You have a buying committee of as many as 13 people. Each needs different content. You don’t have the budget, the time, or the team to serve all of them simultaneously.
Who do you write for first?
Most ISVs write what’s easiest — product updates, release notes, the blog post someone had an idea for in a team meeting — rather than what’s most commercially urgent. The content programme feels busy. The pipeline doesn’t move.
Prioritising content is about doing the right things in the right order. Here’s how to think about it.
Start with the champion
Whatever your budget, size of your team or stage your business is at the champion is your friend. They’re the person who initiates the search, builds the internal case, and carries your content into every room you’ll never be in.
Just over two-thirds (69%) of B2B buyers engage with salespeople after they’ve already made their decision, according to HubSpot. That’s a decision being shaped by your content (or your competitor’s) long before anyone reaches out.
If the champion lands on your website and finds nothing that speaks to their challenge, nor addresses their stakeholders‘ objections, or gives them something worth sharing internally, the deal stalls before your sales team knows it existed.
Champion-first content means problem-led blogs that describe the challenge your product solves in the language your buyers actually use. Thought leadership that demonstrates you understand their world. Clear, jargon-free explanations of what your product does — written for the person who has to convince their CFO it’s worth the investment, not for the developer who already understands it.
Then the next audience depends on your maturity
Beyond the champion, the right content priority depends on the maturity of your ISV and the complexity of your go-to-market. But the sequencing follows a logic. Once the champion is served, your next audience is the person most likely to kill the deal.
For most ISVs, that’s the technical evaluator — the IT director or technical lead whose job is to find every reason to say no. And the content that neutralises their scepticism most effectively, at any stage of ISV maturity, is proof. Specifically: case studies.
Early stage: start with the technical evaluator — and your trial sequence
If you’re a fast-moving ISV without a large content library, the most urgent gap is almost always proof aka case studies.
According to a report from the CMO Council, 87% of B2B buyers say online content significantly influenced their choice of vendor. And the content that does the most work at the middle of the funnel — when the champion is building their case and the technical evaluator is doing due diligence — is the case study.
One strong, well-written customer story beats ten mediocre blog posts. It demonstrates that your product works in the real world, for organisations like theirs, with outcomes they can point to. It gives the champion something concrete to put in front of a sceptical IT director or a questioning CFO. It reduces the perceived risk of the decision — which is the real job of ISV content.
If you only have capacity for one content investment right now, make it a case study. Then make another.
But case studies get people to your door. Something else has to get them over the threshold.
If you’re offering a free trial — through Marketplace, direct, or through a partner — the email sequence that runs alongside it is doing critical commercial work that most ISVs treat as an afterthought.
Generic onboarding emails written for no one in particular are a wasted opportunity. The champion who signed up needs to see value quickly enough to justify the internal conversation they’re about to have. The technical evaluator who’s been asked to assess it needs reassurance about security and integration. The economic buyer who’s watching the trial progress needs early signals of ROI.
A trial sequence written for a specific audience — in their language, addressing their specific concerns, building confidence at exactly the right moment — is one of the highest-converting content investments an early-stage ISV can make. And almost nobody does it properly.
Scaling: sector, channel, and keeping your existing customers warm
As your product grows and your customer base diversifies, broad content starts losing deals to competitors who speak the specific language of the sector they’re targeting.
An internal communications manager in financial services has different concerns from one in healthcare. An IT director in manufacturing thinks about integration differently from one in professional services. Sector-specific pages — addressing the challenges, compliance requirements, and workflow needs of your key verticals — signal that you understand the market your buyer operates in.
If you’re selling through a partner network, this is also the stage where partner-facing content becomes commercially critical. Partners can’t sell what they don’t understand. They won’t prioritise a vendor who hasn’t given them the materials to make the conversation easy. Yet partner content is almost universally the most underdeveloped part of an ISV’s content programme — treated as an afterthought rather than a growth lever.
And then there’s the audience most ISVs forget entirely: the customers they already have.
At this stage your customer base is large enough that churn has become a meaningful commercial risk. Most ISVs disappear after implementation — communicating intensively during onboarding and then going quiet until renewal is on the horizon. By the time they reappear, the customer has already started asking whether they still need the product.
The customers who renew are the ones who felt included throughout the year. That means running content across multiple channels simultaneously — not just acquisition content for new prospects, but a programme that keeps existing customers warm. Product updates that explain what’s changed and why it matters to them. Tips and best practice content that helps them get more value from what they’ve already bought. Roadmap previews that make them feel like insiders rather than passive subscribers. Community content that connects them to other users solving similar problems.
