Controversial take: Content (especially for developers and sysadmins) can be TOO approachable.
This might be an uncomfortable idea at first. For most marketers, approachability is a key value and one of the first things they’ll think about when writing a post.
Does it use language a middle school student uses?
Does it define and explain every term?
Does
it
have
enough
line breaks?
But this lens just doesn’t work for some readers. Or at least, you need to bend the lens a little bit.
I first learned this lesson at TechTarget. There, my role was part writer, part reporter, part content marketer. My target audience was narrow. And I mean narrow.
They weren’t “technical folks” nor “sysadmins” but “sysadmins specializing in the usage of virtual machines” (or even more narrow still, virtual machines from a particular company — VMware).
The content only worked when the information was as narrow as the target audience. The best example of this in practice was terminology. We had a whitelist of terms we should define and a blacklist of terms we shouldn’t define.
At the top of the blacklist, for my site, was “virtual machine.” I wrote tens of thousands of words about virtual machines at TechTarget and never used the term. Instead, I used the abbreviation our audience used: VM.
The lesson here, which you can apply beyond abbreviations, is that approachability can actually signal a lack of familiarity, and a lack of familiarity can signal bad content (or at least content that is too superficial or basic).
I understand the objection: Wouldn’t more approachable content be readable by more people?
Well, no. And also no.
No 1️⃣: If you want to create content for newbies, you’ll only succeed if you do that from the start. If you write content for advanced readers and then explain a bunch of stuff the advanced readers already know, you’ll drive the experts away and likely fail to capture the newbies too.
No 2️⃣: Like it or not, approachable content cues readers — especially already skeptical ones — to bounce. If your content is too approachable, readers won’t skim by the basics; they’ll actually close out the tab.
And we don’t have to rely on stereotypes of the weird alien developer with an exaggerated hatred for marketing to understand why.
If you’re a writer and you find an article about advanced writing tips, you are not going to continue reading if the article starts off by defining what an article introduction is.
If you’re a founder and you find an article about how best to seize on the emerging AI trend, you are not going to continue reading if the article explains what an MVP is.
If you’re a journalist and you find a guide to interviewing important politicians, you are not going to finish it if the article explains why interviews are important.
It will feel bad at first. Even wasteful. But I promise a shorter article that’s based on research you’ve done but not explained will connect better with an advanced, technical audience.
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