Tech Content Marketing: Tutorial & Best Practices

Selling B2B products to technical audiences has always been challenging. 

Outbound outreach involving dozens of daily calls and emails per sales rep only gets a 1-2% response rate. Worse, its aggressive nature causes brand damage in the eyes of the 98-99% who don’t want to be contacted. 

Similarly, paid Google ads are expensive when the cost per click (CPC) is adjusted based on a conversion rate to determine the cost per opportunity in the downstream sales pipeline. The paid ad return on investment (ROI) equation is exacerbated by click bots (the increasing volume of fake clicks on ads) and the fact that they have no residual long-term value once the financial investment ends.

These factors have made tech content marketing the most valuable tool for companies selling to technical audiences. This process involves creating authoritative, long-form educational content that ranks on Google’s first results page and is referenced by generative AI to educate target audiences searching for features related to your solution.

In other words, content marketing is, first and foremost, about being found when your target audience is searching for information. 

The screenshot below shows the ultimate goal of a content marketer (showcasing content produced by Inbound Square): An authoritative answer to a query is presented as a featured snippet on Google (a section of an article presented as the best response) and is referenced by Google’s AI overview response presented above the featured snippet. The AI overview is Google’s response created by generative AI and is increasingly available to more users for more queries. It credits the original articles used to generate the AI response.

To illustrate the effectiveness of this approach, the graph below shows the traffic growth over 12 months from zero to over 250K impressions, 8K visitors per month, and hundreds of website engagements from publishing only one long-form SEO-optimized article weekly.

This article covers the recommended best practices for tech companies to create content marketing programs that attract leads to their websites and connect on LinkedIn while associating their brands with authoritative educational content. 

Summary of key tech content marketing best practices

Types of content used in tech content marketing

Before discussing in detail the best practices summarized above, let’s briefly examine common inbound content types and provide an overview of the tech content marketing process. 

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Traditionally, content marketing has included everything from social media content to website pages, SEO-optimized articles, and any content you may share on developer forums and tech news sites. The content can be grouped into two broad categories: The first is primarily designed to attract visitors to your website, and the second is meant to explain and promote your products and services.

Content designed to promote your value proposition

This type of content is not meant to rank on the search engine results page but rather intended to clarify and bolster your value proposition. The content is 80-100% promotional and of little value to anyone not already interested in your offering.

Examples include:

• Early buyer’s journey content, like product-oriented data sheets and white papers, thought leadership blogs, branded case studies, and webinars
• Late buyer’s journey content like 1-2-minute videos, long-form demo videos, recorded webinars, public product documentation, and ungated product tours
• Product-related blogs and tutorials
• Content that relates to marketing offers like free expert sessions or self-service trials

Content designed to attract visitors

This type of content is 80% educational and related to the domain your audience is actively searching for on Google, so it draws visitors to your site. You produce this type of content by selecting and targeting specific keywords. For example, if your product is a data integration platform, you might publish a guide on data engineering best practices because that’s what your potential customers need help with and actively look for on search engines.

Content examples include:

• SEO-optimized long-form articles
• Social media posts 
• Syndicated content on third-party websites that accept contributed articles 
• Ebooks
• Webinars

Overview of the tech content marketing process

The phases of content production

The following diagram shows the phases of planning, producing, and optimizing content.

The planning phase involves finalizing the messaging used in the article narratives when mentioning your product, ensuring that your website is free of basic SEO problems, and conducting keyword research to find popular queries related to your product with a high monthly search volume.

Next, you engage subject matter experts to produce content on topics selected based on keyword research. The experts might use AI to accelerate the writing process, but its use must be surgical to avoid the loss of a personalized voice, thoughtful narrative, and examples required for standout content.

Finally, you select assets such as webinars, white papers, and videos to promote in the body of the article using call-out boxes. You should also use AI to create summaries of the expert-produced long-form content and publish them on third-party websites to gain backlinks to your original content. The last step is to promote your content via snippets and summaries on LinkedIn and use automated messaging tools to engage readers via LinkedIn InMail.

The content production sequence 

In general, the idea is to produce long-form content first before summarizing it into other formats. Streamlining the content production pipeline can greatly reduce the required effort and result in more consistent messaging across content marketing channels.

