This detailed blog post brief example is part of the Tech B2B Blog Post Guide series.
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The story behind this Blog Post Brief example
This is an anonymized example of a real world brief that helps folks get their head around responses.
The context for this example is that it was a blog post brief for a tech B2B company that provides cloud marketplace software and services, but this formula can be applied to any tech B2B.
A lot of the content in a Brief can be reused for other blog posts, with just tweaks here and there — see some of the bold sections that recommend out-of-scope/other blog posts.
Who is Dear Reader?
Ideal customer persona for Dear Reader
We’re looking to help a cloud alliance manager at an ISV that is new to cloud marketplaces.
They might be aspiring to getting on a marketplace, or be in their first 90-180 days.
Our primary Dear Reader is the alliance manager because they tend to be the centre of marketplace operations.
But there are secondary Dear Readers:
- The sales team who’s deal success and commission is now tied to marketplace success.
- The product team who are having to divert scarce and finite engineering talen to help marketplace listing and integrations.
- The leadership team who are frustrated with progress not matching promise, and are starting to question their team’s competency and the point of marketplaces.
Ideal customer company profile for Dear Reader
Our target company profile for this blog post is an ISV that is also a cloud partner — they might not be in a cloud marketplace, or it could be early days. It could be a company that is not yet aware of cloud marketplace challenges, or that has experienced them but not solved them yet.
AWS has about 4,000 ISV partners (about 50% of total global partners), but we’re not sure how many are on AWS Marketplace. Some research suggests it’s anything from 5-25% depending on region (more in USA, less elsewhere).
The company must have a growth strategy linked to cloud marketplaces (perhaps we do a different, interlinked blog on that scenario?). If they don’t have this ambition, they aren’t a candidate.
Real example of Dear Reader
Our target Dear Reader for this blog post is someone we’ll call Joan who is the Alliance Manager in an ISV that is building a cloud marketplace-focused go-to-market strategy.
Joan’s challenge is that she and her company are new to working with cloud marketplaces (6 months) so the amount of work, complexity, and new systems is overwhelming. There is also a disconnect between the high expectations of deal and revenue growth from cloud marketplaces compared to the reality. All of this is putting a lot of pressure on Joan. They have hired 2 new people to help, but the problem has got worse, if anything.
It’s not just Joan that’s frustrated!
- Her sales peers are frustrated because Joan and her alliance team are perceived as the bottleneck.
- The product team are annoyed because they’ve had to take precious and finite engineering resources away from product development to working out how to integrate with cloud marketplaces.
- The CEO is feeling and sharing the pressure because the board expected more growth from cloud marketplaces and are now questioning the competency of the exec team and staff.
Cloud alliance managers like Joan know there are different ways to address this, but she’s so busy treading water to stay afloat that she doesn’t have time to do deep evaluations.
Joan is super cautious. She feels like the fragile atmosphere might break if she suggests to sales, product, and leadership that they need to try something new — what if that doesn’t work?
Buyer Journey / Pipeline Funnel
Dear Reader could be in one of three starting positions:
- Educate pipeline – We’re not in a cloud marketplace but have growth ambitions that depend on it. We’re not sure what we’re in store for. We would appreciate honest and transparent guidance and not just “grass is greener” marketing.
- Upside buyer intent – We’re in one cloud marketplace but relatively new. We’re experiencing “productivity” issues and our staff and performance is struggling: how can we do better? We need a proven path.
- Strong buyer intent – We’re in one cloud marketplace and we’d like to go to 3 marketplaces, but that seems daunting given our experience of just one marketplace! What can we do?
Given the above points, mapping them to content we could hypothesise:
- We need to first focus on the strong buyer intent because one of our strengths is making multi-marketplaces possible without pain. The challenge is that they might already have a solution, which in that case means we need a separate competitive piece.
- If we focus on the “new to marketplace and feeling the pain” readers, then we need to acknowledge the challenges and show them a clear, short, and achievable path to alleviate their pain for alliance, sales, product, and leadership.
- For those not in marketplaces, it’s an education processes which I think is out of scope of this brief and should be done in other linked posts.
Decision: for this post, we should focus this post on scenario 2, on the ISVs in one marketplace with challenges.
What outcome do we want?
Brand contribution.
If we can use this blog to align with our ethos of being open, trustworthy, competent, helpful, and knowing the “happy path to success” then I think this blog supports the brand.
We know that
- Competitors seem to have relatively shallow content — more “analysty” and “high-level”.
