeg headaches
  • Otter.ai – this time-synced transcription service isn’t all that accurate yet, but it’s really handy for diving back into long client calls

Just don’t talk to us about Grammarly. Suffice to say, we’re not convinced yet.

The Anonymous Five: Chief Technology Officer

Our secret guest this month is a Chief Technology Officer from a digital development company.

We asked them a bunch of stuff they couldn’t answer in public… so you can find out the real difference between a CTO and a CIO, what tech marketing made them cringe, and how their crappiest day would play out.

And *spoiler alert* when we asked: “What was the last piece of tech content that you actually paid any attention to?” they answered the Stack Overflow yearly developer survey. You’ll need to listen to find out why.

The end of an era

Sadly, this month’s podcast is the last to be co-hosted by our founder, Fiona Campbell-Howes. After seven years and 82 episodes, she’s hanging up the microphone and moving on to a new (and suitably chair-filled) chapter.

Thank you for everything, Fiona, and we’ll try not to stuff things up in your absence.

Want to skip to the highlights?

1:00 – Fiona talks about chairs

4:10 – The tools that can make your writing better

17:00 – Rise of the AI writing bots: David interviews Parry Malm

30:00 – Is Grammarly ever helpful? The team weigh in

33:50 – The Anonymous Five: Chief Technology Officer

38:28 – Fiona’s greatest hits, and final adieu

Send us your thoughts, feedback, and crazy lockdown stories

Contact us through @radixcom on Twitter or [email protected] (send us a voice memo from your bunker). 

How to listen

Credits

Big thanks to Parry Malm for sharing his AI expertise (and reassurances) with us. You can learn more about Phrasee here.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash.

 

Please stay safe and well. We’d really like to see you back here next month.

7 ways to liven up old-school B2B copy

Posted on by The Radix Team

B2B tech copywriting has come a long way over the years. Not just in the technology we write about, but also how we write about it.

In B2B, writing in a snappy, engaging style is an instant, effective way to differentiate your brand. When your text gets to the point, in sentences that are quick and easy to read, it shows you value your reader’s time. It also proves you know your stuff well enough to explain it clearly.

And that’s an opportunity, because many brands still take a formal or “old school” approach to B2B content. A lot of your competitors are making noise, but not much more.

So, what can you do about it?

There are plenty of easy tweaks you can make right now, to give your copy a little more impact and set your brand apart from the old-school crowd.

Let’s take a look.

“Old school” writing wastes readers’ time

For the purposes of this post, “old school” writing is the traditional style of copy that’s been used in B2B marketing for several decades.  You know the stuff: it’s academic, formal, sometimes stuffy, and is often wordy where more concise sentences would do.

There are people who believe there’s more legitimacy in a formal, academic-style – which can be fine in the right format or environment. It’s all about audience and context.

The problem is, reading complicated text takes longer, and B2B decision markers are time poor. People often don’t have the time or attention span to read dry and complicated content.

Research by Prezi suggests that longer content can still hold attention, but people are being more discerning with what they read. This means that it’s more important than ever to make your content as interesting as possible.

Here are seven ideas to get you started.

1. Look outward and focus on challenges

The most effective copy in any format talks about the reader and their challenges – not about you and your capabilities. This is your opportunity to empathise with your audience and offer solutions – and only then bring in your products, services, and expertise.

Instead of talking about what you do and what you can do for your customers, focus on your audience. What do they care about? What challenges do they face?

Moving from a feature-led approach to focusing on the benefits to your reader will ensure your customers aren’t left thinking “so what?”

(In fact, my colleague David created a fantastic short video explaining how this works with web copy.)

2. Be specific

There’s more content being created than ever before and it’s only set to increase. But here’s the problem: there’s also a skills gap, so you’ll find that there’s a tonne of re-hashed topics out there.

You’re unlikely to win customers’ attention with content they’ve already read elsewhere.

The fact is, to break through the sea of content out there you need to say something unique or useful – and a great place to start is by being more specific than your competition. Think about the particular people you want to reach: their challenges, their hopes, their attitude to work. Then ignore the crowd, and write directly to your ideal customer.

Remember: if you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.

3. Be careful with jargon

How much jargon does your audience understand?

If you’re writing for a non-technical business reader, maybe not a lot. And you might want to dial things back a bit to make your content easy to digest.

But if they’re engineers or techies, the likelihood is a lot; potentially, more than you. And in B2B, that’s potentially a bigger worry than blinding your audience with science. You need to speak their language, and if you mishandle industry terms your reader uses every day, you’ll blow your credibility in an instant.

The crucial thing is: make sure you and your audience are on the same page, and understand the same thing by every word you use. Scattering jargon you don’t understand is a bigger risk than using none at all.

4. Get to the point

For me, a long, wandering preamble immediately puts me off reading a piece – and I’ll never get the chance to find out how interesting the subject might be. Because if the language you’re using is boring, the automatic assumption is that the subject matter will be boring too.

