In the world of SaaS business, creating quality content is a key aspect of marketing, driving growth and retaining customers.
Whether it's blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, or social media updates, your content must be relevant, informative, and engaging.
However, developing quality content that resonates with your target audience requires more than just good writing skills.
Effective briefing is essential for creating content that speaks to your ideal customer, addresses their pain points, and offers a solution that reinforces your brand's image and overall objectives.
Nonetheless, briefing your SaaS content writer can be a significant challenge, but it's essential to get it right. In this article, we will guide you through the process of briefing your SaaS content writer effectively.
Explain the Business Purpose of a Topic
Before briefing your writer, it's essential to understand why you are creating content for a specific topic or keyword.
The primary purpose behind briefing a writer is to ensure that the content they produce adds value to your business.
For example, if you're a SaaS company that provides cloud-based HR solutions, you may want to create content that highlights the benefits of cloud-based HR systems to small businesses. The business purpose of this topic is to generate leads, promote your product, and increase brand awareness.
By defining the business purpose, your writer can look at different angles in which he or she can write about the topic.
You can even provide a semantic keyword structure to showcase the different search queries of this topic. Doing this ensures that your writer doesn't go off track.
Explain ICP Pain Points the Topic Addresses
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is somebody who will most likely use your product and benefit from it. When briefing your writer, it's essential to highlight your ICP's needs and their pain points.
It includes identifying the specific challenges, pain points, or problems that your target audience faces, and explaining how your content will help them solve these issues.
This information helps the writer formulate an outline to target the audience's needs and develop content that resonates with them.
Continuing with our example of a cloud-based HR solutions provider, an ICP for this company could be small business owners who struggle with HR tasks. Pain points could include managing payroll, employee benefits, and regulatory compliance. When briefing your writer, you can highlight these essential pain points and it will form a good foundation to address the entire article.
Showcase Various Product Use Cases for the Topic
The third step is to showcase various product use cases for the topic.
Identify how your product can help solve the pain points of your target audience and integrating these use cases into the content.
For example, if you're selling a project management tool that includes a feature for real-time collaboration, you could highlight this feature in your content and explain how it can help remote teams work together more effectively.
Use cases and real-world examples can make the content more engaging and informative, and encourage your ideal customer to use your product.
As a SaaS content manager, it's important to understand these use cases clearly before you explain them to your writer. This will help the writer understand what they're writing about and how it can benefit your target audience.
Emphasize all Search Queries They Should Cover
Keyword research is a critical part of content development. Therefore, you should emphasize all the search queries that should be covered. It helps the writer understand the search queries related to the topic and incorporate them into the content.
A well-done keyword research can help improve rankings on SERPs and drive traffic to your website.
To help your writer with this critical aspect of content development, provide them with a list of the keywords and phrases to include in the piece. For example, if your topic is about cloud-based HR solutions, your list of search queries could include "cloud HR solutions," "HR compliance," "payroll management," and "employee benefits."
This means identifying the specific keywords, phrases, and queries that your target audience is using to search for information related to your topic, and making sure that your content includes these terms.
Establish Ground Rules on the Quality Expected
The quality of your content speaks volumes about your brand.
To set the right standard for your content, define quality standards for your writer, which can include the tone, style, structure, format of the content, marketing angles, and providing product-led examples.
For example, you may want your content to be written in a conversational tone, with short paragraphs and bullet points for easy reading, and include relevant images.
If you have already established a writing style guide describing the standards expected, then it will ensure that the writer provides content that meets the expectations and resonates with your ideal customer.
Discuss Creative Approaches or Differences
One of the goals of briefing your writer is to ensure that the content produced is engaging and informative.
Encourage your writer to think creatively to make the content more exciting, such as using customer stories, real-time examples, infographics, or social proof.
Allowing your writer to experiment with different approaches can create opportunities for your content to stand out from your competitors. You may also gain an advantage in getting more shares and interaction from your target audience.
And of course, there'll be places where you may disagree with your writer. A healthy disagreement can further improve creative processes. Understand your writer's angles and add to them to make them better.
Unless it's way out of the line than your original expectations, you can give the writer some leverage.
Give Them Leverage to Design Ideation
Speaking of leverage, encourage your writer to generate content ideas for designs, infographics or videos that support the business objectives of the topic.
You can provide the writer with guidance that narrows down the possibilities, but leave room for them to use their creativity and write more confidently.
When your writer has some autonomy to generate content ideas, they tend to feel more committed to their work and usually deliver above expectations. The final content output will be more valuable, thereby meeting the standards expected.
Establish Clear Deadlines
Producing quality content takes time, and yet you need to set deadlines. Every business needs to see results before a specified time.
Therefore, setting clear deadlines can help in ensuring that content is produced in a way that promotes the business's overall objectives. Clear deadlines can help you measure the progress against the objectives set and make necessary adjustments.
This means setting a realistic timeline for the content creation process, including research, writing, editing, and final approval. Make sure to communicate the deadlines clearly and stick to them, as this will help ensure that the content is delivered on time and to a high standard.
For example, you may want to set a deadline of two weeks from the briefing date for the first draft, and then allow a few days for editing and revisions before final approval.
Apply These Tips to Improve Your SaaS Content Briefing
Briefing your SaaS content writer effectively is crucial to creating content that resonates with your target audience and achieves your marketing goals.
By working together closely and communicating effectively, you can create content that informs, engages, and converts your target audience, and helps you stand out in a crowded SaaS marketplace.