The guideline for The Zeals Tech Blog
Introduction
Hello!
I’m Ryota Araki aka Akky in Zeals. From this August, I started working with Tech PR at Zeals. When I started working on this theme, I was not sure what marketing, PR, and branding were. So I was not sure how I should manage my company's Tech Blog as well.
As I keep facing these topics, I’m gradually getting the picture of how to manage this Tech Blog, so I decided to try to write a guideline for my company’s Tech Blog. I assumed that readers should be basically my teammates at Zeals at first, but I decided to publish these guidelines to the public because it may give me more opportunities to receive feedback.
Here are the actual guidelines below.
*I omitted the Introduction part of the guideline in this article
Goals of Tech PR
We have 2 main goals in Tech PR.
In the short term, making a positive effect on the recruitment of the dev team.
And in the long term, building the technology branding.
What is good content on our Tech Blog?
If you break down the 2 goals above, you can see the conditions of good content on our Tech Blog.
I’ll make an explanation in accordance with these 2 cases separately.
How to attract future candidates of Zeals?
One big part of the readers of your articles is the candidates of dev team recruitment. They want to know more about Zeals, the technology we use, projects we are working for, and team culture, etc.
So publishing content regarding the inside of Zeals itself is already valuable for them, but if you think of the following things, you might be able to make your article more valuable.
They are 1) goal, 2) theme, and 3) target audience of your article.
The goal of your article
When writing articles for our tech blog, we have several goals we want to achieve. For instance, there is a very famous framework of marketing, ‘AIDMA’ which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Memory, and Action.
By thinking of the goals of your articles along with this framework, the goals will become more clear.
If you put the goal of your article to focus on gaining more Attention, then the article’s purpose is to get people to know Zeals more. So getting higher PV is better. If you put the goal on Interest or Memory, you should make Zeals more memorable for the readers. You should show what Zeals is. You might show unique projects as a chat commerce startup or international engineering team.
Well, these are just an example, but if you have some topics on your mind, then think about which phase in AIDMA your article focuses on more, and then put more attention on it. Is it for getting more attention? Or for attracting candidates?
Theme
Theme or topics should change depending on specific goals.
In the Zeals Tech Blog, articles relating to some specific technology like libraries, OSS, or design concepts can get higher PVs. I guess that’s because someone might run across these kinds of articles when they google that theme. So if your topic is something about a specific technology, it might be better to set your goal to get much attention.
Target audience
By thinking of the target audience, you can make the message of your article sharper and more clear.
If you want future candidates to read your article, you should try to remember when you were a candidate for Zeals. What did you want to know more about? What would you have liked to know to make your decision more confidently? Also, to be able to imagine specific teammates you might get to work with or that might be similar to you would be also helpful. For example, if your current teammate in Zeals had interviewed at Zeals again, what do you think you should do to attract him or her more?
On the other hand, in the case you would probably want to share your learnings or failures about engineering throughout the world by writing articles in the Zeals Tech Blog, you should probably focus on making your articles understandable for a wide range of readers. SEO will evaluate your article at how much your article conveys the right information to people.
By setting up your target audience clearly, your articles will be much better at conveying the messages you want to share with your readers.
How we can build a Tech brand?
As a long-term goal, we want to build Tech branding through our Tech blog. But what is Tech branding?
To explain branding in a brief manner, branding is how it is regarded by the markets. So Tech branding at Zeals is how Zeals is regarded by people outside of Zeals from the perspective of technology. For instance, a famous Japanese startup, Mercari, is famous for making a global engineering team and microservices development using Golang. This is Tech branding.
So, what Tech branding should Zeals build? Well, this is a controversial topic, and the branding image would be not just one. But I think these two will be the main Tech branding image at least within the next few years. Chatbot and Global team from Japan.
If we think about it in this way, although we have published several articles regarding a global team from Japan, articles regarding chatbots would not be sufficient. We have to write articles about our chatbot's unique technology, such as chatbot’s unique projects, our chatbot’s unique architectural design, etc.
Therefore, what is important, not only these 2 topics, but you should also be thinking of how Zeals should be regarded by the markets, and break that down into blog topics so that we can build Zeals Tech branding step by step.
Conclusion
This guideline is a still so-called MVP (Minimum Valuable Product), I have to improve it as I further deepen my understanding of branding and marketing.
And also, I have to improve the Tech PR culture and rules in my team more. For instance, I want to nurture the culture of members to help them write blog content.
I’m still a beginner in the Tech PR field, but I’m already very excited about this theme because this theme is very deep and this theme has very big potential to grow Zeals more.
Thank you for reading my article, Zeals is hiring new people, so you can check our company activities on Zeals's LinkedIn page.
If you want to apply for a position or would like to have a chat with me, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.
