Connecting the dots between technical documentation and product marketing content

In this article, you will learn more about what technical content writing and marketing content writing is all about and what is it not about in today’s market trends.

You will see how technical content serves as your product marketing weapon.

We will also discuss is it good to consider merging technical and marketing content to one content accessible to customers.

Please reach out to me on sadhana.technicalwriter@gmail.com.

While we pitch into the discussion of how technical documentation is your company’s secret
marketing weapon, let us understand in the current industry trends, what technical content is all
about and what is it not about.

What technical content is about?

Technical content focuses on providing useful information about how to use the product, what’s
new, use case driven, and how the product addresses user’s pain points.

Technical content is no more about:

• Restricted access and made available only after product purchase.
• A step-by-step instruction to complete a straight forward workflow.
• Traditional documentation where the goal is to make the product usage simple.
• Limited to customer Administrator’s reference.

From decades, technical documentation remained as content that is accessible to customers after
product purchase. While marketing content is published and available to customers right from
product pre-launch phase to ready to go live.

However, over the years this tradition is changing. Technical documentation is becoming the key
content that customers are referring to prior purchasing of the product.

The trend of the technical document being limited as PDF format and with restricted access is changing. Technical
materials are made available in HTML form and on all platforms for ease of access.

Seeing from the content marketing view, customers are no more relying on marketing materials
as the reference before pre-purchase but are more interested to check out the product technical
documentation.

Why technical documentation serves as marketing weapon?

1. Great technical documentation reflects the quality of your company’s technical support. If the
   documentation is good, then customer experience is most likely to be positive. This
   encourages the customer to purchase the product.
2. Technical documentation seems more trustable by customers than marketing materials,
   often as a result of over-promising marketing messages. On the other hand, technical
   documentation is straight forward and contains information about marketing content does
   not tell you how to setup and how it works.
3. Customers are using documentation to do their primary research about the product before
   purchase. Documentation is becoming a critical aspect of pre-purchase research.
4. Documentation includes details of warnings, legal disclaimers which give customers insight about how the product fits in for their business, view about complexity, scalability, and how the company provides support services to them.
5. When your focus is on delivering technical content that addresses customer’s needs, pain points, and how the product adds value to their business, it is more likely that customers are interested in buying your product. Ideally, technical content is getting customers to buy the product, thus serving as a marketing weapon.

How to improve attention and importance for technical documentation the same as
marketing materials

Technical content is your product’s marketing weapon, it becomes important to deliver product documentation that is not only of high quality but also that makes the content visually delightful.

Few of the key points to consider improving technical documentation in terms of marketing
material are:

1. Improve the layout, pay attention to look and make it attractive.
2. Make technical documentation available as HTML and designed to access over tablets
   and mobile devices rather than limiting to PDF format.
3. Make use of SEO, similar keywords to what is used in the marketing materials.
4. Take it to YouTube. You see marketing videos made available on YouTube, to ensure
   that documentation responses to this trend by creating " how to & quot; instructional videos or
   replace content with videos wherever possible and make it available on YouTube as well.
5. Use a conversational tone. This makes documentation more user-friendly and easier to
   translate to other languages.

Should companies combine marketing and technical content together?

While we figure out whether to combine marketing content and technical documentation, let us
understand in the current industry trends, what content marketing is all about and what is it not
about.

What content marketing is about?

Content marketing focuses on providing useful information that addresses user pain points.

Content marketing is no more about:

• What or how the company is doing with the new product release.
• How the new product is doing in the market.
• A traditional marketing content where the goal is to get the customer buy the product.
• Limited to product offerings or sales pitch reference document.

Why companies must consider combining marketing and technical content?

In today’s trends, marketing content is focusing on addressing user pain points which is what a
technical documentation does.

However, marketing content lacks details about how to setup the product, how the product works, and how the product fits in for the customer’s business that is addressed in the technical content.

Customers are turning towards technical content instead of marketing materials as a pre-purchase research document. Off likely, there is a fewer audience for marketing content and more focus is on technical content in the current trends.

Also, we see that technical content is eventually becoming a marketing weapon.

Considering these factors, it is ideal to offer customers with combined technical and marketing
content and with focus on delivering content that the customer is looking for in the
documentation.

The content delivered must help customers as a pre-purchase guide as well as
technical details about how to install, use, addresses business needs, and support materials.

Prioritize delivery of the content in timelines with product release and marketing timelines and
host it in the location that is easily accessible for customers.

Importantly, the merge of marketing content and technical documentation achieves uniformity in
the content.

The documents appear as if they are all generated from a single source. With a lot of
focus over the years on unified customer journey, it becomes very important that all your content
about the product right from product marketing to product support phase achieves this unified
journey.

Advantages of combining marketing and technical content:

• Improved customer satisfaction.
• Ease of information access where all content is available at the one-point destination.
• Upfront access of technical materials gives customers a complete view of how the product
  serves customers business.
• Customers are aware of product limitations, warnings, and how to support their
  business in such scenarios. This avoids any later surprises and customers are well
  prepared.
• Builds customer trustworthiness and improved customer base for your product.
• Achieves unified customer journey experience.
• Improved product sales.

Author Biodata:

Sadhana S  is an experienced Information Developer at IBM MaaS360 documentation team, based in Bangalore, India. She has extensive experience in technical documentation with a strong focus on better information mapping and enhanced user experience design.  She is a certified IBM Design Thinking Practitioner and Co-Creator. She is passionate about research in the fields of documentation process enhancements, user-driven experience through the UI, API documentation, and information mapping.

You can contact sadhana

sadhana.technicalwriter@gmail.com