Grow your brand awareness and generate leads faster with three quick wins. By Carrine Greason, Digital Marketing Manager for B2B Tech
Tech Content Strategy: Can You Achieve More?
by Roy Sarkar, B2B Tech Copywriter and Content Marketer
In B2B technology marketing, tech content is an essential driver of prospect engagement, lead generation, and sales support. It’s also your first line of defense against savvy engineers and developers who know the difference between marketing fluff and a genuine right-to-play in their spaces.
But how do you know whether your content strategy is working effectively or simply whispering into the chorus of all the other content marketers out there?
Delivering greater business impact means continuously measuring and rethinking your content strategy. And maybe getting a little help to boost your content return on investment (ROI). When speaking with our clients, three strategic themes come up: understanding, alignment, and reuse.
Read on to learn how to apply these themes to your tech content strategy refresh.
Why tech content strategy matters
A content strategy does more than fill your B2B blog or social media calendar. Quality technical content attracts the best prospects for products and services. It nurtures them through the buying process. And it helps your sales team to close deals. Technical content may serve two purposes: pulling prospects to close sales and educating users on how to use your features. (Think of a Getting Started blog for a complex SDK.)
Effective tech content speaks directly to your audience’s pain points, answers their questions, and provides valuable insights at every stage of their journey toward a purchase decision.
If your tech content is underpowered or growing irrelevant, you can get back on track by focusing on three areas: your buyers’ purchase-decision ecosystem, the buyer’s journey, and a strategic review of your content.
#1 Understand the purchase-decision ecosystem
B2B tech purchase decisions usually involve many people—often a whole committee. Multiple stakeholders, each with their own priorities and areas of influence, influence the buying process:
“The typical B2B purchase process might involve a dozen people from several different departments and time zones. Selling a solution touching stakeholders across expanding go-to-market teams, for example, might involve gaining buy-in from VPs in three departments, individual stakeholders from operations to sales to marketing, and a chief revenue officer – as well as legal, procurement, and implementation teams.”
Influencers, like developers, engineers, and architects, shape perspectives by evaluating solutions and presenting insights. Based on their research, which often includes a healthy amount of subjective opinions, decision-makers either approve or reject purchases.
Your content strategy should speak to all participants. Dive into technical details for engineering influencers and provide a big picture perspective that demonstrates ROI for executive decision-makers. When you fill in gaps in a well-structured content plan, you ensure the right messages reach the right people at the right stage of the buying process.
#2 Align content with the buyer’s journey
A strategic approach to technical content development delivers relevant information at each stage of the buying journey:
- Awareness, understanding, and acceptance: Attract prospects and generate leads by addressing industry challenges and solutions through social media, technology PR, website SEO, webinars, tip sheets, and infographics.
- Need: Reinforce why your solution is the best fit through sales collateral, such as case studies, data sheets, sales decks, technical spec sheets, and product demos.
- Loyalty: Strengthen customer relationships and drive advocacy through ongoing engagement via case studies, referral programs, customer quotes, and email campaigns.
It’s important to recognize that buyers can start their journey at any point. A developer new to device drivers may want to learn more through awareness-building content than an experienced engineer looking for a specific feature or standards certification.
Either way, here are some examples of content for each phase:
#3 Strategic review and refresh
An effective content strategy requires regular evaluation. It identifies what you have as well as outdated or underperforming assets. It also reveals opportunities to refresh or repurpose technical content instead of creating from scratch. Aligning your tech content assets with audience needs and business objectives ensures that your content strategy stays relevant and impactful.
Beyond the mechanics of running a content audit, you should ask yourself these questions:
- What proof points, metrics, or customer stories can I incorporate to add credibility?
- Does my content address the pain points of different types of decision-makers and purchase influencers?
- How well does my content perform across channels—web, email, social, sales enablement, and print?
- Is my content inventory up to date? Is it time to identify opportunities to refresh existing assets in addition to creating new content?
- Does my content strategy align with corporate and sales objectives and product roadmaps?
- What new marketing and communications channels could I use to help educate my audience and generate leads?
- How do AI and large language model (LLM) tools fit into efficient and effective content creation?
- How do I ensure consistency and quality of marketing materials across corporate teams, agencies, and freelancers? (Tip: style guides, tone of voice, and review processes are essential.)
It’s a lot. We get it. That’s where a partner who understands your industry, technology, audiences, and marketing goals becomes invaluable. The best B2B tech marketing agency for your company speaks your language, and the language of your buyers, to ensure your content strategy drives real business results.
Work together to rethink your content strategy
At HCI Marketing, we specialize in crafting B2B tech content strategies that engage decision-makers and purchase influencers, resonate with technical audiences including developers and engineers, and produce measurable results, such as lead generation. Whether your next step is a content audit, buyer persona development, or a content strategy overhaul, our agency helps B2B tech marketing teams like yours achieve their goals and shine in their organizations.
Let’s rethink your content strategy together. Contact us today to start the conversation.
Let's connect.
HCI has marketing professionals in North America and Europe.
HCI has marketing professionals in North America and Europe.