This article was originally published as a technical content marketing resource at SyntaxPen.
In today's competitive content landscape, technical content marketing agencies play a pivotal role in helping businesses reach and engage their target audiences. These specialized agencies blend deep technical knowledge with marketing expertise to craft compelling content that resonates with developers, engineers, and other technical professionals.
By focusing on creating high-quality, accurate, and valuable content, these agencies build trust and authority within developer communities. This article explores the unique challenges of technical content marketing and how partnering with an agency can help your business.
How Content Marketing Works
Content marketing revolves around creating content to bring attention to your business. In this article, we'll mostly discuss written articles, but content marketing extends into videos, podcasts, and more!
When you're doing content marketing well, your ideal customer asks a question and arrives at your site for an answer.
Typically they'll ask their question in the form of a search query to a search engine like Google, but as you grow your audience you will attract traffic through other mediums like word of mouth or email lists.
When readers arrive at your site as a result of a search, they should read educational articles that quickly solve their problems. Giving readers this free, up-front value is a great way to build a reputation as a trusted source in your niche.
After you attract customers, your content educates them, then you have a chance to convert some subset of them into paying customers.
Not everyone who arrives at a particular article on your site will find that it solves their problem, and that's okay! Not everyone who has a problem solved by a piece of your content will convert into a customer, and that's okay too.
Content marketing is about sustainably building a reputation over the long term with traffic that has a heavy concentration of potential customers. You'll find that as your posts get more and more readers, you'll naturally have more and more inbound leads.
What Makes Technical Content Hard
Technical content marketing is more than just a niche in content marketing. Much of the internet is full of content marketing written with executives in mind, as many B2B product purchasing decisions end up being made mostly by executives. Technical products like developer tools are unique in this way, as developers have a huge voice in product purchasing decisions that affect them. Marketing technical products effectively requires gaining the trust of developers.
Here's the hard part. Traditional content marketing isn't effective for developers. Content written for software developers, software engineers, or technical leadership has to be technically accurate. Technical audiences will scrutinize technical articles, and they'll quickly lose interest if they feel the content lacks value or accuracy.
When planning content strategy for technical audiences, you'll quickly find that you have to write about what software engineers are actually interested in. Most teams will arrive at the conclusion that writing about real, specific, and novel problems in software is the best way to give real value to technical audiences.
Developers Trust Content Written by Developers
Marketing to developers requires building a brand with developers themselves, which is hard for professional writers or traditional content agencies.
The best content for software developers is written by software developers.
Who better to explain a technical concept or walk a reader through a programming tutorial than someone who is actually in the intended audience?
This presents another problem - great programmers are not all great writers. In fact, this is a pretty narrow set of people. Writing great articles for programmers is not the same skill as programming. In the next section, we'll compare finding this talent in your business, leaning on freelancers, and working with a specialized agency.
Doing Technical Content In-House vs Freelancers vs Agencies
Now that we've discussed what technical content marketing is and what makes it hard, you're probably wondering - How do I get technical content on my blog? Do I need to hire someone for that?
When it comes to producing technical content for your business, you have a few options:
- You do it in-house with talent on your payroll
- You hire a freelancer
- You work with an agency
If your business is in building products that developers are interested in, you might have someone on your team who would be able to help! Most teams start producing technical content this way but find it challenging to scale. Every hour you ask a developer to write for your blog is an hour they're not spending working on the rest of their job. Still, leaning on your existing team to write technical content is a great strategy for producing authentic, valuable, and high-quality articles without directly increasing your costs.
You could also expand your in-house team to include someone dedicated to technical content marketing. Sometimes developer advocates fill this role, and some companies even have dedicated technical writers.
Freelancers are a great option when you want to scale your technical content operation beyond your own team. There are tons of incredible freelance technical content writers out there writing great stuff - I started as a freelance technical writer myself! It's hard to find a great freelancer with consistent availability in any industry, and marketplaces like Upwork can be unpredictable.
Technical Content Marketing Agencies help you produce this sort of content without so much involvement from your team. Typically, these businesses have processes and a team in place that make them more efficient. Many agencies will do everything from planning to writing to editing and even publishing. Having a full-service team working with you lets you treat technical content marketing as a product your business is purchasing instead of a task for your team.
Different Technical Content Services
The most obvious service you can expect from a technical writing business is article writing. Typically this is company announcements, think pieces, articles that explore technical concepts, or even programming tutorials. This is packaged differently depending on who you're working with - Here at SyntaxPen our full-service technical content marketing is typically done in engagements of at least one quarter and includes a collaborative content planning process.
You might need more than just article writing for your business. Here is a more comprehensive list of services that technical content teams offer:
- Article writing
- Content strategy/planning
- Technical Editing (SyntaxPen offers this as a standalone service!)
- Website sales copy
- Ad copy
- Product documentation
- Example projects
- Technical Reviewing (SyntaxPen offers this as a standalone service!)
Conclusion
By leveraging a technical content team's expertise in creating accurate, valuable, and compelling articles, you can build trust and authority with developers. Whether you decide to produce content in-house, hire freelancers, or work with a specialized agency, the key is to provide real value to your readers.
If you're looking for professional assistance with editing, reviewing, or full-service writing, SyntaxPen is here to help. Our team is the perfect intersection of software engineering expertise and writing ability, and we'd love to partner with you.
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