When putting together an investment proposal, business plan, or selling your enterprise’s products or services online, you can summarize your business in less than 200 words.
Also called a company summary, your business description is a short, engaging couple of paragraphs that can go into all sorts of sponsorship recognition and other promotional materials.
Using key points and engaging sentences, summarizing your business in under 200 words by including only the essential details about your company, what it offers, and who it services. Your business summary is aimed at helping an outsider understand your enterprise without the figures, analysis, numbers, or charts that would be included in a wholesome report.
Why summarize your business in under 200 words?
The ‘about us’ page within a typical business website or blog is the most visited and productive for small or medium enterprises. Your business’s summary or description story is a powerful way for new customer acquisition, as people prefer dealing with companies they can identify with, or products and services they can trust.
A business summary must be designed to grab the reader’s attention and directly attract their attention to your company’s best attributes. Your business’ essence should be distilled down to a page and the information within arranged to create a better vision of what your company does.
The entirety of your business’s operational existence is quickly boiled down into a digestible format using a structure that involves;
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An elevated pitch
To summarize your business in under 200 words, start with an all-encompassing paragraph that captures vital points and key attributes of your company. Express the characteristics of your business in summary form, within a few paragraphs and maintain the same pitch reflected throughout your company description.
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High-value content levels
Other sections of your business summary will include non-essential information, but within these 200 words, only include high-level details. Keep the information within these paragraphs closely related, using power keywords that help give the reader an overview of your business without any fluff.
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A passionate description
Your business summary should show how passionate and excited you feel about its products, services, or customer bases. The tone of the 200 words summarization must infect the reader with the same passion, engaging their interest, and helping them discover your aim for starting or running the business.
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A reduction of redundant information
When writing your business summary, the excitement and passion can have you getting carried away, putting in more than the necessary 200 words. Cut out the unnecessary and redundant details from the summarization of your business activities, and make the narration concise and clear.
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A well-proofread description
Review your business summary for errors, grammar mistakes, or typos, while reviewing sentence flow and the information correlation to have the most vibrant impact on your reader.
How to write a focused business summary
While informing the reader what your company does, summarizing your business in under 200 words needs to focus on products or services. Since the aim is to sell your enterprise to the reader, your business summary shouldn’t necessarily list all the description details. You can describe a few focused critical items as the overview, and picking on a couple of vital aspects of your services.
Initially, you’ll explain how and why you started your business, which can include having reasonable know-how of the service, product, and market. This is called the vision and it explains why your business does things differently from the other providers in that specific niche. You could be selling a product whose idea was borne out of experiencing or by noticing a gap in the market, and your business description must communicate this.
The ‘why’ question of starting and operating your business will often lead to reasons that lend credibility to your summary, seeing as you’ve taken the time to invest yourself in the enterprise.
To write a well-rounded business summary in under 200 words, keep your narrative around the aspects of;
Answering questions concerning your business
Have the answers to questions that any prospective client or prospective customer would ask, answering with complete honesty in less than two or three sentences.
- What is the product or service that your enterprise currently provides?
- How do you go about the provision of that product or service?
- How are your products or services utilized by your clients?
- How does your service or product assist consumers at the moment?
- How is immediate revenue generated by your business?
- Who are your most important clients that your business targets currently?
- How do you market or advertise to prospective clients?
- Why does your product or service perform differently from your nearest competitors?
- How do you achieve success with your primary client base, and who are the secondary or tertiary customer base that your business targets?
Answer these questions beforehand, creating an initial draft from the answers, and structuring of your less than 200 words business summary.
Telling a story
Starting with the basics of your business structure, narrate the what, where, and why of your enterprise as a cleverly woven story. Introducing your company should include an explanation of what your business does and who or what market it operates in. Your introducing narrative should also include the amount of time you’ve been in the business, as this portrays expertise, experience, and resilience.
Take your initial draft and field test the assumptions to find out whether they integrate, assessing if they’re true, false, or functionally incomplete. This is your action plan, and you can revise it as you proceed, modifying the layout and including insights from past lessons along with your business’s growth story.
Build a positive brand description in story form, engaging the reader, and making your business memorable to a prospective client. If your product or services has an origin of the raw materials backstory, incorporate contemporary messaging regarding your responsibility through organic, sustainability, or eco-friendly natural options.
Your business summary reads like a positively vibrant story that is informative and entertaining by targeting emotional or earth-conscious triggers.
Providing a benefit
What does your business stand for, or which of your product or service offering can your clientele identify? Is your business model integral? Does it stand for fair trade and social justice, or do you uphold transparency, honesty, and a global consciousness?
Where or how you source your raw materials or human resource for your business can be narrated in terms like locally sourced, eco-friendly, organic, or energy efficient. By communicating your business policies or operating philosophy as a worthy cause, you’re giving the readers of your less than 200-word business summary something to rally around or support.
An excellent answer to the question ‘why your company is the better choice as opposed to the competition’ is the benefits it provides for your clientele. Focus on one or two significant advantages, letting the reader know what they stand to gain by transacting with your business.
It could be that your business offering gives customers superior service, convenience, award-winning products, or personalizes its services to the client’s requirements. Your enterprise might have a memorable event or occasion within which customers receive cheaper, exemplary services, or other incentives.
Telling your business summary with passion
Your business summarization will be scanned by a reader for proof that your enterprise is borne out of passion, or whether you are excited about performing your practice. Clients and entrepreneurs love a passionate business summary that can communicate your vision or mission better than the best info-graphics.
Write of your business operations following on a technological initiative, social philosophy, or other aspects, and include what changes you’d like to happen within your industry. Your summary should leave the reader with a relatable moment when your passion for the business was born, and how the opportunity was capitalized on.
Cutting down to the necessary 200 word summary of your business
Since the goal is how to summarize your business in under 200 words, you need to cut out a massive chunk of your information to create a swimmable, quick breakdown of your main points. You don’t want to end up with a wordy company summary that won’t cover all the pertinent details, and the framework to use will include;
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Selecting the most relevant information
Read through your draft business summary, scanning the available text to identify the essential details, and distinguish this information with that which doesn’t have precedence. With a clear perception of the impression, you want to create on the reader, define your most relevant information.
Go through your article and bold out all the sentences or phrases that can be used to reference the existing operations of your business.
After this, strike out any descriptive information that you’ve not bolded, and this usually gets rid of 60% to 80% of your draft summary. Your business description is now more or less 300 words long.
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Splitting up the vital points into logical sections
With the resultant manageable 250 or 300 words of your business summary, it’s time to connect the sentences so that they flow logically, taking the reader from one idea to the next. Structure this remnant volume of your article, and create sense from your sentence fragments using standalone bulleted points.
You can mesh together sentences for more fluid flow using a heading and one or two subtitles, or compartmentalize your information in groupings that consists of;
- An introduction
- Main content
- Summary
After organizing your copy into these three sections, any of the points that appear out of place are used to create separate callouts or add supplementary information.
Styling and polishing your business summary
Once you have a structure in place, and the number of words doesn’t exceed 200, add some finesse and flair to the summarization of your business. Your write-up should carry the right font type and size so as to have an impact on how it’s perceived. Limit the number of fonts you use to less than 3, and keep the main body of text highly legible with a variance in style for your subtitles.
Proofread your business summary and edit out all grammatical, prose, or point of view issues, ensuring that your article is addressed to a moderate or highly literate readership.
The best business summary is not merely made up of cobbled up information but tells a compelling and cohesive story. Summarize your business story to narrate a single tale, directing flow with a subtle or a highlighted phrase, enhancing the engagement capacity of your summary.
Promote your business message
With your business summary polished and clear, you can further the reach of your message by exploring a marketing strategy called guest posting. Essentially, you contribute as an author to another website on a topic that is of particular interest to your target audience, and include a link to your business. While this is a highly effective approach to driving interest and traffic to your business, it can be a really involved and daunting task, so many businesses who practice this strategy rely on a service that offers guest post links. These services command a large network of blogger and content writers from all industries, and facilitate guest posting for your business, to further your message and brand.
