An essential step to unlocking your technical copywriting’s full potential

If you want your technical content to generate maximum benefit for your marketing campaign, setting up a process to coax out exactly the messages that need to be delivered is essential.

If you’re responsible for marketing high technology electronics, electrical or software products, you probably use technical content as one of your marketing tools. It allows you to reach your customers’ designers and engineers, and helps to build your brand as a credible and valuable ‘go-to’ reference source.
However, the content needs to be generated, and it must deliver the right messages while being genuinely valuable to your customer audience.

Depending on your available resources, you may decide to write some material internally, or, alternatively, employ a freelance technical copywriter.
If you find a good copywriter, they can deliver content that performs successfully within its role − but however accomplished they are, their output can only ever be as good as the information you give them. As a professional copywriter with many years’ experience, I have developed a strategy for engaging with customers and obtaining the information I need. Here are some key points:

- Irrespective of whether the piece is intended as a blog post, press release, technical article, case study, or even a full white paper, it often comprises two fundamental components:

• The key messages that you want your customers to understand; why using your products will save them money, give them a competitive advantage, or provide some other benefit.
• More in-depth technical content that gives conviction to these messages − whether it’s more detailed information about your product’s technology, advice on how to use it within their own products, or something else.

- While the in-depth content is typically available in documentation from the customer, the key messages are not always so easily available.

- I find the best approach is to start with a meeting involving both a marketing specialist and an engineer from the customer. Nowadays this usually through an online platform such as Teams. The marketing specialist can advise on the key messages, and the type of content they are looking for − web page or blog post, for example. The engineer can back the story up with more in depth explanation and documentation such as existing white papers or articles, PowerPoint presentations, videos, or other collateral.

- My objective is to obtain answers to a pre-prepared questionnaire or briefing form, covering all the essential issues:

• Target audience
• Application areas
• End user pain points
• How the promoted product solves these challenges, and the customer benefits
• SEO keywords
• Information sources, links to relevant documents. This is very important, as it defines the scope of my research and ensures I am working only with relevant information
• Other points, such as target length of piece in words, and UK or US English spelling
• When the meeting starts, I ask the participants’ permission to record it, so I can transcribe the recording as a key source of information.

This is a simple enough procedure, but I find that it usually helps me to find out the key points and more detailed information I need to tell the story. Just as importantly, it keeps me focused on relevant information, without spending time in areas that do not promote the narrative. It takes the guesswork out of profiling content to meet the customer’s expectations and perform accordingly.
If you would like to know more about the content and copywriting services that I offer, please visit my website on www.charig-associates.co.uk