What is technical content marketing?
ConTech: A newsletter for folks at the intersection of technical writing, content marketing & B2B SaaS.
Hey, ConTech community. 👋 It’s nice to have you here.
In the coming weeks and months, I’ll touch on a wide variety of technical content marketing topics, including some educational fundamentals, blue-sky observations about the current state of the field, and forecasting about where I think it’s going (and what skills will most help us all navigate those changes).
But to start off I want to set the scene with what, exactly, I mean when I talk about technical content marketing.
If you’ve worked in this field for any amount of time, you probably know there are many, many competing definitions of what it is we all do. The most common understandings tend to break down into three categories:
Wrong context: Technical SEO efforts (think XML sitemaps, page speed concerns, responsive design planning, etc.)
Too broad: Data-driven content marketing and storytelling (CXL focuses on this angle for their courses)
Too narrow: Content marketing that focuses on the technical details of a company’s specific product or service. (HubSpot digs this definition)
Tbh, all of these definitions miss the mark.
Over the last five years in content marketing and working with dozens of companies speaking to technical audiences, here’s the definition I’ve landed on:
Technical content marketing is (or at least, should be) content that a company produces that aims to reach technical audiences to:
create an emotional tie
build trust
foster community
I think we miss a lot of the difficulty—and uniqueness—of technical content marketing as a craft when we focus on the technology it’s communicating about over the audience we’re communicating to. Sure—writing about the things like API development is hard no matter what, but there’s a big difference in the approach depending on if you’re explaining how it works to Ops folks or to developers.
This focus on emotional connection, trust, and community means technical marketing’s mission often is closer to that of community and DevRel teams vs. straight marketing teams. And for good reason.
At a fundamental level, our job is to educate and inspire, not pitch our product. Good technical content should answer the questions and play into the areas of interest of the community—not dictate to them what they should think, or angle content with ulterior conversion motives 100% of the time.
This is an edgy idea for a lot of marketers.
Instead of working to tie every article into a CTA for sign-ups, technical content marketing has to focus on building credibility with the reader by flexing the technical knowledge of the writer and, by extension, the company.
This is because—unlike a lot of other forms of content marketing—we’re often writing to our SMEs’ peers. We’re not teaching the layman about a new tech they have no foundation for, but convincing the technical expert to explore a new option. And if you’ve ever spent time on Reddit or HN, you know those technical experts are a tough crowd.
As a result, technical content writers often face a learning curve that’s less “curve” and more “wall” when coming into the field.
This is because it’s not enough for technical content marketers to understand the building blocks of what their product does and who their personas are. We need to know the history of the ecosystem the tools and the audience sit within, and why our product is important within the context of your users’ pain points. This means fully breaking down how our product was built (and, more importantly, why), as well as the lengths folks were going to hack together an alternative.
Our job is to build a unified customer experience by presenting folks with a cohesive, master-planned content experience that builds their trust in us and makes them feel heard, as well as educated.
Emotion, trust, community. All while getting to nerd out on cool technology and how it’s built.
See you next time,
Allie
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Speaking of community, if you know anyone creating content for technical audiences (or trying to), I’d love to get them on the list for ConTech. Here’s a link for a free 30-day pass for your friends and colleagues.
In the meantime, come say hi over on Twitter at @alliewritestech.