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How to Find (and What to Look for in) Great B2B SaaS Writers
Want to find great B2B SaaS writers? Start by knowing the three crucial things to look out for —all detailed for you in this guide.
Victor Eduoh
Lead Strategist, VEC.
It’s called B2B writing for a reason.
When you hire someone for it, they aren’t just going to churn out words. What they create must compel decision makers at other businesses to see the need to buy your B2B software. Or, at the very least, admire your brand enough to care and want to learn more.
That’s no mean feat. Writers who consistently craft words that drive such outcomes are rare and hard to find. Why? Because good business-to-business (B2B) SaaS writing, as Graham puts it, is an outcome of…
Good thinking:
Prioritize Good Thinkers
Great thinking went into building your software. Likewise, great thinking goes into the decision-making process of buying B2B software:
- Will it solve the problem(s) I/we have?
- Will it be cost-effective in the long-term?
- Can we integrate it smoothly into our existing tech stack?
- Are there better options or alternatives for getting the job done?
These are just a few considerations. In typical enterprise sales cycles, there are even more boxes to tick before deals close. Legal and cybersecurity bottlenecks often come into the mix.
Good B2B writing must address one or more of these considerations to even earn a glance. While doing so, it must strike a chord with readers, who could be end users, decision-makers, or both.
In other words, it must:
- Resonate with and hold prospective users/buyers’ attention long enough for them to even read what’s written.
- Educate and subtly show, without coming off as salesy, how your brand or SaaS product solves their problem(s).
Again, that’s no mean feat.
It takes deep thinking to connect all necessary dots and make a business case with written content. It’s why here at VEC Studio, we prioritize deep thinking. To demonstrate, here’s an excerpt from one of our job descriptions:
By prioritizing good thinkers, we’ve assembled a small team of good B2B writers. Specifically, those exceptional at using strategic storytelling execution —an approach we call Product-Led Storytelling— to craft epic B2B pieces tech founders rave about.
Don’t take it from me:
The question now is, how do you find good thinkers? In other words, what should you look out for when hiring B2B SaaS writers?
What to Look for in B2B SaaS Writers
Before I proceed…
It’s crucial to note that all good writing, and not just business-to-business writing, requires good thinking. But specific to B2B, you want writers who also think broadly and long-term.
Chris Gillespie shared why:
Thinking broadly and long-term —weighing the interests of 5–7 people over a 6–12 month sales cycle— and contextually blending both into every written piece requires the left and right brain always working in tandem. Why? Because creativity blended with logical reasoning is how you write such good B2B content:
To identify B2B writers who have this trait, look out for:
1. Unique Angles
Two changes have rocked the content world in recent years. The first was Google’s 2022 Helpful Content Update. The second was the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritative, and Trustworthy) Update in 2023. Use both as a yardstick for the type of content people —and search engines— now reward, and the need for B2B writers who can spin unique angles on topics they write about pops.
For instance, the first update rewards content having new insight (i.e., has a higher information gain score compared to similar ones on the same topic). This means Google is more likely to show target readers your written content, if said content has new information more likely to help them.
Here’s the logic used:
To write content with new insight, and earn a higher information gain score, a B2B writer needs an angle different from others. What better way to do that than by sharing their own experience(s)?
Google, and other search engines, must’ve known this. So in 2023, they announced the E-E-A-T Update. Before now, content written by or involving experts, authoritative and trusted persons did better. Taking it a step further, Google added ‘experience’ to the mix.
According to them:
The key phrase, as highlighted above, is, “does content also demonstrate?” This means, added to writing with new insight to gain higher information gain score, a B2B writer should also demonstrate how to use a product to solve a problem they are writing about.
To do that, they must use the product themselves.
So when evaluating writers, we:
- Assign them a popular topic/keyword
- Give them access to a B2B product that solves problem(s) related to the assigned topic/keyword
- Pay them to write a 500-word draft on the assigned topic/keyword.
What do we look for here?
Those who can think deeply enough to spin a unique angle on the topic/keyword assigned to them, relative to how the product we gave them access to, solves a problem related to the topic/keyword. That’s crucial for growing with content written for your B2B SaaS.
Speaking of which...
2. Storytelling Prowess
Spinning a unique angle on a topic/keyword isn’t enough. Same goes with using a product and knowing how it solves problems. Both abilities are now inevitable, per recent search engine updates.
But they don’t equate to having the ability to write a B2B piece, readers will actually want to read. More importantly, they also don’t guarantee that one has the ability to write B2B content that engages target buyers enough to make them visualize how your product can transform their lives.
What we’ve found does?
Storytelling prowess:
Robert McKee is a storytelling consultant and the world’s best-known screenwriter lecturer. He has a Ph.D. in cinema arts. McKee’s students wrote the stories for hit films like Toy Story, Gandhi, Forrest Gump, and many others, winning 18 Academy Awards and 109 Emmy Awards, to name a few. The quote above is from his interview for a HBR report.
McKee went on:
Persuasion is the ultimate goal of B2B writing. But as McKee rightly points out, doing it with storytelling is hard. A writer must be able to harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story.
You’d struggle to find such writers.
We did, too.
So to overcome the hurdle, we examined the principles of well-told stories, relative to B2B writing. And found that they speak to specific readers (WHO), addresses pains they have relative to the topic of the content (WHAT), and gives them a reason to care or act (WHY).
Per our analysis,
- If a writer knows WHO they’re writing for, imagining stories that person will resonate with is easier.