The following diagram shows how content aligned with popular queries based on keyword research should be the first step in the process. This can then be used as the basis for derivative content such as social media posts, syndicated content on third-party websites, and PDF ebooks.

Start by planning for the long-form content:

1. Research and identify the broad topics or themes most relevant to your audience.
2. Identify high-value keywords related to your topic.
3. Produce long-form content related to each keyword.

Depending on your chosen keywords and topic relevance, long-form SEO-optimized articles will attract visitors to your website for years.

Other benefits of starting with keyword research and long-form content include the following:

• You generate organic traffic that targets ideal customer profiles.
• You can connect and engage with prospects when searching for answers to specific questions related to your product.
• You can use calls to action to capture email addresses for accessing recorded webinars or engaging with your sales engineers to ask their technical questions in a live session.

The example below shows how nine articles published on a website rank for hundreds of keywords on the first page of Google search results, generating 1.44 million organic impressions and 49,200 visits over approximately 12 months. At the end of this period, the nine articles created 9,692 organic impressions on a peak weekday, driving 371 new visitors to the website in a single day. The original articles were used to create social media posts and syndicated articles that engaged hundreds of visitors. As long as the topics are selected based on search volumes and the articles are comprehensive and authoritative, visitors will read them and respect your company for producing them.

Best practices in tech content marketing

The tech content marketing process seems simple but can be challenging to scale and consistently maintain over time. Here are some questions to consider:

• How do you target relevant keywords that have high search volume?
• How long will it take to produce long-form articles?
• Who can allocate enough weekly time to write content consistently?
• Who should edit the articles?
• How do you convert content visitors to paying customers?
• How do you measure the return on your content marketing investment?

The following best practices answer these questions and guide you in implementing the process for your organization.

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1. Ensure that your website is optimized for SEO

Your content won’t rank if your primary website struggles with design and performance issues. An SEO website audit evaluates all the essentials that Google looks for when ranking content, including mobile page speed, metadata, image and video optimization, and more.

You can start by using third-party tools to crawl your website pages. Ahrefs is a market leader in evaluating every SEO metric, such as indexing, security, usability, and other issues that may prevent your site from ranking high in search results.

One of the advantages of Ahrefs is the clarity of its reporting (shown below) in calculating a health score and listing all the issues preventing it from achieving a higher score. Your health score goes up as you address the listed issues.

2. Simplify your value proposition

Your value proposition is the solutions you offer that best solve your client's problems. You should be able to express your differentiator in no more than three short bullet points that website visitors can consume at a glance. Think of it as messaging for an election campaign. No reader will remember a dozen differentiators, so you must be selective. 

Focus on features that appeal to technical audiences, not benefits like cost reduction and revenue enhancement, to avoid sounding generic and obfuscating your product’s functionality. Start with “blockers,” which are the features your product addresses that your leading competitors lack, and then present “pushers,” which are the features or areas where you perform better than your competitors.

For example, if you offer a Kubernetes monitoring solution, you may have differentiators like the ones below.

Your differentiators can be more descriptive, but don’t let the lines wrap into paragraphs and put off readers. Remember: The intent is to present ideas in a format that visitors can’t avoid reading as they scroll through your articles. 

The example below describes a data operations platform that streamlines data pipelines for developers and data engineers working on AI applications.

The summarized value proposition can be used to

• Create cards (as in the above example) that you can insert in long-form educational content, separating the promotional and sales-y bits from the narrative, thereby creating more unbiased credibility.
• Create project briefings to train your authors and make the narratives consistent across the articles when mentioning your product in non-sales-y terms.

3. Only produce the information your audience is searching 

Organic visits to an article come from it being ranked on the first page of the search engine’s results since traffic drops precipitously for the second page and almost stops for articles that rank on the third page or beyond. More than 99% of the articles available on websites don’t rank on the search results page and are never found. Researching keywords (queries or search terms) that yield first-page results is the cornerstone of content marketing. 

It’s important to note that queries are grouped at the highest level into three categories: navigational (looking for a website or a local store), transactional (looking to buy something), or information (looking for education). For B2B content marketing, target the informational category because it contains the queries with the highest search volumes and because it’s possible to produce high-ranking content by providing the best answers to the queries. 

