Learn B2B SaaS Marketing

B2B SaaS Content Brief Template

by 

Lauren O'Bryan

Last updated: September 12th, 2024

In the highly competitive niche of B2B SaaS, creating content that resonates with your target audience is crucial for success. However, developing an effective content brief can be challenging, often leading to content that misses its mark or requires extensive revisions. The key to overcoming these challenges is a well-structured content brief.

Our comprehensive B2B SaaS content brief template is here to transform your content creation process, ensuring your team delivers engaging, high-converting content every time. Ready to elevate your content game? Let’s get into it.

What is a Content Brief Template and Why Use One?

A content brief template is a structured document that outlines the requirements and goals for a piece of content. Its purpose is to guide content creators, ensuring the results align with the broader content strategy.

Using a content brief saves time and reduces the likelihood of miscommunication between managers and content writers. It also improves the SEO quality of a piece of content by naturally incorporating keywords, which can improve search performance and visibility.

What to Include in a B2B SaaS Content Brief Template

Using a content brief template can significantly streamline the content creation process, making it easier to produce high-quality content that meets your strategic objectives. Here are the essential elements to include in your B2B SaaS content brief template.

Goal

The goal summarizes the overall purpose of the piece of content. Setting a clear goal will not only direct the tone and style of the writing but also the stage of the marketing funnel it belongs to. This sets the scene for the rest of the document and helps avoid any major rewrites and changes.

Title

The title of a piece of content is very important for grabbing a reader’s attention, and while it’s recommended to provide a title, it can be adjusted for readability and effectiveness during the writing process. One thing to remember is that the title should always include the target keyword.

Target Audience

Identify the buyer personas you’re targeting with the content and their stage in the marketing funnel. Different buyer personas will appreciate a different tone or style of writing and will have different pain points to address. Understanding the audience helps tailor the content to effectively move them through the funnel.

Marketing Channels

Specify the marketing channels where the content will be promoted, as different channels might require different writing styles. For instance, LinkedIn posts differ from blog articles in format and linking practices.

Key Message and SEO Keywords

Define the key message and include keywords to maintain focus and meet SEO targets. Think about what you want the reader to take away from the content and what target keywords to insert. Aim for keywords with high buying intent instead of high search volume.

Tone and Style

Provide details about the tone and style of the content to ensure consistency with the company’s brand. For example, if the target audience is upper management, then content written in a more formal tone would be most appropriate.

Desired Word Count

Suggest a word count to help writers plan their articles, ensuring they are neither too long nor too short. This also ensures the content meets SEO guidelines, making it more competitive.

Call-to-Action

Specify the CTA based on the content marketing strategy, whether it’s to drive users to a lead magnet or build brand awareness. Clearly defined CTAs can be creatively integrated into the content.

Internal Links

Include internal links to related articles to develop a hub-and-spoke content model. Over time, writers will become familiar with the content and include internal links autonomously.

Reference Materials

Provide reference materials, like similar articles, to ensure the content matches the desired end result and reduce the research time required to structure an article.

Deadline

Finally, setting a deadline that gives you some room for editing and minor changes will ensure that everyone involved in the content creation process has ample time to work effectively.

The Fundamentals of Killer B2B SaaS Content

At Powered by Search, we’ve identified some core fundamentals to crafting SEO content that competes and converts.

Develop High-Quality and Helpful Content

To effectively engage your audience, start by consistently producing high-quality content that addresses their specific needs and challenges.

Understanding your audience’s pain points and the information they seek is crucial. Research what your customers’ pain points are and gain a deep understanding of how these problems impact their business. When promoting your product, highlight the benefits it provides to your customers rather than the features it displays. Customers care more about what the features in your product can help them achieve.

Once you’ve identified the most relevant topics, invest time and effort into creating each piece. Adopting a quality-over-quantity approach ensures that your content provides real value. Although it may seem time-consuming to focus on a single article, high-quality content can be repurposed and shared across multiple channels, maximizing its impact.

In addition to republishing across channels, you should also regularly update your existing content. Old, outdated content can harm your SEO efforts and fail to meet your audience’s needs. By ensuring that all content is current and accurate, you maintain its relevance and usefulness, enhancing both user experience and search engine performance.

Be Strategic About Content Creation

B2B SaaS content creation should never be ad hoc – every piece should be curated to fit into the broader content strategy and business goals. Content should reach users at all stages of the marketing funnel and at varying points of the buyer awareness matrix. Let’s break this down a little more.

Prioritize the Bottom of the Funnel

Creating content for users at different stages of the marketing funnel ensures you reach the right people at the right time. When a user is at the top of the funnel and has just discovered your product, you want them to find content that informs them about it.

That said, we recommend starting from the bottom of the funnel, as this is more cost-effective. Bottom of the funnel users are more likely to convert, providing a better ROI. This content should provide the final bit of information a prospect needs to make a purchasing decision. Once you have all the bottom of the funnel content you need, you can move on to the middle and top of the funnel.

Middle of the funnel content is intended to get the user thinking about specific use cases for your product, whereas top of the funnel content should inform the user about your product and intrigue them to learn more.

Craft Content Based on Buyer Awareness

When planning the types of content to align with the different stages of the funnel, it’s worth considering our buyer awareness matrix. This takes into consideration the 4 different awareness levels a user moves through:

• Problem Unaware: Users who aren’t even aware of their problem or how your product can solve it.
• Problem Aware: Users who are aware of their problem but are not yet sure how to solve it.
• Solution Aware: Users who understand their problem and are actively searching for a solution.
• Product Aware: Users who are both aware of their problem and your product and are interested in evaluating it.

Different types of content are better suited to the information needs of users at these different levels of awareness.

• Users who are problem unaware are also at the top of the funnel, where content like quizzes, expanded list posts, and guides are the best choices.
• Those who are problem aware gain the most from content like checklists, webinars, templates, and guides.
• Solution aware users are firmly in the middle of the funnel. Content like interactive calculators, product choice guides, and product tour guides will help guide them along the funnel.
• Product aware users are the high-value leads. Detailed case studies and comparison pages will improve the chances of converting them.

Consider User Experience

Finally, organize your content around topics, not keywords. We recommend using the hub and spoke technique, which is intuitive for users to navigate when they want more of the same type of information. This approach also aids search engine crawlers and boosts site authority because the internal links help a search engine connect all the pieces of the puzzle.

Wrapping Up

With our B2B SaaS content brief template, we guarantee smooth communication between all parties involved in the content creation process. In addition, this structured approach will ensure your content achieves the goals you set out for it, whether that is to increase leads or build brand awareness.

Quality content is a key element to developing a demand generation flywheel and sustainable business growth. But, before you get started, there’s another beneficial tool in our toolbox – the SaaS scalability score self-assessment. This free tool will help you understand where your business currently sits against the competition and how scalable it is in its current state.