Do Tech Content Marketers Need to be Native English Speakers?
This is Part 1 of a series on Lessons Learned from Content Marketing for Tech Companies. I’ll be covering a lot of topics and pet peeves such as Content Analytics, Content Distribution, Aligning Content and SEO, Content Tools, etc. This time around I’ll be talking about hiring content marketers.
I specialize in B2B marketing for companies selling technical products to technical users: devs, CTOs, R&D, etc. Some of my examples and insights may be industry or customer-specific, but there’s a lot here that will be relevant to all industries.
If you take a look at job postings for tech content marketing they’ll all have two requirements in common:
- Tech-savvy — must!
- Native English speaker — must!
I have yet to see a job description for a content marketer that doesn’t list English as a must. I can’t even recall one that called for plain old excellent English. Every single posting I’ve come across has required native/ mother-tongue English. Now, when I started out, this seemed to me to be a very reasonable requirement to ask of an applicant. I’m a content marketer (amongst other things), I’m a writer and editor, love and understand technology and, English is my mother tongue. I was those job postings, so of course, it made sense to me.
What is a Good Content Marketer Made Of?
In my mind having native level English was what made me eligible to be a content marketer in the first place. I have to admit that this fallacy stuck with me a lot longer than it should have. The first time I recruited a team, native English was a significant factor. Unfortunately, it’s was also the wrong factor, one that ended with me having to let employees go because my ideal content marketer profile was plain wrong.
Looking back native English was the last on a long list of things that content marketers should have. It’s nice to have, but other traits have a higher payoff.
This is the content marketer trifecta that you should be looking for. If you landed on an applicant that has it all hire them and never let them go. But most of the time you’ll need to pick two main traits, and this is the order they go in and the logic behind the order:
#2: Tech-savvy + Excellent writer
The easiest thing to fix is bad English. Find someone in your company that is a native English speaker that can edit or hire a professional editor for a pure English edit. There is no shortage of editors looking for work on sites like UpWork, though you might have to go through a few till you find one to your liking.
#3: Tech-savvy + Native English speaker
In this case, the technical know-how will be baked in, and the English edit will be minimal. The problem will be the flow. Someone from the marketing department will need to edit for coherence. Transitionary paragraphs will be missing, the order of the article will need to be tweaked, and, most likely you’ll need to invest a significant amount of time tailoring the abstract, intro, and, summary. In my experience, these writers will deliver a solid body but, unfortunately, they don’t know how to build arguments and conclusions.
Pro tip: Write the abstract for them in advance. The more you define the boundaries of the piece in advance the less work you’ll have later on. The reason for this is that when left to their own devices, they’ll deliver a super technical article with tons of side notes that will leave you asking “Why did I read this?”.
#4: Excellent writer + Native English speaker
At first glance, this should be #3. The reason that I ranked it #4 is that the resources required to bake in the technical know-how are expensive. The only way to work here is by interviewing developers or whomever your subject expert is. There will be a lot of ping-pong between the writer and developer to ensure that what you’re saying is correct. It is difficult enough to receive developer resources for marketing activities as it is so needless to say requesting a lot of developer resources is an issue. The plus here is that your writer will keep the developer on target and won’t let them go on a technical rant just for the sake of it.
Bottom line, #2 is an easy hire for me as I’m an editor. Even if you’re not an editor yourself finding one shouldn’t be that hard. Furthermore, #1 will be able to help with everything from marketing and sales collateral to website content which is a major plus. #3 I’d still hire, but they’d have to be brilliant on the technology end, and you need to have enough bandwidth to deal with editing them. #3 would be my second content hire, and I’d probably go with either an established developer evangelist or a developer on the way to becoming one. #4 I wouldn’t hire. Maybe in larger companies, it would make sense to have them on the team but, at a startup, the value they’d bring to the table compared to the resources and effort they’d require isn’t worth it in my opinion.
Now that you know what primary traits you should be looking for, here are the bonus skills to look for in your next content marketer:
- Research experience.
- SEO experience.
- Community experience — people with social and forum knowledge and/or karma. Distribution is easily half of the game.
- Statistics oriented — someone who knows how to prepare, analyze, and run surveys.
- Analytics experience — Google Analytics is good enough. Data visualization experience is even better.
- Basic graphics abilities.
- Basic coding abilities — HTML, CSS.
Who Are You Looking For?
Assuming that you don’t have your heart set on someone with an exact match content writing experience, here are a few occupations that have the potential to make the switch to content marketers successful.
- Data scientists- realistically, it’s not going to happen.
- Journalists- tech focus. Make sure that they can handle your subject material. Someone that is used to reviewing consumer apps will have a hard time handling container orchestration.
- Industry analysts.
- BI analysts.
- Any other type of analyst depending on your subject matter.
- Developers.
I’ve seen people make the jump from almost all occupations, including a writer who used to write historically accurate novels (18th century France if I remember correctly) and now writes whitepapers for major tech companies like HPE. So keep an open mind and always ask for writing examples and/ or test blog posts on your subject matter. It’s high time to stop listing native English as a threshold requirement for content marketers as they’re much much more than fluency in a language.
Next up: Types of content + My content guidelines for contributors
If there’s something specific that you’d like me to rant about let me know @HaleviMoran
Live long and prosper 🖖
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