As a Content Marketing Manager for G2, Sarah Ash is part of a team that creates content for two very different personas: 1) the end users of tech products and 2) the companies that sell those products.
If you’re unfamiliar with G2, it’s a software review platform. People can leave reviews for the tools they’ve tried, and then other potential buyers use those reviews to make informed decisions. Peer reviews carry a lot of weight, particularly in the B2B world (studies show B2B buyers are 5x more likely to engage if they’re introduced to your brand by someone else). For that reason, companies with a G2 presence are able to reach valuable prospects.
There’s a clear benefit to both audiences, but reaching everyone requires big-picture thinking from the content team.
“What’s really interesting is that as we create content,” Sarah explains, “we’re thinking about strong top-of-funnel to bottom-of-funnel content for the people buying the software. But we’re also creating great content for the software companies that are looking to reach those buyers. When we’re showing up as a brand, we can’t just commit to one side. We have to play to both.”
The broader content team builds an editorial calendar for the buyer side of the business to align with G2’s 2025 thought leadership initiatives. Then, Sarah — as a seller-focused content leader — is responsible for taking that and translating it to the seller side, whether through repurposing or creating fresh new content like G2’s “Reviews to Revenue” campaign.
Reviews to Revenue: Selling the Seller Story
Before this campaign, G2 hadn’t yet told a complete, end-to-end story about the full-cycle value of the review process for sellers.
“The goal of this campaign was to show how reviews lead to actual revenue and how you get from Point A to Point B,” Sarah says. “How do you go from having no reviews at all to closing a few deals from buyers on G2?”
Sarah was initially in charge of developing core messaging pillars for the campaign. “I identified the four main pillars that we care about as a brand, and then I had to bring that down to the Reviews to Revenue story. How would those pillars manifest? What key points would we want to hit?”
From there, Sarah went deeper based on G2’s specific personas (typically, the seller persona is a director-level or higher in marketing or sales, but they all have different wants and needs). This required a lot of ideation mapping and group meetings. “I led a big brainstorm with our whole marketing team to figure out what this idea of “reviews to revenue” meant to us. Then it’s like, throw all of that away. What is it going to mean to our customers?”
The final phase involved finding existing content and creating new assets that could speak to each pillar for every stage of the customer funnel. The team launched the first phase in December 2024, along with supporting gated ebook content and targeted persona ad campaigns driving back to the ebooks.
Take a look at the finished landing page:
Early campaign success includes 1,348 website visits from the campaign’s TOFU awareness ads and 148 new leads from ebooks and guides, resulting in $18K in new pipeline.
“We’re learning from it,” Sarah highlights. “At the end of the day, that’s what campaigns are for and what marketing is about. Trying things, seeing if they work. If something doesn’t work, you try something else!”
The Power of a Collaborative Manifesto
One new thing Sarah did on this project was co-develop a manifesto with her team copywriter.
“Once we had the messaging pillars down, the copywriter and I went our separate ways, put our heads down and wrote a stream-of-consciousness narrative about what we thought the campaign was about and why it mattered. We gave ourselves permission upfront to be super creative and not worry about what it sounded like.”
That meant Sarah’s musings were in her voice, almost as if she was writing in her journal. Next came a working session, in which they read each other’s perspectives and took pieces from each one they liked. The first collaborative version of the manifesto sounded more like a poem, and future versions read like long stories.
“The goal of the manifesto was to align the wider marketing team on the purpose of the campaign and set the stage with an aspirational feeling,” Sarah emphasizes. “You want the team to think about the manifesto when they’re creating their own content for the campaign. We had to find a balance between being concise and easy to read and having an emotional impact.”
It took a few weeks to cut the manifesto from nearly two pages to its final form, and Sarah brought in stakeholders from different teams to give input. Take a look at the finished product:
B2B buying has evolved. Buyers are savvy and skeptical, and they rely on trust. Trust you need to earn. And the best way to earn it? Leveraging the voices of your current customers.
100M+ people come to G2 every year to find solutions for their biggest business challenges. Every click, comparison, and search is a data point—a signal of your future customers’ intentions and valuable insights into buyer behavior and market trends.
Multiplied across your entire category, these interactions drive better business decisions. You won’t just react to trends; you’ll anticipate them—sharpening your strategy and driving innovation based on real-time buyer needs.
Build credibility with reviews and make it onto your prospects’ shortlists. Connect with high-intent buyers at the perfect moment to fuel pipeline and accelerate sales cycles. Know when your customers are looking at competitors so you can protect and grow revenue.
This is customer voice tapped across the entire revenue cycle.
It starts with a review. It ends with revenue. We’ll show you how.
Ultimately, the manifesto paid dividends in ways Sarah didn’t initially expect, and she recommends trying it for your next campaign.
“The manifesto actually birthed a lot of our taglines,” Sarah says, “and some of the fun, creative components that made it into the final campaign. Two creative people coming together in that way and writing collaboratively helped us get really clear on the story that we wanted to tell.”
