Technical Content Marketing: How to Succeed
If you’re doing research on technical content marketing you may be looking to understand:
The differences between regular content marketing and technical content marketing (and if there’s anything you should be keeping into account).
Tips and best practices on how to do content marketing in a technical field.
What great content marketing in a technical industry looks like.
Technical content marketing is different from regular content marketing. You can’t use the basic content marketing playbook that everyone else uses to succeed: writing generic content en masse, targeting “what is” keywords and outsourcing to writers who know nothing about the subject. It just doesn’t work.
We’re an agency that specialises in technical industries, and we’ve done a lot of work in fintech and payments, where things get very technical. We’ve managed to create content about APIs, intelligent payment routing, identity verification and other complex topics that have not only ranked highly, but also brought in $1M+ for our clients.
We wanted to share what we’ve found works and doesn’t work with technical content marketing.
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What’s unique about technical content marketing?
1. Your audience is different, and therefore your writing style has to be different too
The main difference with technical content marketing is that you’re writing for a different audience. With a B2C content marketing or less technical industries like SaaS, you’re writing for a general audience who is likely not an expert in their field.
But this is not the case with technical content marketing. With technical content creation, you may be targeting doctors, heads of departments, technical managers, developers, etc. These are people who are educated, probably have a few degrees, and are smart – writing to them while following the advice of “write for your grandma” won’t work.
So what makes content writing for them different?
Your writing has to be straight and to the point. The people you’re targeting are time-poor and just want to get the information they need. No need to start the article with a background story of how money was invented. Make it clear in your article what you’re going to write about and get straight to the point.
Don’t be condescending. A lot of B2C articles are condescending “you may want to save money and do X”. With B2B, you want to say it as it is and give them the information they’re looking for.
Include the information they need to know, not information they already know. In other words, don’t start an article about “Payment methods API” with “what is a payment method”. Again, because these people are time-poor you want to give them the information they’re looking for right away and not waste time covering topics they already know.
The type of writing and writing style is different, which means you also need a different process. Asking freelance writers to regurgitate what they find online won’t result in high-quality content that a technical person will read. We go into more detail about a better process down below.
2. What you write about must be written for their level of knowledge
In other words, if you’re writing an article on “Implementing operational resilience” for compliance managers, you don’t need to include a section where you define “What is operational resilience”.
When targeting a technical audience (which will naturally be more advanced), your content has to be advanced. This is why regurgitating what you find online is not a good approach. You’ll end up:
Not adding anything to the conversation and not standing out, and therefore not giving a good reason why someone should read your article over someone else’s.
Creating content that is too beginner, and therefore completely missing the mark and not giving the technical reader the information they’re looking for.
How can you write from a place of expertise if your writers are not experts? The best way is to then involve the industry experts on your team.
However, experts are typically very busy people and don’t have the time to write. A better approach is to ask your writers to interview them. We go into more detail down below.
3. You need to get comfortable talking about product
It’s common for marketers to avoid talking about the product in their content because they don’t want to come across as salesy.
But when it comes to technical content for an advanced audience, you need to write about the product to give the reader the information that they’re looking for.
Let’s take the same article as before about “Payment methods API”. Let’s say the article includes information about the use cases for an API, when it makes sense to use one, and maybe some examples of an API in practice.
But to really give the reader a good sense of how it works in practice, the best is to talk about the API’s features and benefits, and how it works and perhaps include case studies of the product in action with real customers. In other words, talking about the product.
We did analysis on this for one of our clients, where we updated multiple of their articles on their website with more information about their product. In one particular example, we completely rewrote and restructured an article targeting the keyword “health insurance Nigeria”. Conversions went from 8 in the past year, to well over 10 conversions per month. Because someone doing research on “health insurance Nigeria” just wanted details about how to get health insurance – they didn’t need the whole backstory on how the health system works in Nigeria (although we did leave that at the end of the article for those interested).
In general, someone doing research about technical concepts is actively looking for product information and wants to learn more about how the technical product works.
There are ways to talk about the product which is not salesy, and gives the reader what they want. We’ve gone into more detail about how to do that here: How to Write About Your Product In Your Content [And Increase Conversions]
How can you get good results from technical content marketing?
One of our USPs as a digital marketing agency is that we know how to write technical content and have the right processes in place to do so. We’re not scared of writing about APIs, identity verification, insurance underwriting and new regulatory laws.
Our main USP, however, is that we help our clients get conversions with content. In other words, we don’t just create content to drive traffic, we are also accountable for leads and conversions.
The fact that we’re able to do this is proof that our type of content is actually being read by advanced readers and satisfies their intent.
This is the framework we use that has helped companies like Zai, Fintel Connect, Jeeves and more create advanced content while getting leads and deals via organic and paid search:
Start with Bottom of the Funnel content
The first step of our framework is that we start with Bottom of the Funnel content.