And I’m just a B2B copywriter. Imagine how little patience a time-poor B2B decision-maker would have.

That’s why it’s vitally important to get straight to your argument, cut the waffle (remember: more words don’t equal greater value), and inject your own personality into the copy, right from the start.

5. Lose the passive voice

Switching from passive to active voice is one of the most effective ways to give your copy more punch – and give you an edge against your competitors.

Grammarly has some useful advice on how to spot if you’ve written a sentence in the passive. Simply, if you can add “by zombies” after the verb (highlighted in green in the example below) it’s passive.

For example: “the new servers were installed overnight” would become “the new servers were installed by zombies overnight”. The sentence still makes sense, so it’s the passive voice.

(Whereas “the company installed the new servers overnight” wouldn’t make sense as “the company installed by zombies the new servers overnight”. So it’s active voice.)

6. Appeal to emotion (where appropriate)

Most decisions – even in a business context – aren’t made using logic or reason. They’re based on challenge-driven emotions (and then rationalised later).

It’s why using emotive language that taps into people’s challenges is far more effective in selling your products or services than simply setting out bare facts.

One of the best ways to resonate with an audience is to set up a piece of content with relatable challenges that make people say, “these guys genuinely understand my issues and what I’m trying to achieve”. You can tell a compelling story, and offer the immortal copywriters’ phrase “if this sounds familiar…”

Only then should you propose your solutions to these challenges.

7. Use design to your advantage

And finally, no matter how great your copy, it’s worth investing in some decent design work.

If your content looks eye-catching from the off, it will not only be able to shine through the masses of other content out there, but your audience will also be more likely to engage with it.

After all it looks different, and it sounds different. Why wouldn’t they want to find out if the content is different too?

Graduate from the old school – one step at a time

If you think these changes might be a bit much for your stakeholders, remember: you don’t need to make them all at once. Even applying a couple of these tips will have a significant impact on your content, and once you start to see results, it’ll be easier to justify doing more.

Or, if you’re not confident in your ability to make the break into a clearer, more modern style of content, feel free to get in touch with us. It’s exactly what we do all day, and we’d love to give you some idea of how a fresh approach to your writing might sound.

Webinar: What does good B2B content look like? 15 essential checks

Posted on by The Radix Team

What does good B2B content look like? 15 essential quality checks
Thursday 7th November, 4pm GMT / 11am EST

It’s hard to create great B2B content when everyone’s idea of quality is subjective. You get vague, unhelpful feedback like “this reads well”. Eight sets of conflicting amends to consolidate. Stakeholders – who should be fine-tuning technical accuracy – spending precious time changing “use” to “utilize” because they think it sounds “more professional”.

It’s a lot of noise. And importantly, there’s nobody speaking up for your reader. The process that was supposed to improve your content ends up focusing on the wrong things, and ends up making it worse.

At Radix, we can’t afford to work like that. We write a lot of B2B content, and every scrap of it is reviewed by our own editors before it leaves the warehouse. We need to work fast, and keep our standards consistently high, or we’ll be broke.

And that’s why we created our 15-point content checklist, covering everything a piece of B2B content needs to work – from basics like grammar and spelling to audience value, voice and tone.

In this one-hour webinar, we’ll take you through every point of our list, and give you some tips on how to create your own. We’ll also talk about how you can use it to:

  • improve your content
  • wrangle your stakeholders
  • guide your training and development

As B2B content creators, none of us have as much time as we’d like. So I solemnly promise to cram as much valuable stuff into the hour as I can. Spaces on the webinar are limited, though, so do reserve yours ahead of time.

This webinar has now finished.

Podcast 75: B2B copywriters v AI – what does the future really hold?

Posted on by The Radix Team

Increasingly, there’s evidence AI copy generation platforms can outperform human copywriters for basic tasks like writing digital ad copy and email subject lines.

So does that mean it’s only a matter of time until computers are writing all the content, and copywriters are out of a job?

Not necessarily.

In this episode of “Good Copy, Bad Copy”, we talk with with AI copy expert Dr Andrew Bredenkamp, of Acrolinx. And we find out:

  • How AI will change the nature of copywriting work
  • What algorithms can do, and what they can’t
  • Why AI may expand the number of people writing content
  • Which skills writers will need to learn next
  • How the traditional writers may soon adopt a consultative, editorial role

So it’s not the end just yet. But we’re on the verge of a good deal of change. It’s an exciting time.

Want to be on the next “Good Copy, Bad Copy”?

Contact us through @radixcom on Twitter or [email protected] (if you really want to make us happy, send us a voice memo).

How to listen

Credits

Thanks to Andrew for his time, openness, and expertise regarding what AI can and can’t do. If you’d like to know more about his work, take a peek at the Acrolinx content governance solution.

Podcast editing and music by Bang and Smash.