- If they know WHAT pains that person is likely to have relative to the topic of a B2B piece, tying those stories to pains and showing how your product solves them to earn more attention is easier.
- And if they know WHY one will be compelled to care or act, they can further extend those stories to persuade target readers.
Most, if not all, good-thinking writers we’ve evaluated didn’t know this out of the box. Specifically, in the context of B2B writing, even those with rare storytelling skills struggle to execute it to the letter.
To help, we invented the ICP StoryScripts Framework:
As illustrated, ICP StoryScripts combines buyer personas on one end and Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) on the other. This results in storytelling scripts that address the WHO, WHAT, and WHY of B2B target readers, enabling our writers to imagine stories more likely to persuade a company’s target buyers when creating B2B content.
This sets our writers up to generate outcomes like this for clients:
But this framework (i.e., ICP StoryScripts) for imagining relevant stories for B2B writing doesn’t translate into persuasive pieces automatically. A writer still needs to strategically execute those imagined stories from briefing to final draft to stand a chance of producing outcomes.
And that’s the third thing to look out for.
3. Strategic Execution Know-How
Consider this B2B content design framework:
The little purple squares around the blue, ‘Overarching Company Narrative,’ circle represent thought leadership created to advance a company’s narrative and points of view (PoVs). The red, yellow, and green squares around the blue, FI, F2, F3, and so, circles are content to address relevant queries per the customer journey, create awareness, and drive traffic to a company’s features/solution pages.
Zoom out, and you get this:
Good B2B writers know the importance of fitting every piece they create into this puzzle. So they write strategically, fitting each created content into a feature/solution content cluster, per the right buyers’ journey stage. They also know how to align every written piece with a company’s PoV and overarching narrative.
The advantages of this?
Such strategic execution creates an excellent information architecture through proactive internal linking of relevant content and priority, high-converting pages. As a result, readers get way better site experiences and personalized content discovery paths.
If you’re anything like us, finding writers who could do this, from briefing to writing content with stories target readers can resonate with that fits well into the strategic mix, was a struggle. But upon close investigation, we found the problem. Most writers rely on generic briefs focused mostly on SEO and stuffing in as many keywords when writing.
Seeing there had to be a better way, especially when the focus should be on using stories to write people-first content...
We invented the StoryBrief & Outline Framework:
This framework, as illustrated, enables our B2B writers to strategically brief the creation of story-driven, personalized pieces. It has guardrails for everything from strategic alignment to picking customer pain points and queries (not just keywords) a piece will address, to outlining the briefs.
Here’s a walkthrough using this piece.
Using the StoryBrief & Outline Framework, I first aligned strategically by defining a goal, choosing a target query, and service cluster (because we’re a service business. For a B2B software, this will be a feature/solution cluster). Further, I stated the ‘why’ for creating this piece, ensuring it aligns with our business narrative:
Then you have the ICP StoryScript section.
Here, I chose a main ICP for this piece, the customer journey stage they’re likely to be at, and the broader audience. Next, perusing our ICP StoryScript doc for the main ICP, I picked three story scripts depicting the pains they are likely to have that’ll make them want to read this piece. Look closely, and you’ll notice the storytelling throughout this piece revolves around these:
The next step is where I dove into research tools.
Here, I scraped relevant, related keywords and search queries target readers looking to find B2B writers are likely to use in searching for an article or guide such as this one:
Next step is putting everything above into context.
In doing so, I didn’t dash to create an outline focused on stuffing in as many keywords as possible. Instead, my outline focuses on solving the main ICP’s pains, addressing queries they have related to finding B2B writers, all through strategic storytelling execution.
As you can see below:
On their own, the little details of this process have little effect.
But taken together, they empower our writers to strategically execute story-driven content that impacts the pipeline. They’ve also made a huge difference in how the SaaS marketing teams we work with (and train) approach content creation. For instance, a former client said:
In-House or B2B SaaS Freelance Writers?
I’ve stressed the need to prioritize those who can think deeply and broadly. I outlined three things to look out for that shows your prospective B2B writer is capable of thinking deeply and broadly. Out of the three things to look out for, we’ve found most writers struggle with the 2nd and 3rd —storytelling prowess and strategic execution know-how.
And to that, we invented the ICP StoryScript and StoryBrief & Outline frameworks briefly explained above. With these frameworks, you can train both in-house and freelance B2B writers to give you what you want.
Here’s a snippet of my online course for that:
Get lifetime access to the course here.
Back to the question, in-house or freelance B2B SaaS writers?
It depends on what will work best for you. In-house writers may be more expensive to hire, onboard, train, and retain. But they often have full access to your product. This advantage means they can learn more about it and come up with more unique ways of weaving it into the content they create. Freelancers, on the other hand, may be a lot less expensive.
But finding those who can align with your narrative, have processes for researching customers’ pains (not just keywords), take the time to actually use your product, and know how to weave it into content is hard.
In addition to these, most lack the storytelling prowess and strategic execution frameworks needed to craft story-driven content (aka, Product-Led Storytelling) that sets your product apart and drives growth.
That’s where VEC Studio comes in:
Like our approach to storytelling?
Victor Eduoh
Lead Strategist, VEC.
Founder, Lead Strategist @VEC. Thinker, reader, words-crafter, and husband to Omosede. Besides crafting product-led stories, I love scouting and grooming rare marketing talents.
Crafted with ❤️ in Port Harcourt