While most marketers start their content strategy by targeting Top of the Funnel and thought leadership topics like “what is a payment method” or “Top payment trends in 2024”, instead we’ll start with topics targeting someone who is already aware they have a problem and actively looking for a solution – in other words, already close to buying.
This will allow you to get results sooner, and then use those results to track the ROI of your efforts or make a better business case for investing in content. You can learn more about it here: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?
2. Test keywords with Google Ads
We firmly believe that Google Ads and SEO teams should be constantly talking to each other. Ultimately, both paid and organic search are targeting the same person: someone doing research online.
If you’re investing in both channels, make sure you’re in constant communication with your paid search team. There are a few ways you can collaborate:
Make sure to constantly check which keywords are bringing in conversions. These may be keywords that you could also target organically, thus saving money and scaling more easily.
Run an “SEO Support” campaign, which are campaigns dedicated solely to testing keywords and topics that perform well, helping direct your content marketing strategy.
Working closely with your Google Ads, SEO and content marketing is the best way to make the most of your technical content marketing.
3. Create content for an advanced user and based on an interview
This is the part of the framework that is exceptionally important for technical content: making sure the content is written at the right level for an advanced reader. There are a few ways you can make sure it’s at the right level:
1. Spend some time interviewing the salespeople or customer facing people on your team.
These people on your team have a strong understanding of your target audience, their pain points and who they’re comparing you to. It’s worth spending some time interviewing them to get a good understanding of the topics your potential customers care about. We like to ask questions like:
Who are your best customers?
What are their pain points?
Why would they pick your product over someone else’s?
What was the easiest deal you closed? How did it go?
Learn more about how to do this here: How to Do Research for Bottom of the Funnel Content Marketing
2. Base your content on an interview with an expert
As we mentioned earlier, it’s incredibly important that your content comes from the perspective of an expert in order to build trust with your reader.
But your writers are likely not the experts – so how can you get them involved? The next best way is to ask your writers (or anyone else) to interview the subject matter experts on your team.
This allows you to get a much better overview of the pain points of the market you’re targeting, as well as unique insights that you won’t get elsewhere.
You can learn more about how we do that here: Why You Should Create Content Based on Interviews With Experts
3. Get the writer involved in the content strategy
We don’t believe typical “content briefs” are a good way to help a writer create the best quality content. This is because they often focus on the wrong things: word count, keywords, grammar – rather than what really matters: does the argument in the article make sense? Is the structure well put together? Are we talking about key pain points?
Instead of using briefs, we use “questionnaires”. These are a lot more in-depth than briefs and the writer has to fill them out, rather than the strategist.
Within the questionnaire, the technical content writer will be asked to add what pain points they think are worth including, and what structure they should follow. This more collaborative and thorough process is what has allowed us to create highly technical content that brings in conversions.
You can read examples of our technical writing here:
If you’re interested in implementing this process yourself, you can learn more here: How to Create Content that Speaks to Your Customers' Pain Points
4. Track business results from your content
Most marketing teams will track metrics like traffic, engagement and time on page to measure the success of their content. But the issue with this is that an increase in traffic doesn’t equal an increase in conversions so you get a situation where marketers are optimising for metrics that ultimately don’t help the business.
The best way to get around this is to make sure you’re tracking business metrics: conversions, leads, deals and the financial value of those deals.
Not only does this help ensure your content and marketing efforts are optimised for the right metrics, but it’ll make your life as a marketer a lot easier. By showing how your content is contributing to the business, it’ll make it a lot easier to ask for more budget or more time commitment from experts.
One of the main reasons marketers don’t track business metrics is that tracking it accurately is notoriously hard. The customer journey is complex and disjointed, cookies are hard to track and most content doesn’t lead directly to a conversion and is focused on brand awareness.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t track at all.
With our clients, we’re able to track the leads, deals and even financial results that our content helps bring in. We do this via a combination of Hubspot, GA4 and Salesforce.
Within Hubspot, you can set up a report that tracks month over month the leads and deal amounts that your content is bringing in, both first and last touch conversions.
Especially if you work with numbers-oriented leaders, being able to demonstrate the business value of the content you’re bringing can be a game-changer.
You can learn about how to set up those HubSpot reports in this article: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 6 HubSpot Reports]
Technical content marketing: harder, but worth it
Technical content marketing is hard to do well. But it’s precisely because it’s hard to do well that it can be so successful when done well.
Because it’s difficult, it can’t be automated with AI and most people won’t be willing to put the work in. We’ve seen that thanks to this, it’s a lot easier to rank well organically because of the low competition, which in turn leads to more and better results.
Technical and advanced people still do research online, and only more and more of them will as younger generations advance in their careers and become more technical themselves. Creating the right content for this audience could be a key channel for your business.