The ideal keywords associated with information queries have the following in common:

1. They are terms searched for by your buyer persona.
2. They have a high monthly search volume.
3. They have low competition from articles that already rank highly.

For example, consider a company offering an AWS cost management tool that wishes to attract AWS system administrators to their website. Their objective is to:

• Identify large enterprise AWS accounts.
• Identify DevOps engineers and AWS admins within those companies
• Bring these individuals to their website

The image below shows some keywords that our target persona, an AWS DevOps engineer, might search for during a month. Each query reveals specific information about the engineer’s environment. For example, searching for “AWS data transfer” suggests that their application is multi-regional and that the person searching is sophisticated enough to know that AWS treats transfers across regions in a special way. In another example, searching for “AWS EDP” (for the AWS Enterprise Discount Program) suggests that their AWS environment is large enough and that the person searching is aware that such a program exists and might help them lower their monthly spending.

We can organize the queries by their degree of relevance to the ideal customer profile (ICP). The diagram below uses four criteria for organizing the keywords:

1. Right use type: Is the query from an AWS user?
2. Right size: Does the AWS user operate a large AWS environment?
3. Right persona: Is our target buying persona (responsible for cost savings) the one searching?
4. Right time: Is the timing right, meaning is the person looking to evaluate or purchase a tool?

The diagram below visually depicts the four criteria described above in the context of an example. Suppose we are evaluating queries regarding their relevance for a company that sells tools intended to reduce the cost of hosting applications in Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

The first query in the table shown below (“AWS Lambda”) only tells us that the person searching is interested in the AWS Lambda service, but the query might be from a student looking to learn about this AWS service. The second query (“AWS Data Transfer”) is an advanced concept that savvy AWS users would search about. It describes the data transfer between AWS regions subject to intricate volume-based fees. The person searching is likely responsible for a multi-regional AWS application environment. The third query (“AWS Savings Plan”) is an AWS service contract where AWS customers commit to services upfront in exchange for discounts. The person searching for this keyword must have a large AWS environment, at least relative to their budget size, and is looking for savings. Finally, the fourth query has the highest search intent because the person searching is not only interested in saving money on their AWS bill but is looking for tools to do it, which checks all the boxes.

4. Regularly produce original, long-form, deeply technical content

Now that you have the keywords, it is time to create content. 

Google uses the acronym E-E-A-T to refer to the attributes of valuable content, which stands for “experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.” In other words, a high-ranking article must reflect the author’s experience and expertise, be hosted on a trustworthy website (with backlinks from other reputable websites), and be authoritative on a particular topic (also known as “topical authority”). 

Over the past few decades, content producers have tried every trick in the book to game the search engine. However, we are in an era where Google has refined over one hundred signals to distinguish good content from bad, so the best winning strategy is to produce the highest quality content possible.

Long-form content—an article with more than 1,500 words—ranks better than short-form content, mostly because there is room to explain the concepts sufficiently to satisfy the search query comprehensively. The articles should include code blocks, visuals, and tables to increase audience engagement. Attractive visuals at the start are essential to hook the reader and keep them scrolling.

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Readers will vote with their time-on-page and can quickly tell if the author of a technical article is a marketing person who wrote the article based on research or using AI tools. Especially with Google’s March 2024 search engine core update, superficial articles generated with AI won’t rank well. This is part of the long-term trend of Google counteracting the latest efforts by companies to rank without taking the time to write meaningful original content.

Finally, regular content production is key to increasing organic traffic. In other words, articles rank and reach their peak potential for Google ranking within a few weeks of being published before slowly being replaced by other, better content over the coming months. The best analogy is exercising. Staying fit requires weekly, if not daily, exercise—it’s not a one-time affair. Your content pipeline should have at least two to four monthly articles in production at all times to maintain traffic growth momentum.

5. Design calls to action for both early and late stages in the buyer’s journey

The ultimate purpose of tech content marketing is to expose website visitors to the company’s value proposition and engage them with compelling offers. Don’t become satisfied with simply having website traffic and forget the end goal!

