You are a consummate professional. You can create a content marketing strategy for all occasions — go to market, incremental growth, you name it. And you know how to get it done. You are getting it done, but it is taking more of your time than you thought, and resources can be scarce or unreliable. Particularly the human kind — the writers. Because your market is a skeptical technical audience, well, you can’t get away with faking technical expertise. But, technical experts with time to write are hard to come by — in or out of your organization.
Practitioner Content Marketing as a Service
Whether you are marketing to developers, IT professionals, or data scientists, your audience is deeply technical and deeply skeptical. So even when your own product team writes, it’s just possible that their word alone might be dismissed as just another company product pitch. So, while your pain point is managing internal content contributors on an on-going basis, even success can feel like failure.
Working with a Practitioner Content Marketing as a Service company can assuage this with the added benefit of creating a consistent stream of high-quality technical content written in the voice of the customer. Practitioners are peers of your audience and your prospects. Their authenticity is high, and because they sit outside your company, their credibility is stellar. They are technical experts, and they like to write. Better yet, they are managed, not by you, but by their company. Content production is their bread and butter. They make you look good so you can focus on creating a strategy and other demands that don’t disappear just because you need to wrangle another technical writer.
What makes a good practitioner marketing company?
A good practitioner marketing company should handle everything about content production. This includes the following:
- Identifying, recruiting, retaining, and managing technical writers who are subject matter experts on the topics you need.
- A reliable content delivery schedule.
- Topic curation.
- Expert technical editing.
Tell me more about the stardom thing
Ok, so how does a practitioner content marketing service get you to technical marketing stardom? Your content marketing strategy execution is guaranteed. You will have the right mix of content types, content focus, and content writers to attract and retain prospects.
Content Types
Undoubtedly, your strategy relies on several forms of content, including blogs, documentation, white papers, e-books, and tutorials.
Blog Content
Hopefully, you are paying attention to your company’s blog. However, if all the content is product focused, you are probably mainly attracting current customers. A healthy blog publishes at a cadence of twice a week, and some of that content is not about product.
Instead, it attracts prospects by raising hot and technical topics that your audience cares about. Pieces that combine thought leadership to raise awareness of a problem and education about solution tactics. These posts don’t mention your product, but they draw new prospects to your website because of the relevance of the content.
When this valuable technical content is written by a peer not from your company, so much the better. Mixed in with your product pieces, this a powerful combination that can electrify your blog.
Documentation
We assume since you are star material, that you are already treating public-facing documentation as a content marketing product. If not, hasten away to add that to your strategy. Don’t worry; it doesn’t mean extra work for you. A Practitioner Content Marketing Service company has the people to write public documentation. Because their writers didn’t code your product, they are more likely to be able to write documentation that truly guides a new user past “Hello World” and into a useful application.
White papers and e-books
The value of white papers and e-books is their depth. Longer than a blog post — at least 1,500 words; often 3,000 or more — this content can give in-depth analysis and instruction to help a prospect solve a problem, execute a task, or learn enough about an approach to see that it could work with their use case. Often, these are written as case studies, which increase credibility of your brand — and ultimately your product.
Tutorials
If you talk to developers, like we have, you’ll see a common theme: They love to learn. Developer challenge winners like Roger Deutsch and Oana Mancu attribute their winning entries to their love of learning new things. Data collected by Evans Data supports that — 87% of developers are likely to share a tutorial. Practitioner content that scratches that itch is more likely to be shared.
Content Focus
Content that only talks about your product misses many prospects. Assuming stardom is your goal, you are undoubtedly asking for content that raises awareness, educates, and describes the product. Your internal team is the expert on your product, but by reaching out externally, you can deliver enticing technical content that pulls in those prospects not yet ready for a product comparison.
Content Writers
Your technical team undoubtedly will develop a following among your technical audience, particularly if that audience has the product. They are close to the product. They built it for crying out loud! But for those prospects who don’t even know you, seeing a name that speaks of an expertise that transcends your product and is closer to their problem space is attractive. Having a mix of external and internal content writers helps build an authentic voice and brand.
That’s a Wrap
You know you’ve created a content marketing strategy that will vault your company to the top of the market. But in order to succeed, that strategy has to be executed. Practitioner content marketing will get you there. With a Practitioner Content Marketing as a Service company at your service, you don’t have to sweat the execution.