- Prospects and customers tell us that they want to self-serve their thinking as much as possible.
Also, even though we have an idea who we’re targeting, we know there are a lot of “lurkers” out there that might come across our content and discover our brand and become a future prospect/customer (we need to make sure we check “How did you hear of us?” in sales calls etc).
Campaign contribution.
This blog post is funded out of the 2024Q2 Good-fit New Logo campaign.
It’s not focused on existing customers, or the prospects we ruled out above (not yet started, or multi-marketplace) — we should definitely do other blog posts for them, because they have different challenges, education needs, and buyer intent.
Budget has been allocated by Joe to get this done in 2024Q1 ahead of the campaign.
Internal team benefit.
There are a few different team benefits we expect from this blog:
- Marketing/pipeline – More focused MQLs from the campaign — are we landing with the right prospects?
- Sales conversions – Does the blog help sales qualification and getting prospects over the line into customers?
- Can we plumb this into the company deck / the CEO’s customer/partner analyst pitch as “one of the things we learned and are now helping with” –> brand equity.
- Our own alliances with cloud marketplace owners like AWS Marketplace — they are pushing us to help get more customers on board.
What are the blog mechanics?
Blog outline
H1. How ISVs break can through cloud marketplace bottlenecks and finally unlock growth
Key points – map these to H2s
- Promise: Cloud marketplace promises (meet customers, fulfilment smoothness, growth, partnering etc)
- Challenge: multi-CRM, manual updates, faulty pipelines leaking deals, etc.
- Solution: not manual, not home grown, not huge “partner automation”, goldilocks of automation from inside your CRM.
- Inc. case study.
- Research points
- Getting started — as self-service as possible.
Blog SEO
- We need to do some keyword research, but not keyword stuffing.
- No GenAI/LLM copy and paste.
- We do want to align with Google Helpful Content Update (this mont!) and Google E-E-A-T.
- See our company SEO Guide (link to doc).
Common guidance:
- Good H1 inc. keyword.
- H2s can be “questions”.
- Add meta description using Yoast.
- Use on-page linking with ToC and H2 anchor links (not down to H3+ tho).
- Make sure images have the company name + relevant word in the filename and alt-text.
- Add the URL to the UTM builder/tracker.
Content direction
- See our Blog Guidelines.
- See our Style Guide.
- Related blogs:
- Blog 1
- Blog 2
- Related pages:
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Our research white paper on cloud marketplace operations.
- Speak with Dave in Sales, and Babs in Customer Success – both have contributed on this topic before.
- We can give you access to some testimonials, specific customer cases (challenges they face).
- We need this to be in our friendly, helpful brand voice and speaking directly to Dear Reader.
Content distribution
Channels
This blog post will be canonical on our https://acme.com/guides section.
Will advertise + atomize this on the following channels:
- Leadership Medium blog (will be summarized/key point/linked).
- LinkedIn Company page post.
- LinkedIn Company page article.
- X company page.
- CEO’s LinkedIn and X pages.(other staff pages).
- Q2M1 Newsletter.
- Cloud hyperscale partner network.
- Product pages — landing/microsite inc. marketplace links.
- Sales comms inc. drip feed for qualified prospects.
Atomize
Once this post is finalized, we will atomize as follows:
- Create snippets for each H2/ToC item for social platforms.
- Infographic.
- Key points (quotes, numbers).
- Linked atoms — what’s in this article that matches external events/messages?
- Drip feed / email messages.
- Sales talking points.
- New optional slide on the sales deck.
- LinkedIn carousel.
- Key points LinkedIn Article (CEO).
- What other blog post ideas can we squeeze out of this?
Engagement
Internal engagement:
- Engage the sales, alliance, product, and leadership through blog brief + development process but keep engagement rate low – input into brief, a review + contribution, that’s it.
- Make sure we’re aligned with the brand/design folks so we have the final template to simplify pushing live.
- Make sure the web analytics guy has got this on his radar and part of the campaign tracking.
External engagement:
- Prospects are key. This will be manual via sales, but also automated via drip feed / newsletter, and self-service via website/social.
- Make sure it’s available on the customer success portal and that team knows, and customers can see — they might have more ideas or contributions and appreciate our openness (brand again).
- Social commentators – we have a list of people we value online and we can either give them a nudge or drop into their comments, and email them direct.
- This isn’t paid media related, so PR isn’t in scope.
- Our analyst friends.
- Our co-sell partners, esp. the hyperscaler alliance team, we might have an oppo to publish on their site.