By Dennie Theodore, Communications Trailblazer and HCI Board Member
Quality content is the active ingredient for B2B technology businesses. From websites to tradeshows presentations, from webinars to social media and short-form videos, quality content serves thought leadership and engagement to B2B tech buyers around the world. But whipping up quality content is difficult to do—even writing this blog took team effort.
If you try to produce good content on top of your existing workload, it will be sidelined. And you may miss sales opportunities that you would convert if you had expanded your content development team by collaborating with a top B2B tech marketing agency.
Quality content rises to the top
While the size and growth of the Internet presents opportunities to reach more people, technical web content often has a targeted audience. The number of active websites held steady in recent years at about 200 million, while the global Internet user base doubled in the past decade and grew by 100 million users from 2022 to 2023. In fact, the Internet welcomes 274,000 new users per day! But are they your buyers?
For best-practices B2B tech marketing content to reach your intended technical buyers, it must be:
- Optimized for SEO
- Adaptable for multiple channels
- Legally compliant
- Visually accessible and engaging
- Written in language your buyers understand
- Geared toward positive business outcomes
Is AI the missing ingredient?
Quality technical content is a business asset and a trustworthy source of information for buyers prior to a sale. Businesses are looking for ways to use generative AI to streamline content marketing. Although we find that AI can add value in specific ways, top technical content for marketing and PR needs be accurate and trustworthy, which generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard are not. Although AI does a good job optimizing display ad campaigns, generative AI is not much more than a brainstorming tool today.
A recipe for quality content development
Consider this: Like quality chocolate makes for better brownies, quality content improves your market impact and penetration. We know intuitively that good ingredients produce superior results, yet achieving them requires a proven recipe like the following for developing quality technical content:
Step 1: Start with thorough research and a subject matter expert
- Facts, statistics, and solid understanding of the topic enable a writer to build trust with an audience.
- Quality research keeps users on your website longer and positions your company as a thought leader.
- Tip: HCI writers speak the language of engineers, developers, and visionaries, ask probing questions that drive to the heart of your technology, and zero in on what makes it so cool. And we absorb technical information quickly. Several of us are engineers turned marketers. We not only get engineers, we are engineers.
Step 2: Add the buyers’ perspective
- Uncover and address the goals and pain points of your audience.
- Are you selling to a need? Are you answering questions? Are you facing the competition head on?
- Keeping the buyer in mind builds trust as they engage with your material.
- Tip: HCI helps clients understand their buyer personas and internalize the questions: who cares about this and why? In fact, when we do buyer persona research for you, we talk to both your buyers and to people who should have chosen your product but went with a competitor instead.
Step 3: Mix in SEO analysis and the right keywords in reader-friendly ways
- SEO raises your brand awareness and profile in organic search engines, such as Google and DuckDuckGo.
- Think about what sets apart your buyers from other website visitors.
- Feed your SEO efforts with quality, keyword-rich content on a continuous basis to reach your SEO potential.
- Tip: HCI has a team dedicated to excellence in SEO, its measurement, and writing for SEO results. We work with you to optimize your non-branded keywords until they’re on page one of Google Search.
Step 4: Blend with strong writing
- Excellent writing is easily consumed and feels fresh, informative, and fair.
- Storytelling is an art form that enhances even technical content.
- Keep it clean—avoid business jargon and unsupported opinions.
- Tip: HCI writers create compelling content that improves conversions and builds meaningful connections with your target audiences. On time and on budget.
Step 5: Serve with a call to action
- Share with your audience what they need to know and guide them to the next step with a call to action.
- Tip: Co-create with a technical content development agency like HCI so you can provide strategic content to buyers at every stage as they move through the buyer’s journey and your sales funnel.
Leftovers are good starts for repurposed content
- Quality technical content can be repurposed in myriad ways across multiple platforms to save time and money as well as to deliver consistent messaging. No need to start from a blank page with every piece of marketing or PR content.
- Tip: HCI works with you to extract the maximum amount of repurposed, targeted content for thought leadership, lead generation, and customer retention. Repurposed content typically incurs 50% or less of the cost of the original.
Additional toppings to keep in mind
- Your brand extends beyond your actual product to all your audience interactions.
- Bring buyers to awareness and intent to purchase your product through strong technical content that supports your company’s mission.
- The more engaged your audience is with your content, the more likely they engage with your product!
Learn more about HCI’s technical content development services and reach out to us for help!
