When it comes to marketing or lead generation campaigns, content remains king – the assets that you put in front of your audience to tell them about what you offer and how working with you can benefit them. From extensive whitepapers to short video scripts and even captions, each needs to be carefully written to convey just the right message.
For a B2B campaign, you’ll need a technical copywriting agency – but what particular skills does an agency need?
As a company, they’ll need to understand your business, your technology, your markets and your customers. Only in this way can they hope to produce content that will grip your audience.
The writers employed by the technical copywriting agency should ideally have a good depth of technical knowledge about the industries you serve and the technologies you offer. In addition, they may have industrial experience themselves and will be accustomed to speaking to engineers and developers, encouraging them to give the answers that potential customers want to know.
When developing written content, too many people make the mistake of focusing on the features of the product or its innovative technology. These are useful things to know and should come across in many of the written pieces produced, but what does this mean for actual potential users? An experienced content writer will seek to get behind these headline features, to discover the benefits and what they can bring to users – will it save them energy, cut maintenance costs, improve quality, and make their processes better and more efficient? Users will ask what they can do with it that they could not do before – in effect, why should I invest in this? A good technical copywriter will keep the conversation focused on the issues important to customers and the questions they want answered.
At certain stages, you may want content that provides information on the issues facing the industries you are addressing. The technical copywriting agency’s writers will be able to write objectively about these issues, producing whitepapers and substantial feature articles that position you as a thought leader in your industry. To produce this content, they’ll ask the right questions of your industry experts, as well as research a wide range of online resources to back up the story with statistics, trends and projections.
Then there is the matter of tone. An experienced technical writer will know that a white paper is more academic, more formal in style and tone, and needs to be backed up with references from trusted sources that help develop and underpin the points you need to put across.
Similarly, a feature article will be more balanced in tone, while a blog can be more playful and informal, using idioms, humour and even slang to get a reaction from readers.
This is quite different to a brochure, which would have a style that is confident, informative and enthusiastic about your proposed solution. More promotional in its approach, the writer knows that this is the chance to really sell the benefits of your solutions. They will use language that stirs the imagination of the reader, showing them that your company understands their challenges and listing the benefits they could reap from becoming one of your customers.
A press release will be both informative and promotional – however, a good technical copywriter will ensure it is not mere marketing fluff but has something useful to say and says it in a way that resonates with readers.
Other collateral includes video scripts, landing pages, advertising and social media entries, all of which have their own goals and so need to be developed in a way that produces the desired effect. For example, while with a white paper, the writer has the space to develop an argument and back it up, social media entries are strictly limited in their character count, demanding some creativity to get a powerful message across in such a restricted form.
With all these content forms, a good writer will be able to get across the information that readers need in a way that will maintain their interest, balancing the right amount of detail while not overloading the piece with irrelevant material.
Another issue companies can face, is the audience that you want to address and the different roles or personas that your target companies have. For example, you may sell services that involve a strategic maintenance partnership that could help transform the cost base of a customer. Such an important decision would be up to the CEO and CFO, so you need collateral that would appeal to these personas, pointing out trends in maintenance and showing how other companies are benefiting from similar contracts.
Other personas could be the Production Manager, who will be interested in cutting costs and ensuring a high uptime for machinery and other assets. The Maintenance Manager will be interested in ensuring that technicians are making the most of their time, finding faults quickly and easily and ensuring machines are maintained efficiently and at the right time. Collateral for these personas should emphasise practical, everyday benefits of using your solutions, ideally with real-world savings figures from previous users.
Written content is the basis of all marketing and with the right technical copywriting agency, you can make use of its many forms to convey the message you need and improve your engagement with new and existing customers.