Take your community to coffee: The give and tell of technical content marketing
Take your community to coffee: The give and tell of technical content marketing
The unique ability of technical content marketing to build community.
Hey, ConTech community 👋 I’ve officially made the move to the Mojave Desert of southern CA this past week (and I’m actually sending this from a hotel room in SF before a company offsite this week). It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, so I appreciate y’all’s patience with Vol. 3 of ConTech.
With all that said, I’m excited about this edition. We’re going to talk about one of my favorite things in the whole world today: Coffee. ☕ Specifically, in this edition, you’ll learn: How technical marketing is like taking your audience to coffee at a fancy coffee joint (and why that helps you build a better, more engaged community).
In the last edition, we talked about the importance of having relentless empathy for our technical audience. It doesn’t just help us be better marketers, but better writers, storytellers, and confidants for the technical communities we create for.
Before we get too far into this, I do want to make a point about content marketing vs writing as it relates to community building. This may be a hot take for some folks coming from more traditional content marketing backgrounds and agencies: But if you want to build a quality technical community, aspirations of becoming a good content marketer won’t cut it alone. You need to dedicate yourself to becoming a good writer (on top of learning more technical skills as you go), because, as we’ll talk about below, the former sells and the latter gives and tells genuinely.
Being a good, empathetic writer is what makes folks connect with the story you’re telling them. In fact, the distinction between “content marketers” and “writers” is the difference between building an “audience” and building a “community.” Community building, as we’re seeing across tech right now, is an especially powerful effort for those of us working with developer audiences of some flavor. Community- and people-centered strategies (of which, content is a big part) can drive more funding and let companies catapult business growth (check out this link for a more in-depth look at that point).
So, with that in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this awesome Tweet from ProductHunt’s community program manager, Sharath Kuruganty, got me thinking.
Go check out Sharath’s full profile here for community-building gold.
Sharath makes a really valuable point about the role of community builders today. I’m not going to pretend to be a community-building expert here (if you want that, go ahead and check out David Spinks’s full thread in response to Sharath, or some of my other favorite community folks like Mary Thengvall), but this got me thinking about the inverse of Sharath’s original message:
Technical content creators are community builders, too.
If you knew me back when I was building the technical content marketing department at Animalz, you’re probably no stranger to my rant that technical content writing and marketing should sit closer to developer marketing and developer relations than it should traditional marketing. And in the last few months of my new in-house role at Census, I’m only more sold on this philosophy than I was before.
This belief is both because of the mission of technical content marketing (building a community around and within a technical reader base) and its superpower (telling about and giving insights to said community within a virtuous cycle of content generation (which will talk about in-depth in a future edition)).
Personally, I think all RevOps work falls within a matrix of giving, selling, telling, and hearing. There are a lot of ways to get at telling about a product (PR), selling it (sales), giving something back to your users (customer support and community), and hearing feedback about it (surveys), but the intersection of giving and telling at once is relatively unique to technical content marketing.
I know, that’s a pretty intense, beautiful-mind-inspired graphic. To make it easier, you can reference the labels in each corner:
Giving + telling = coffee ☕
Hearing + giving = therapy 🦻
Selling + telling = time share pitches 🌴
Selling + hearing = beta testing video games 🎮
And this is where we get into the subject of this email: Giving and telling to your technical audience with content marketing is like taking your community to coffee. The best coffee dates--friend or otherwise--involve two people sitting down, enjoying something that stimulates them, and sharing ideas mutually. You should both walk away satisfied and inspired.
So what does this coffee-as-content-marketing idea mean for your technical content marketing strategies and efforts? Let’s take a look.
First, be genuine. Then, be useful.
Content of any kind that’s written in a silo is self-congratulating and stunted. You need to actively talk to and collaborate with the other people in your organization working in your community, and with the community itself.
When this is done well, content gives you the ability to genuinely learn about your customers, in the same way, you learn about your friends over coffee.
But you have to be transparent about your research and your distribution with some ground rules:
Don’t try to act like you aren’t a brand advocate.
Be responsive to questions, tips, and feedback about your content and product.
Actually, incorporate that feedback.
Only post your content if it’s completely relevant to your target audience. If you wouldn’t share it if you weren’t getting paid, don’t.
We all know the saying, developers hate marketing. But in reality, developers hate been sold to. Marketing that sells them something and marketing that teaches them something are two very different beasts separated by genuine content that respects their knowledge and aspirations.
Think of your content as teaching at scale.
No matter how hard your community and support folks try, there are only so many direct questions they can personally answer every day. Often, a lot of those questions have overlap, too.
Useful, genuine technical content scales your ability to teach your community, as much as it does learn from your community. Developers and technical audiences are very self-serve when it comes to problem-solving, and good content should fuel their ability to dig out the solutions they need.
Not only that, content allows you to answer questions and educate users at scale since A) the answers already exist and B) community support folks can link existing long-form content when answering questions vs rehash the solution from scratch.
Give your community members and builders their own voice.
If you want to foster true community, you should aim to set up a container where your community members can share knowledge and talk amongst themselves without your voice in the room (in this instance, we’re inviting more and more folks to coffee and letting them talk amongst themselves).
Sometimes--actually, often--knowledge and expertise are best delivered directly from your community and company experts. This means giving up your bylines and letting community managers and community members alike take up stage space in your channels.
As many of you know, there is no shortage of ideas stemming from active communities. When you treat your technical content marketing like a publication vs a megaphone, you let people develop a community for themselves and their peers organically. This P2P content flow promotes more imaginative, active, and engaged communities while reducing content cost, driving better social engagement, and leveraging real-time research and content feedback.
Give content relationships time, support, and space to grow.
Just like new friendships, community content bonds don’t happen overnight. It takes more than one coffee and more than one idea to really form a mutually beneficial relationship with the people in your technical community.
You’ll need to do more leg work than them to start. Continually serve up interesting and useful content to them and tie things back to the feedback they’re giving you from day one.
While you’re first starting, it’s a good idea to support your content distribution with some additional paid efforts (again, with relevancy as your king standard). This helps you gain some momentum around your content so you’re not just putting everything on the goal of going viral on HN.
With that, we’ve wrapped up vol. 3 of ConTech. 🎉
Up next ⏭️ The world of above-the-funnel content: Educating tomorrow’s users: Next time I’ll dive into what I call above-the-funnel content (aka content that goes the long-haul of educating users and readers who aren’t quite within your ICP).
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As always, let me know what you think of this edition over on Twitter at @alliewritestech.