What is the secret to effective technical product marketing? And how does this secret tie in with positioning for technology products, platforms, and services? The secret is that there are dozens of secrets that all must come into complete alignment to hit the mark.
Technical marketing and technical product marketing is challenging. When it doesn’t work the results are obvious but the reason why it doesn’t work is not. When it works, it seems like magic.
Let’s dive into the magic of building the future of technical product marketing and technical content marketing.
The Technical Product Marketing Challenge
Product marketing is about connecting a potential solution to a problem. This is where most product marketing and technical marketing efforts struggle. Too many marketing teams find themselves force feeding the solution, or worse, only focusing on the “uniqueness” or “industry-leading” nature of the solution.
You need to connect the problem to the solution by deeply understanding and exploring the problem, and the persona who experiences the problem. You need to make it in the voice of the customer and in language that aligns with your solution. It’s an interesting and careful equilibrium.
The Heuristics of Product Positioning
Lots of factors come into play with product positioning and messaging. Your team spends a massive amount of time developing a product that is designed to solve a problem for your customers.
Now you need to tell that solution story. You also need to draw readers to your platform and message by writing about the problem in the voice of the customer while setting up the opportunity to show a solution fit.
This leaves every marketing team with a common set of questions, especially where the prospective customers are deeply technical.
- How do you reach and retain a technical audience?
- What information can you share that will be relevant and important to your potential technical users?
- How can you map the required capabilities of a solution while clearly communicating the problem statement, but in a non-sales way?
- How do you ensure your messaging is infused in every aspect of your content, but not overtly?
Our entire team has lived this experience directly and have been researching this problem for well over 20 years. What we need to do as writers is to make the reader the hero without moving too heavily to story over technical depth.
Solving a Big Problem
There are two distinct groups that we found ourselves among as we researched and validated the depth of the problem. These were product marketing teams and likely technical champions on the customer side.
Research and interviews along with anecdotal evidence showed that both sides are unsatisfied for 3 key reasons:
- Technical product teams struggle with creating content that engages technical readers.
- Prospective technical buyers/influencers require deep technical content to build trust in a company or platform.
- Marketing-led content tends to be too high level and does not build influence with the technical readers.
We did early work to solve this problem with very specific methods and the results were positive. But this also left another problem in place around scalability. We needed to solve the content challenge in a way that has not been able to be done before.
We’ve combined our growing community of content creators with deep technical expertise with the leading technical product marketers and digital marketers. Through this pairing and deeply researched and tested proprietary tools and methods, we are able to create highly engaging technical content that converts readers into trusted, passionate technical champions.
Giving Emotion to Technical Content
The simplest description I give when asked what it is that my team does, is that we give emotion to technical content. There are two differentiating capabilities we bring with our approach. The first is technical depth and accuracy with our technical product marketing and technical writing content. We create content that gets right to the problems that are being felt by your customers and user communities.
The next critically important thing is to give that technical content a narrative and flow that will keep the reader engaged. We create easily readable, highly relatable, technically accurate content that speaks in the language of potential customers and converts readers into technical champions.
The SEO and long tail keyword research that our team adds to our discovery process helps to optimize content for better discoverability. That in turn increases your domain authority on the subject matter and brings more eyes for your digital marketing team to bring to solution-centric content.
Principles, People, and Product Marketing
Combining the right principles and people is an amazing accelerator. Your success depends on matching expertise, experience, and confidence to experiment. Our team has built a practice and set of principles over decades of learning and experimenting with a massive technology community.
Taking that same approach in small groups within a single product marketing team proved the model. Even new social media and types of engagement have not changed the core need to create human-readable and human-generated technical content.
Our principles are simple:
- Create highly-engaging technical content aimed to educate and empower the reader
- Create opportunity for focused success throughout the product/problem lifecycle
- Codify processes and techniques so we can scale our practice
- Be excited about the problem
- Learn every day
- Teach every day
The continuous research done to guide the overall process along with a growing set of proprietary systems and tools is creating a truly differentiated offering. This allows is to continue to hone our approach and build a scalable delivery model with the greatest opportunity for successful outcomes for our clients and our content creators.
Creating a Vibrant, Positive Community of Practice
It’s always been a passion to create and nurture a thriving community of practice for technologists. Being able to do this for a fast-growing content engineering community has already become an incredible experience.
Community goes far beyond just our content engineering practitioners. The technology startup ecosystem and enterprises alike have long sought out a place to collaborate for the various needs of engineering, product marketing, product management, competitive positioning, and much more.
We have lots in store. It’s our chance to turn passion into a practical, meaningful collaborative opportunity.
A Magical Journey Begins with All of Us
Even though we may know how magic works, it’s still magical. We are extremely proud of our ability to merge science, human experience, proven processes, and amazing people together. By creating opportunities to optimize the research and writing process we have solved a massive problem that gives product and digital marketing teams a lead in the content race.
This is just the beginning. It’s exciting, and we want to thank our customer and content engineering community for everything they are already contributing to this amazing team and our vision.
Welcome to what’s next!