At a broad level, we can group calls to action (CTAs) into two categories:

• Early buyer’s journey CTAs: These address visitors who are not yet ready to buy so they can learn more and view your website as a trusted source of information. Examples include webinars, white papers, and ebooks.
• Late buyer’s journey CTAs: These engage visitors who are closer to a buying decision and who self-qualify by clicking on items like case studies, recorded product demos, demo requests, product documentation, and self—service trial sign-ups, the ultimate tool in a product-led growth (PLG) arsenal.

Create landing pages for each CTA so you can more easily track navigation to those pages using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, as described in the next section. For example, you can track visitor entries through each article via an organic search that results in a CTA visit. By instrumenting your website this way, you can measure each article’s conversion performance and replace the least engaging CTAs.

6. Measure results to gauge success

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and tech content marketing is no exception. The following tools are the most popular and are usually sufficient without the need for implementing expensive third-party tools:

• Google Search Console is a free tool for monitoring general website performance and content performance in search engine results—from Google’s perspective, as opposed to your website’s perspective. You can see the queries that bring users to your site and analyze clicks, impressions, and search positions. Once your content starts ranking, you’ll be surprised at the range of keywords that generate traffic, even though you’ve only targeted a single keyword as the article’s topic.
• Google Analytics is another important tool for learning more about your website visitors—how they found you (organic, paid ads, or referrals from other websites) and how they interact with your website (the pages they visit and how much time they spend on each page). This tool uses JavaScript to track this data and complements the Google Search Console in that it analyzes data from the perspective of your website once visitors reach your website. 
• Google Tag Manager is another free tool that integrates with Google Analytics to simplify the management of your website’s JavaScript code (which can get unwieldy as your website matures). In addition to content visitor information, you can track events like link clicks and button clicks on the CTAs you designed to engage visitors. To maximize engagement, you can also conduct conversion rate optimization (CRO) experiments, which involve rotating CTAs to replace the non-performing ones.
• Google Looker is a helpful dashboard that can gather data from the aforementioned Google Analytics tools to provide a single pane of glass for analyzing specific data at a glance while saving time by avoiding the need to navigate through the other tools. The screenshot below shows a portion of a Google Looker dashboard presenting summarized standard and customized metrics at a glance.

7. Create derivatives of your original content

Your long-form original articles containing more than 1,500 words can be used for summarization, either manually or with the help of AI tools like Gemini to accelerate the process. For example, you can use a 100-word summary of a 2,000-word article to promote the long-form article on LinkedIn or other social media platforms. The summary would grab the viewers’ attention and link to the original article.

You can also summarize the concepts from the original article into a longer piece, say 750 words, as long as it doesn’t plagiarize the original content, and submit the shorter articles to websites like https://dev.to/ and https://dzone.com/. You can even gain a backlink that helps the ranking of the original article if you include a hyperlink pointing back to your original article. 

Another option is to package some of the content into an ebook, which can simply be a PDF that includes the original article. You can use this as a “leave-behind” in meetings with sales prospects or to run paid ads on social media platforms.

Yet another way of reusing the long-form content is to create a slide deck using the core concepts presented in the original educational article. Have a sales engineer read the article and use the deck to present a 15-30-minute webinar, with an opportunity to present your company as the sponsor at the beginning or the end.

There are many ways to create derivative content once you’ve produced long-form original content. The added benefit is that the narrative of the content remains aligned with your value proposition, and you save time by not reinventing the wheel whenever you need to post on social media or submit a blog to a third-party website.

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Last thoughts

Traditional marketing techniques no longer work. Email nurture campaigns and intensive inside sales outreach messages get caught in spam filters or make an intrusive first impression. They worked a decade ago, but prospects increasingly resent them when they lack helpful information. In contrast, inbound technical content marketing generates value for many years after publication and provides a far superior return on investment.

High-quality content positions you as an authoritative thought leader, easing the initial engagement as a trusted advisor. Sales and marketing teams can also share the content with prospects, post it on social media, and reference it when presented as part of a monthly newsletter.

The process begins with auditing your website to ensure it’s ready to host high-ranking content. Next, you should codify your value proposition into messaging writers can consistently amplify by producing content based on a regular interval targeting search queries with high monthly volumes and low ranking-difficulty scores. Finally, don’t forget to invest time in measuring and optimizing the conversion rate of website visitors to qualified leads. 

Contact Inbound Square for a free consulting session to design a content marketing program customized to your needs.