Business writing is a type of writing that aims to produce any professionally written material that is often direct and clear and encourages response or action from the target audience. As a blogger, making business articles are challenging for you, and aim to make catchy articles with the right pitch and balance for the people reading your respective content.
Business writing is commonly used in a professional context, business writers must be able to communicate well and not cause confusion.
According to a survey by Josh Bernoof in 2016, 81% of businesspeople believe that poorly written business materials waste a huge amount of time. This is why it is imperative that aspiring business writers must be able to adopt a writing style that produces straightforward and compelling business articles.
What Is a Business Article?
A business article is any material that shares details about an organization whether in the form of blogs, reports, posters, and presentations. Information from business articles shared via different types of media is purposeful.
The importance of writing business articles is for you to: (1) be research-driven; (2) propose effective solutions that professionals are seeking with common problems happening within their scope, and; (3) to have a wider reach in the market by using this to increase brand awareness. Writing business articles may be challenging, but this gives you a wide opportunity for people to be aware of the vision that your company represents toward the market. The three basic purposes of business articles are to share information, make requests or convince, and transact or build business relationships. Consequently, writing business articles play a huge role in letting different companies get aware of the products and services offered by the company.
For business writers, whether amateur or expert, here are the 5 major steps to take in order to write a great business article that serves its purpose really well.
Setting the Specific Objectives
As the famous adage says, “Begin with the end of mind”. Business writers cannot set the targets properly if objectives are not specific and feasible; thus, when setting objectives in writing a business article, make sure that it must be SMART, or Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-oriented, and Time-bounded. When setting specific objectives, consider these questions:
1. Who Is the Target Audience?
Setting the target audience gives you a focal point in what written articles do you intend to write. In writing business articles, you cannot successfully make a business article without setting the proper context, and when setting this you need to lay down the target audience. You can do this by listing down some groups of people that might get affected once the articles have already passed the ideation phase, after this, you can make use of statistics to further address some concerns in a particular article.
People affect the way you write depending on their culture and way of living. For example, when targeting individual teenagers, they prefer a writing style that is more conversational and humorous according to their context.
Who are you targeting? Are you targeting readers in the B2C or B2B industry? Are you targeting prospective customers or clients? What is the demographic data of your audience?
Writing a business article doesn’t mean that you show all the theories and principles written in books or research journals. To catch the attention of your audience, you need to know what ticks them off or what appeals to them. To say it simply, you need to know your audience. Make sure to establish comprehensive and proper communication that will benefit and encourage the readers to take a certain course of action favorable to your business.
2. What Positioning Strategies Are You Going to Employ?
Your target audience may read your business articles; however, the biggest concern is how the target audience will position the statements you have posited on their respective minds. After setting the context, it is important to place the context in a careful place. With this, utilizing positioning strategies is useful in making sure that the target market gets to easily retain the business articles you have written and introduced to them.
80% of the positioning strategies in blogging gives a huge impact on increasing the traffic in a particular website. To do such in your particular business article, make sure that you integrate it with real-life happenings, trending issues, and people’s typical way of living effectively catches the attention of your target audience. In addition, making unique statements and remarkable keywords is a plus point.
3. What Platform Are You Going to Use?
Setting the target market and positioning strategies would become more effective if you organize the people and the strategies together in just one platform. It is best to know which platforms you will use for posting or distributing your business articles so you can plan accordingly.
If you want to post your articles in newspapers to target people in the middle adulthood stage, then you can adapt your choice of words and writing style to fit newspapers. If you want to make use of blogs to post your articles and encourage more readers, then consider the best SEO practices. This should be a lucrative choice considering that businesses with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t have blogs.
In conclusion, there are so many platforms that you can use to post your business articles. In fact, 80% of internet users interact with both social media sites and blogs (DemandMetric). The overall target here is to adjust your content to your choice of platform.
Researching Relevant Information
When you start studying the blog topic, think about the two to three key points that your article needs to include. These concepts would then become the starting point for search engine analysis. When researching for relevant information, make sure that you search for the best niches that fit best for your particular blog.
Google (or other search engines) will throw up recommendations for other related search terms when you browse through the relevant articles
While researching the information available online, the recommendations are as follows:
- Keep abreast of the changes: Using the sense of recency, make sure that articles you will use as your reference must not be later than three years ago. Since knowledge revolutions and technological advances are evolving rapidly, you must make use of pieces of knowledge that are relevant.
- Use reliable sources: With the Internet as the “information gateway”, a single click and single type in the keyboard displays numerous pieces of information, regardless of its accuracy. Learn how to evaluate websites and determine pieces of information that are reliable and accurate.
- Give credits to where it is due: Include at least one or two links whenever a piece of information is conveyed to your article.
- Include data: The use of infographics, charts, surveys, and recent data will effectively strengthen your article.
- Include a quote: For effective positioning to readers, adding an authentic and remarkable quote that is relevant and timely is a plus point to your business article.
If you want to make use of blogging, you can seek advice from popular bloggers, or reach out to internet marketing specialists for a contribution to your article.
Organizing the Key Points
Make an article skeleton. Write an effective outline by making an opening, subheadings, bullet points under subheadings, and takeaways from your article, as well as the information that needs to come under each section
You may decide to write 150 words for the opening of the post, 800 words for the main body, and another 100 for writing the conclusion. Of course, it is best to compose the first draft of around 1200 to 1300 words, so the word count will naturally be decreased as you refine the material during the editing stage.
Actual Writing
As a writer, this phase serves as the most exciting phase, as everything is already laid down carefully and you get to concretize the things you have already laid down. This phase is indeed crucial for the things you have organized prior to the writing phase.
As a golden rule, always remember to write as you think. Get to be friends with your mind as this plays a huge role in the writing phase. Remember to be as dynamic as you can but keep referencing the base document to see the sub-points and the information you want under each point. You can play words, but always make sure that you pitch the attention of the readers by making use of relevant and accurate pieces of information.
There may be many drafts in your article, it is always important that you aim for effective positioning to readers and comprehensive dissemination of information.
In the actual writing phase, make sure to do these things:
- Write a convincing opening paragraph. Making an engaging opening paragraph attracts the attention of the readers. If you start an engaging statement, everything follows the opening statement. It is important to set the attention of the readers.
- Include keywords: Using remarkable keywords retains the attention of the readers. Also, this effectively lets the readers know your aim for them.
- Urge your readers to take action. You may conclude your article with a compelling call to action and urge them to respond by leaving a comment or asking questions. This tells you more about their thoughts upon reading your content.
- Write in the active voice: Minimize the use of sentences in the passive voice. Using sentences in active voice promotes reading engagement to learners
Reviewing and Editing
Make sure to undergo a polishing phase prior to deploying a certain business article. To prevent further errors in the business article you are going to post, make sure that you undergo several steps where you get to review and edit your respective business article.
Editing enhances quality in producing a business article. Take a time to review some typographical and grammatical errors. Many technological tools are available to correct your errors committed in the article. After doing such, read your business article aloud and encourage your friend or any family to listen to your article. To be honest, this phase might be one of the harshest phases because you get to undergo multiple reviews and edits to a certain business article; however, this phase makes your business article better to deploy in a certain company website.
If you’re already satisfied with your article, cross-check the effectiveness of the article header using tools such as Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer. After such, do some plagiarism checking to make your article authentic.
There you have it! Here are some of the tips that you can carry in making business articles.