Turn your technical blah into brilliant marketing content

Technically complex subjects give B2B marketers the opportunity to highlight their brand’s competence and industry knowledge, in heaps of competition. The more technical the topic is, the more a brand stands out when its content reflects the industry in an engaging way.

However, your content isn’t going to get far without technical authority.  Producing compelling B2B content on a tech topic is like walking on a tightrope. You want to write something readable and engaging - while also ensuring that you don’t skim through the topic’s complexities. 

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at 5 techniques that can help you deliver a clear and technically authoritative message.
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1: Establish your audiences

As with most B2B content, it’s important to consider 2 distinct audiences:

1. The technical audience The decision making ‘audience’ ( usually the procurement head/CFO/purse-string holder)
   

Your main goal is to engage your first audience and convince the primary decision-maker that there is a strong financial/business case that could help them take their business to a new level. 
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2: Introduce the core basics

Now that you’ve established the target audiences, this is your time to explain key terms and acronyms - if it is absolutely necessary.

Be careful though: If you take up more than two paragraphs explaining the ins and outs of your product or service - you’ll lose your primary audience because they know this information inside and out already. This will only bore your reader because you’re not providing them with the information they are looking for.

Use box-outs, quick side notes, and short explanations to introduce your audience to the key ideas of your copy. Just as you might spell out an industry-standard acronym on the first mention, quickly explain any complex concepts, and move on.

3: Gradually reveal complex ideas

We discussed more on how the decision-making process can be divided into 5 stages - in this article of ours. To summarize:

1. awareness
2. consideration
3. preference/intent
4. purchase
5. repurchase

As your buyer moves further into the cycle, you’re going to have to reveal more information about your product or service. At the third stage, leads are closer to sale and have more ingrained, serious interest in what you're offering.

But that doesn’t mean, you have to reveal the full richness of your idea all at once. In fact, it's generally more effective to introduce layers of complexity one by one. This ensures that your audience understands each layer of your message before moving onto the next. It never gets overwhelming or confusing. 

Think of your content as a tree: begin your ideas with a simple root, then add extra branches (or complexities) at a gradual pace. 

4: Focus on the business challenge

Remember, we don’t need to solve the technical problem for our audience here. 

What we do need, is to solve a business challenge. So, if you want to sell a new tool to a mining company, your narrative isn’t what this material is made of and how amazing it is. Your headline and your lead point should be about how much better, faster, cheaper, etc. their operations will become with this new tool.

After you’ve established the main business benefit, then you can get into the proof, the facts, the science, the logic behind it all. But without an initial offer of improvement or solution, you won’t have much to offer your reader. 

The primary role of your content is to convince the business case to switch over to your product or service. Focus your copy on how you can solve the business challenge: will your prospect be able to speed up production time, secure the supply chain, or increase their profits? 

5: Avoid excessively formal language

Jargon is good when used in moderation. By using professional language appropriately, you’re showing you’re part of the same tribe, while also adding credibility to your name. However, the big problem with a lot of B2B copies is not the jargon - it’s the overly formal language that surrounds it:

• Passive sentence structure
• Posher-sounding versions of common words (like “utilize” instead of “use”, or “methodology” when you could say “method” etc.)
• Lots of nominalized verbs (often words that end in -ion, like “implementation”)
• Encyclopedia words that nobody uses in real life (like “plethora”, “perfunctory”, “archetypal”, and “byzantine”)

If you learn to separate the technical from the needlessly formal - you’re halfway to striking a balance between a complex vs. concise copy.
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Final Words

As a B2B marketer, you want to craft readable and exciting content for your audience. But if you push too far, you risk undermining the technical complexities of your topic. You need to find the right balance.

The most difficult thing here is that there is no magic guide that would help you find the perfect balance. But one thing is for sure: you have to know your audience. 

For instance, something that works for cloud computing brands may not apply to AI or Data Providing companies. 

By using these five strategies, you can start your journey of finding the right mixture between clarity and complexity for your particular copy. And when you do, you can create a persuasive narrative, while also speaking a language that resonates with your tech audience.