Tech story is different. And, that’s because people on the assembly line in the production are equally important for marketing as much as the content and front-ending marketers. If you are targeting developers as a persona or need a bite of the technology budgets, you need engineers to talk to engineers.
Why are your engineers the new content creators?
Technical content marketers go through a lot of pain points during the content marketing process. If their audience are technical heads and developers, they need a unique set of content such as code snippets, getting started guides, product sheets, etc. But, content strategists and product marketers cannot outsource this work to a freelance content writer who lacks product and technology knowledge. Domain knowledge is an imperative to create great content.
And, from where do you get this information?
Engineers can contribute a great deal to not only to technical documentation, but also assist in content creation for marketing teams. They can assist in delivering specialized product features and descriptions that add to the value of blogs. It helps in building trust and resonate with the target audience. And that’s why tech companies involve engineers in their content cycles. Involving engineers in content development adds value, authenticity, authority, and perception to your blogs, whitepapers, videos, social media posts, and anything else you choose to add to the content mix.
Investing in thought leadership improves sales response ratio and more RFPs. Differentiation is another result that thought leadership generates for a technology brand.
Let the thought leaders (engineers) speak about their thought leadership.
How we enabled engineering teams to articulate and contribute to the official content, website and blog of a technology implementation company?
PROBLEM
Poor showcase of work despite working on amazing projects. They lacked time to produce content around the work that they did, absence of procedures, and priorities from different engineering project teams. They could not articulate customer success stories and improve thought leadership. They couldn’t exhibit it to their audience.
DIAGNOSIS & RECOMMENDATIONS
Alignment between engineering and marketing teams in developing customer success stories.
The alignment between the engineering and marketing team was necessary to bring out customer success stories to showcase the real work done by the engineering teams across several projects.
Tie up the process with employee KRA.
The focus was to bring more transparency among teams and develop the process that intimates the KRA team on case study content collection.
Best use of Organizational Journaling
The organizational journaling habit helps teams prioritize their time. It enables them to bring out the inputs and raw data for the company’s blogs and thought leadership.
Unsettled Content Process for Remote Engineering Teams
CHALLENGES
- Lack of language skills among engineering teams restricts the marketing team to gather customer success stories.
- Unwilling to prioritize content as a deliverable among engineering teams.
- Addressing lack of bandwidth by the founding team to contribute to their brand’s thought leadership.
Content Collaboration for long-lasting Thought Leadership
PROCESS
We collaborated and worked together with
Engineering Teams
The engineering team got the opportunity to impart customer success stories using pre-scripted forms.
HR Team
The utilization of pre-scripted forms from the engineering team allows the HR team to improve content coordination.
Founders
The workshops and questionnaires allowed the founding team to share their thoughts without hurting their priorities.
A combination of forms as questionnaire and workshop
- Pre-scripted form for gathering case study content
- Content Cycles and Orientation Workshops
- Organizational Journaling for Founders to articulate Thought Leadership
Content creation in a software services firm is a strategic decision and needs delivery teams to invest a lot of time in marketing activities. Nischala created awareness within our teams on the importance of content and helped us navigate this decision. She worked with different groups in the organization to brainstorm and come up with ideas. She championed the whole initiative for us. Tvarana will always be grateful for her contribution.
Kishore Bojja, Founder -Tvarana
SOLUTION
Pre-scripted form for gathering case study content
She has created a pre-scripted questionnaire form with questions to gather responses and insights on specific projects. This was circulated among project leads and sub-leads of the engineering team. This helped them avoid the embarrassment of lack of language skills, and fearlessly shared information. The form was linked to the quarterly KRAs, encouraging every engineer to share details about every successful project completion. This whole process helped in extracting high impact stories and crisp content from the team. Access the questionnaire here
Content Cycles and Orientation Workshops
Filling the pre-scripted forms was new to the project leads and sub-leads team. Sharing the right details in their responses made all the difference in showcasing the impact. Sharing the procedure on form filling was necessary. ; A three-day content orientation workshop helped them align with the upcoming content cycles and understand the whole process. What is a Content Cycle?
Organizational Journaling for Founders to articulate Thought Leadership
It began with accumulating the content priorities from the founding team. Then, those priorities were aligned with the ongoing projects. Another questionnaire was created to enable founders to drop their thoughts during every Eureka moment that they didn’t want to miss. This helped in getting content input for the organization’s blog. It was a step forward to facilitate thought leadership content. Enroll to the next workshop
IMPACT
Streamlined case-study and thought leadership content creation in two months.
The workshops and pre-scripted forms eased the job of marketers to gather case study content and thought leadership in a few months. The whole process of data collection gets streamlined without confusion.
Standardized content process to develop consistent content for the organization’s blog.
Pre-scripted forms with questions for founders and executive team eased the job of marketers to get maximum information with less effort. This helped in attaining high-impact stories with compelling content.
Improved coordination between marketing and engineering team.
Improved clarity between both teams and aligned the methods on how to get the top customer success stories.
Better reach to customers.
The solutions helped the company in showcasing the company’s achievements that improve the brand’s publicity.
Chance to filter the brand’s progress amidst technology projects.
They get the chance to refine brand’s success stories, and it helps in reaching more customers. In addition, it improved the company’s goodwill.
Content Frameworks and Tools used
Pre-scripted forms as questionnaire
The engineering team with limited language skills were able to articulate customer success stories using pre-scripted forms.
Alignment Workshops
Ongoing workshops with project leads of engineering teams helped them align with marketing expectations and content cycles.
Organizational Journaling
Journaling across the organization allowed the founding team to share their visionary thoughts without hurting their priorities.