What is Technical Content Marketing?
Why technical content marketing is essential to any company developing a technical product.
Technical Content Marketing is an essential part of any company that sells technical products. Whether you are a developer tools company, or a company that sells to scientists, you’ll need to have a good technical content marketing strategy if you want to acquire users outside of paid ads or outbound sales.
Technical Content Marketing vs Content Marketing
Content marketing is a form of marketing where companies generate blog posts, videos, social media posts, and other forms of content that are used to attract a specific target audience in hopes of converting them into paid users down the road. The content that is generated through content marketing is often tangential to the product that the company is trying to sell. For example, if a company is an e-commerce store selling men’s grooming products, the company may try to create content along the lines of “The Best Beard Trends of 2022”.
Content Marketing becomes Technical Content Marketing when the content is too technical for a marketer without domain knowledge to accurately write about the topic. A technical audience can easily tell if the article was written by someone who doesn’t have a strong understanding of a topic and this will affect the credibility of the company. Badly written technical articles will also have a high bounce rate which will cause them to rank lower on Google.
Why is Technical Content Marketing Important?
The world is a crowded place, and it is difficult for companies to stand out amongst all their competitors. Technical content marketing is a way to break out from the crowd, and drive more traffic to your product. It is also a way to position your company as a thought leader, and build a brand that your customers want to buy into.
For understaffed startups that have technical products that don’t have viral growth loops (e.g. most developer tool startups), I would argue that Technical Content Marketing is probably the only path forward to success as it is too expensive to do paid ads early on and there aren’t enough employees to spend time doing direct sales.
If you manage to create a piece of content that ranks #1 on Google, on Youtube, or gets shared widely, you will no doubt start to have a steady stream of customers knocking on your door to try out your product as long as you managed to target the right audience.
How do You Create a Technical Content Marketing strategy?
Creating a technical content marketing strategy is pretty similar to creating a content marketing strategy.
Here’s the typical process you take to form your strategy:
- Start by figuring out the keywords you want to rank for on Google.
- Prioritize the keywords by traffic and intent
- Come up with the first 10 pieces of content that will target your highest priority keywords
- Execute, measure, and repeat
For a real world example, we can take a look at CircleCI’s blog. CircleCI is a developer tools company that creates a CI/CD tool that makes it easier for engineers to deploy their code. They have a blog with article titles such as :
- How to reduce flaky test failures
- How to do vulnerability management with Docker and CI/CD
- Automating database cleanup with scheduled pipelines
Working backgrounds we can see that they were most likely targeting the keywords “vulnerability management”, “database cleanup”, and “flaky tests”.
Summary
Technical Content Marketing is a form of marketing where highly technical content requiring domain knowledge is created in order to drive traffic from a technical audience in hopes of converting them into paid users.
Want More Tips on Technical Content Marketing?
I’m Ben, a technical content marketer who has worked at Netflix, Uber and Microsoft creating developer content.
To stay updated on future posts, subscribe to my newsletter below:
