What is technical content strategy? To put it simply, technical content strategy is extremely refined content strategy/content marketing (these two terms are used interchangeably, for the sake of this article, we’ll refer to it as content marketing). Standard content marketing is a pretty well-known term: it is using content to drive your target audience to perform a specific behavior or navigate to an end goal. To do this, you have to get the right content to the right people at the right time. Which is easier said than done.
However, when you add a technical aspect to your content strategy, you’ve significantly narrowed down your audience and your objectives. Let’s take a look at how this happens and how to go about broadening your strategy to capture more people. In this two-part blog series, we’ll look at the two primary functions of technical content strategy and the challenges each business faces to effectively meet these demands, starting with picking the right content.
Picking the right content
This is a particularly difficult aspect of technical content strategy for two reasons:
Thought leadership requires entirely original ideas, often including new research or concepts that no one in the industry is familiar with.
Subject matter experts (SMEs) are able to identify these topics, but not necessarily able to create the content - whether from time constraints or capability constraints. In contrast, marketers are able to create content, but not necessarily capable of generating highly technical thought leadership collateral because they simply don’t have the insights and expertise of an SME.
Thought Leadership
These two aspects come together to create a perfect storm of challenges for businesses. Thought leadership requires introducing a new take on existing information or brand new information altogether. The first is easier to address and market; people are already familiar with the concepts and looking for information about the topic.
The second is much harder because the topic is new, and it falls into the “you don’t know what you don’t know,” category. How do you get the word out about something that people aren’t even aware of?
SMEs vs. Marketers
When we look at the roles of SMEs versus your marketers, we face another gap, and that’s basic content creation. Generally speaking, SMEs are hired to perform a specific task, like research or product testing and development. Using these individuals to create new content for marketing may not be the best use of their time as it takes away from their primary function. Additionally, many (not all) SMEs aren’t particularly qualified to generate marketing collateral. Which is understandable - that’s not what they were hired or trained to do.
However, SMEs are uniquely qualified to generate original ideas, discuss their ground-breaking research, and make predictions about the market. In fact, we’ve found that most SMEs are typically enthusiastic about providing insightful concepts and ideas that contribute to thought leadership. They are experts, and they want to share their ideas.
So this takes us to the marketing team. While your marketers may know the topics fairly well, they generally aren’t SMEs. What they are experts in is identifying what type of information and topics the market is currently searching for. In this, they are able to clearly identify the gap between what the audience is looking for and what the audience is entirely unaware of.
So where does that leave us? This is where technical content strategy comes in. Technical content strategy marries the current information the market is looking for with groundbreaking/new information by utilizing the strengths of both your SMEs and your marketing team. It is using content marketing to get the right information to the right audience at the right time so that when you have new information to share with the industry, people are already aware of your brand and trust in your expertise. In other words, they are looking to you for guidance.
Don't miss Part 2 of this blog series, What is Technical Content Strategy Part 2: Capturing Your Audience, where we discuss the nuances of the second component of technical content strategy - audiences.
If you're ready to begin identifying and creating the technical content you need to become an industry thought leader, reach out. We can help.
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