Why Technical Content Marketing is Underrated

Let’s firstly all agree that marketing nowadays is such an important tool for anyone or any company to promote themselves and their brand. It helps them establish their presence in a given space and gives them a voice to be heard.

But in some cases, the General Purpose Marketing (GPM) approach can be a double-edged sword for some technology-enabled businesses — it activates their brand in the market (which sometimes can be saturated) for visibility, but it can also fall short (and perhaps lack depth) in reaching the specific target audience they intend to seek because they haven’t been able to put enough time and effort into producing the right content — in other words, GPM’s impact and influence extend out to a certain degree, and companies are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to content marketing.

Today’s article is going to focus on one specific area of marketing, namely; Technical Content Marketing (TCM) which plenty of tech-focused companies can focus on especially if they’re building a product/service designed for technical customers i.e. developers, engineers, IT specialists, etc.

Let’s get started!

Technical Content Marketing (TCM)

As a quick primer, let’s understand the definition of TCM and go from here.

TCM is all about generating in-depth technical content about a product and/or service that requires specific skills to use, operate, or deploy for an audience that has such skills and who is also likely to consume the product as a user and potential customer.

But there is a caveat; TCM isn’t for every business — so, who is it for?

If you’re building a product like an API core service, any developer tools, or platforms that require specialized expertise, then dedicating some of your marketing resources to producing TCM could be a viable content channel for your business.

The biggest difference between TCM and GPM is depth. GPM does a great job of generating excitement, hype, and momentum around the business brand and product for the masses. It lets everyone know that you exist. But the problem is that it doesn’t go into the nooks and crannies of the actual product i.e. how to use it, applications to build, user guides, tutorials walkthroughs, etc. The very information that the audience needs to act on is missing. It gets even more challenging especially if the market is already flooded with incumbents and the new guy on the street is trying to make a name for themselves.

However, despite all of this, TCM can still be overlooked.

The Challenges of TCM

In many cases, TCM can be resource-intensive and require more time and effort to set up and execute properly.

For one thing, it can require internal teams i.e. engineering, marketing, and product to come and work together on producing content. This is a tall order, especially for developers and engineers who are already stretched thin on building and releasing the actual product (as they should), let alone writing about it as well.

It’s not only about lack of time and human resources, but it also comes down to costs as well — it can be pretty expensive to set up a team dedicated to creating technical marketing content consistently.

Finally, creating TCM materials can sometimes lead to unintended consequences where the writers are providing a biased perspective on using the product rather than being objective and creating it from the view of the end user — this can sometimes lead to user backlash.

But with all of the challenges of doing TCM, having the right strategy can lead to remarkable benefits and outweigh the costs.

The Benefits

As already mentioned, the whole idea behind why companies invest in producing technical marketing content is to act as a vehicle to promote not only one’s brand but more importantly their product on a deeper level through education.

If done correctly, it can be an extremely powerful tool for long-term growth — this diagram above showcases the technical content flywheel that can we apply to every organization.

High-quality technology-related content consumption educates and informs the public. This value-add engages the community who may be looking for knowledge to solve their problem. Your company/brand has now made an impression which causes them to share and even advocate for you with their network, resulting in traffic.

As the community continues to grow and use your product/service, you receive honest product feedback which in turn improves the product, which then generates authority and leadership in the space and ultimately feeds back into the community.

So now that we understand the benefits, how can companies from startups to scale-ups do it properly?

Doing it the Right Way

A separate piece will be written on this since it’s way too big to delve into now, but here are some high-level thoughts on how companies can make TCM an integral part of their marketing team and overall content strategy

1. Invest from the beginning — start building out marketing infrastructure so you can already start planning on your content. This means investing in human resources (building a team) who are capable of writing TCM materials as well as being transparent about scheduling, topics, and ideas. This initiative brings everyone onto the same page. The last thing you want is for one of your engineers to be caught by surprise knowing they have to write a tutorial guide and also have to meet their development sprint.
2. Educate — build a marketing culture around education. It’s too easy to produce content that tells the audience about the product. Instead, create content that informs and educates the audience on using the product. The audience feels much more satisfied when they know that you have been able to solve a problem for them or break down a complex topic into easy-to-understand terms. Focus on generating great educational materials for free because eventually, these folks will know about you (the company), the product, and the overall brand and that will pay dividends in the long term.
3. Collaborate (internally and externally) — start nurturing strong relationships internally to get the ball rolling. TCM requires more collaboration because the marketing team needs to bring in fellow team members from other business units i.e. engineering, product, growth, etc. to help and support. Similarly, collaboration externally with third parties like integration partners, syndicated news outlets, and loyal customers is key to strengthening your presence and leadership in the market.
4. Innovate — traditional marketing used to be in the written word, but things are changing quickly. With content creation over video taking the world by storm over the past few years, it seems only natural that businesses start doing the same. We’re now long and short-form videos making an impact on the audience. Innovations like these ensure companies are making strides and keeping their finger on the pulse. If you haven’t already, we recommend you begin experimenting with different innovations to make your content stick and stand out.

Starting the Journey

Thanks for reading to the end. If you like this content, let us know and say hello — we’d love to connect and learn more about you and what you’re building.

If you’re in the stages of building out your own TCM initiative or maybe have something going but need an extra pair of hands to support you, feel free to reach out and book a call with us. We’d love to see how we can help.