Writing for a Trade Audience

A different reader

Most advice about writing for the web assumes a reader who knows less than you and has limited patience: simplify, avoid jargon, keep it short, explain the basics.

That advice is correct for a homeowner and actively harmful for a specifier, a buyer, or a tradesperson choosing a supplier.

Those readers already know the basics. What they are looking for is evidence that you know the parts beyond the basics, and every paragraph explaining something they learned in their first year is a signal that you may not.

Jargon is vocabulary here

The advice to avoid technical terms exists because they exclude readers who do not know them.

When every reader knows them, they stop excluding and start doing what vocabulary does: saying something precisely and quickly.

Writing around a term to avoid using it makes a sentence longer, vaguer, and slightly odd to somebody who knows the word you are avoiding.

It also reads as an outsider's account of the field, which is the impression you least want to give the person deciding whether you understand their problem.

Lead with the specification

A general reader needs orientation before detail. A trade reader wants the detail and will orient themselves.

So the opening carries the specification, the constraint, or the number, rather than an introduction to the subject area.

Rated to this load, in this configuration, at this tolerance is a better first line for that audience than a paragraph about the importance of choosing the right supplier.

They are scanning to establish relevance quickly, and specifics let them do it in seconds.

What they are actually checking

• Have you done this at their scale.
• Do you know the failure modes, not just the process.
• Can you work to their standards and documentation.
• What are your lead times and capacity, honestly.
• Where are your limits, stated rather than discovered later.

The second item separates suppliers more than anything else. Anybody can describe how something is done; describing what goes wrong and why demonstrates having done it repeatedly.

Include the numbers

Vagueness that passes unnoticed with the public is disqualifying here.

High quality, fast turnaround, and competitive pricing tell a professional buyer nothing and suggest you are unwilling to be pinned down.

Tolerances, capacities, dimensions, lead times in working days, minimum and maximum order quantities, and the range your pricing actually occupies.

These feel risky to publish because they let somebody rule you out. That is their function: being ruled out early by people you could not have served is a saving, not a loss.

Say what you do not do

The most useful thing on a trade-facing page, and the least common.

The sizes you do not handle, the materials you do not work with, the certifications you do not hold, the jobs you routinely refer elsewhere.

A buyer reading a page listing everything with no limits assumes either that it is marketing or that you will discover the limits on their project.

A page with clear boundaries is credible in a way no amount of capability language can be, and it filters your enquiries to the ones you can serve.

A worked example

A fabrication shop's site described precision engineering solutions for a wide range of industries, with a photograph of a workshop.

Enquiries were frequent and mostly unsuitable, and the specifiers they wanted were not calling.

The rewrite listed their machines with capacities, the materials they routinely worked and the two they did not, their tolerance range, typical lead times in working days at current loading, and their minimum order value.

It also stated plainly that they were not set up for high-volume production runs and named the sort of shop that was.

Total enquiries fell by about a third. Enquiries that turned into quotes roughly doubled.

Two of their largest customers that year said the capacity list was why they made contact, because it was the only supplier site where they could establish suitability without a phone call.

Write as one of them, not about them

There is a tone that gives away an outsider immediately, and it is worth learning to hear.

Explaining the significance of things the reader deals with daily. Describing the industry in the third person as though observing it. Enthusiasm about routine matters.

The register that works is closer to how you would brief a colleague: assume competence, state the position, note the exceptions, and stop.

Where somebody outside the trade is writing for you, this is the hardest thing to get right and the first thing a knowledgeable reader notices.

Both audiences on one site

Many businesses sell to the public and to the trade, and the temptation is to write one set of pages that serves both.

That produces pages too basic for one group and too technical for the other.

Separate them structurally: a trade section with its own pages, written properly for that reader, linked clearly from the navigation.

It is more pages and it is honest about the fact that they are different conversations, which is what both audiences would prefer.

The counter-case

Assuming knowledge can go wrong, and it does so in a specific way.

The person reading your page is often not the specialist. Procurement staff, an office manager collecting quotes, or a director signing off a decision they did not make are all common readers of trade pages.

A page written entirely for the specialist can be unusable to the person who actually issues the purchase order.

The workable structure is a plain summary at the top, stating what you do, for whom, and the broad parameters, with the full technical detail below it. The specialist skips the summary and the buyer never reads past it, and both are served.

Writing one

1. Use the correct terms without explaining them.
2. Open with the specification or the constraint.
3. Publish the numbers, including the unflattering ones.
4. State what you do not do.
5. Describe the failure modes, not just the process.
6. Add a plain summary at the top for the non-specialist.
7. Have somebody in the trade read it before publishing.

The last step takes ten minutes and catches everything that reads as an outsider's writing.

Describing a service properly is covered in describing a service without listing features.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.