Five Principles for Creating Great B2B Content in the Technology Industry
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Five Principles for Creating Great B2B Content in the Technology Industry
This blog entry outlines five principles for B2B content creation in the technology industry that I have identified over the course of my career in product marketing. For purposes of this entry, the target audience is buyers of technology products and other stakeholders in the customer organization who influence the purchasing decision.
I hope this serves as food for thought as you go about formulating your own principles for content creation. Cross-check it with your own list! If you are a marketing leader, you might consider passing these principles down to your staff. These are not the only principles to consider, but I think you will agree they form a solid foundation for creating great content.
Start by Knowing Your Customer—Who Is the Target Audience?
Everything starts with the customer. Your marketing content is not for you, it’s for them. You need to be able to put yourself in their shoes to communicate effectively to them. Empathy is a desirably personal character trait; for a product marketer it’s a job requirement.
Think hard about your target audience. What challenges do they face, and what problems are they trying to solve? If you are marketing B2B technology products, chances are the Chief Information Offer (CIO) is in your target audience. If there is a security element to the offering the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is also in the mix. Depending on the type of product, your content may also be for network administrators, IT helpdesk teams, developers, DevOps engineers, and similar job roles. Your audience also probably includes their colleagues on the business side of the house: administrators in higher or primary education; general managers in carpeted enterprise; property managers in hospitality.
Product Management can be a great resource for learning about customer needs and preferences. Partner with product management to get included in customer calls, even if you are just listening in. Customer conferences and trade shows are a great way to get customer exposure as well. Get hands-on by working on customer case studies to learn what’s on their minds. Customer interaction of any kind will help improve your content.
Your organization may already have already developed buyer personas representing your target audience. If not, it’s a good idea to create them. These don’t have to be perfect right out of the gate, and they will evolve over time. If you have trouble getting started, with the right prompt artificial intelligence platforms can create a good first pass.
Strive for Clarity in Creating B2B Marketing Content
Clarity in marketing content creation is a paramount attribute. The most fundamental thing we must do as marketers is communicate what the product is. If we fail at that, any hope of differentiation is lost.
The first step toward ensuring clarity is understanding the language that the marketplace uses to talk about the product category. You can get a feel for this by reading competitors’ websites and collateral. Third party sources like industry analysts and news articles can also be great for this.
Be careful not to use jargon, obscure words, or terms your audience may not be familiar with. Often as marketers we think in metaphors, but this can be risky in creating content. If your audience misses the metaphor, you may have lost them.
Prefer the active voice over the passive voice. Say, “the system stores log data in an easy-to-access central data repository,” not “log data are stored in a central data repository.” If there is a complicated way to say something and a simpler way, you should usually choose the simpler way. Avoid run-on sentences and don’t be afraid to break one long sentence into two or three shorter ones. Before using acronyms, think carefully about whether your target audience will universally know what they mean.
Be Precise in the Language You Use in Creating B2B Marketing Content
Especially when creating content for technology products and services, precision matters. If you get the nuances wrong, it damages the credibility of your content.
One example that illustrates the importance of precision is from the wireless networking industry. Pre-shared key, usually abbreviated as PSK, is a technology for network authentication where multiple users, or even all users, use a common passphrase to log on to the wireless network. You might be tempted to call that passphrase a PSK, because it kind of sounds like it fits. Many vendors in the networking industry do just that. But technically PSK is the technology behind getting users and devices connected. The actual password is called simply the passphrase or password. Users don’t use the PSK to connect to the network—they use the passphrase or password. If you use these interchangeably with PSK, you may lose credibility with a technical audience.
The need for precision extends to following appropriate usage conventions. Popular style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Style guide outline conventions for usage, grammar, capitulation, punctuation, and so on. Technical products require precision on another level not addressed by style guides. One example is the term “Wi-Fi.” You will occasionally see this written in some other manner, such as WiFi or even Wifi. Wi-Fi is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance and they decide the spelling and hyphenation—the correct usage is Wi-Fi. Why should anyone believe a vendor’s wireless offering is any good if they can’t spell Wi-Fi right? Here too, precision matters.
Keep Your B2B Marketing Content Authentic
Members of the target audience for technology products and services have their antennae up for authenticity of voice. IT audiences and developers alike can detect language that is less than authentic. Avoid hyperbole and marketing-speak if you want to avoid crossing over into marketing fluff.
Every marketer has his or her list of terms that make them cringe because they smack of marketing speak. One phrase that has always bothered me is when marketing content calls a product or service a “game changer.” Calling a product or feature “revolutionary” is another one—for me anyway. Leave that adjective to television infomercials. “Innovative” is OK-ish but you must go one level down and explain why. I prefer “advanced” which gets the point across in a more authentic way. For example, a product might provide “advanced analytics based on artificial intelligence.”
I usually favor powerful verbs in articulating a value proposition. “Delivers complete visibility into network activity” sounds more powerful than “provides,” for example. But for the sake of authenticity of voice, you might want to consider dialing it back a bit and using “provides” or even “offers”. Not always, but sometimes. Like many choices in product marketing, it’s about striking the right balance.
Video is a very powerful medium in tech product marketing. Not every video has to feature sophisticated animation, perfect scripting, and professional voiceover. If your product has compelling visuals, you can score points for authenticity by creating simple screen capture demos with informal, largely extemporized narrative. If they are not excessive, those “ums” will increase your video’s authenticity quotient.
Make Your Marketing Content Easy to Consume
Buyers and influencers of technology products have limited time—there are only so many hours in a day. We as marketers need to make it as easy as possible to consume our content.
In recent years many marketing organizations have moved toward more snackable content. Snackable simply means easy to consume. Companies have moved from longer form, more dense assets to shorter form, less dense ones. Think infographics and e-books over white papers. We optimize shorter-form assets to be easier to consume. A data sheet typically has around a thousand words over (hopefully) no more than two pages of body copy, plus technical specifications. An e-book omits the technical specs, and spreads those thousand words of body copy over ten pages, with more extensive graphics. Not the same 1,000 words of body copy—it’s much less dense in its approach anchored in storytelling. Infographics take one step further, typically being only a single page in length. This is not to say white papers are not still a thing—but be aware that readers will typically only scan it and look for the call out boxes that quote an analyst or summarize a particular point in isolation.
Conciseness makes your content easier to consume. When you make your content concise, you respect your audience’s time. This means providing maximum information for the length of the content you are asking them to consume. Don’t say in 10,000 words what you can say in 1,000. Your audience will thank you for it in the form of a higher degree of engagement.
Conclusion
Content creation is one of the main components of the classic product marketing job description. Every product marketer should come up with his or her own philosophy for great B2B content creation. These principles are a good place to start as you navigate your content creation journey.