Retention is a content problem as much as a customer success one. And at this stage of growth, the content investment that protects your renewal rate is at least as valuable as the content investment that drives new pipeline.
As Toni Hopponen noted in our Original Thinkers interview: “It’s not about how many pages you have; it’s about how helpful they are to your buyer.” That applies to existing customers as much as prospects. A customer who consistently finds your content useful — who learns something, solves a problem, or gets ahead of a challenge because of something you published — is a customer who doesn’t need to be persuaded to renew.
More mature: close the gaps in the buying committee
At this stage you have case studies, sector pages, and partner materials. The priority now is identifying where deals are still stalling.
A formal content audit — mapping your buying committee against your existing content library — will almost always reveal the same gap: the economic buyer. The CFO who needs ROI evidence and line items, not product descriptions, is the most consistently ignored stakeholder in ISV content. Bottom-of-funnel content that gives the champion the financial proof to build their business case is frequently the piece that’s missing when deals stop moving.
How to map your content to the buyer journey
Content priority isn’t just about audience — it’s about where in the buying journey your biggest gap is.
Top of funnel — the champion is searching for answers to a problem they may not yet have fully defined. Content here should speak to the challenge, not the solution. Blog posts, thought leadership, sector-specific guides that demonstrate you understand the problem. The goal isn’t to sell. It’s to be found by the right person at the right moment.
Middle of funnel — the champion has found you and is building the case. The technical evaluator is asking hard questions. Case studies, integration documentation, security credentials, and business case support do their most important work here. Content needs to be thorough, specific, and honest. Vague claims don’t survive IT scrutiny.
Bottom of funnel — the economic buyer is now involved. The business case is on their desk. Content at this stage needs to speak the language of finance: quantified outcomes, comparable organisations, total cost of ownership, time to ROI. This is the content most ISVs don’t have — and its absence is what causes deals to stall at the final hurdle.
The customer access problem nobody talks about
Here’s the honest challenge that sits underneath all of this: many ISVs don’t have direct relationships with their customers.
If your product is sold through Microsoft Marketplace, through a partner network, or through self-serve installation, your end customer may have bought your product without ever speaking to you. You don’t know who they are. You don’t know what problem they were trying to solve, what made them choose you over a competitor, what nearly stopped them, or what they’d tell a colleague considering the same decision.
That’s a significant content problem. Because the most powerful content — the case study, the ROI evidence, the sector-specific proof of outcomes — all depend on customer intelligence you may not have.
There are two ways to address it.
The first is to work with what you have. Mine your support conversations, partner feedback, sales call notes, Marketplace reviews, and renewal discussions. The intelligence is there — it just hasn’t been organised into content yet. It won’t give you the depth of a proper customer interview, but it gives you a starting point that’s grounded in reality rather than assumption.
The second is to build an outreach programme. Work with your partner managers and customer success team to identify customers willing to share their experience. Ask for introductions. Then conduct proper interviews — not to gather testimonials, but to understand the buying journey from the inside out.
Well-executed customer interviews reveal a trove of insights — and have the added benefit of building relationships with customers at the same time. The most valuable interviews focus on specific customer segments, use cases, or journey stages — and should include cross-functional participation from product, customer success, and marketing.
Customer interviews don’t just feed your content strategy. The intelligence they surface — the problems your customers were really trying to solve, the features they use most, the capabilities they wish existed — feeds your product development team too. It’s one of the highest-value investments a growing ISV can make. And it’s one that most never make because nobody has thought to connect the content programme to the customer.
How Bright Star approaches content creation
Before we write a word of content for an ISV, we get into our journalism mode. We interview your founding team and senior stakeholders to understand your product, the market it’s in, the competitive landscape, and your ambition.
Then, wherever possible, we interview your customers. We ask about the problem they were trying to solve before they found the product. We ask what nearly stopped them buying. We ask what they’d tell a colleague considering the same decision. We ask what they wish they’d known before they started. And who is in the buying committee.
Then we map out who’s typically involved in the buying process, what each person needs, and where the biggest content gaps are.
This give us the raw material for content that actually works — because it’s built from the language of real buyers, not the assumptions of the people who built the product.
From there, we prioritise. Who needs to be reached first? What content gap is costing the most deals? What does the champion need that they currently don’t have? What would give the technical evaluator more confidence? What would make the CFO’s business case easier to approve?
Then we write.
That sequencing — research first, prioritisation second, writing third — is what separates a content programme that performs from one that simply exists.
Bright Star works exclusively with Microsoft Partners — ISVs and MSPs. We work with a small number of clients on an ongoing basis each year, but we also take on scoped project work that can be delivered in weeks. Get in touch to talk to us about what that could look like for your business.
