Why does your current B2B agency fail to engage technical buyers with its content?
If your experience tracks with mine, you know the frustration of working with a generalist agency that just doesn’t understand the technical depth your clients’ respective audiences crave. Ill-informed content leads to endless rewrites, which saps the precious time (and strength!) of your clients’ internal experts and ultimately fails to earn the trust of editors and their sophisticated readers. The cost of getting content wrong is far higher than most realize. It’s not just wasted budget. Weak or inaccurate content puts your credibility at high risk, and I don’t have to tell you how hard that is to win back. Qualified leads that may already be in hand can be squandered or be spooked enough that they vanish entirely. Napier has a long history of helping clients win back reputations that they feared may be lost forever.
How to find B2B content agencies with the technical expertise you actually need
Casting your message in a bottle onto Google Ocean will most likely land you on the rocks. Don’t misunderstand. There’s very much a place for broad online searches to get a sense of what’s available and narrow the field from there, but don’t rely solely on a Google search. Instead, augment your talent search by using Google (other search engines are available) to help you do your homework. For example, take an in-depth look at who’s generating content for – or about – respected tech companies you admire. Dig around the websites and LinkedIn pages of agencies founded by engineers and seasoned industry journalists and notice not only what they are writing about, but whether that content, in your opinion, really reflects the world you know your clients live in.
Beyond that, take a tip from Napier and always take note of speaker lists from both large and niche technical conferences. You can often identify some potential partners.
My vetting process includes, but is not limited to, a few critical questions
I never settle for surface-level vetting. By that I mean that, when evaluating a potential content generation partner, I use a checklist that goes far beyond scanning their portfolio of case studies. Instead, I ask them to walk me through their new client onboarding process, especially when they need to understand specific product components for complex products. I want to get a sense of if their writers can hold credible conversations with the engineers they will be expected to interact with. I always like to see a ‘before and after’ example of a technical topic they’ve simplified to see if they’ve done so without watering it down so much that it loses accuracy. These two enquiries alone (there are others) help me differentiate between genuine, useful expertise and smoke and mirrors.
How to spot a fake ‘technical’ agency
Spotting a “fake” may sound easy. I assure you, it’s not. Lots of agency representatives talk a good game and I can’t fault them for that. It’s their job. However, with guidance from many of my highly experienced Napier colleagues, I’ve developed a sixth sense for spotting those who can only pretend to have technical chops. If they overuse marketing buzzwords instead of what I consider real substance in terms of specific components. i.e., market threats, corporate strengths and weaknesses, that’s a yellow flag.
However, the biggest red flags are a reluctance to introduce me to the actual writers who’ll work on my account; portfolios filled only with top-of-funnel content; and vague, uninspired answers about their process for interviewing SMEs to generate content. That may sound picky and more than a little precious but, trust me, a little added skepticism up front goes a long way toward avoiding costly hiring mistakes.
The true ROI of partnering with a specialist technical content agency
One of the many certainties I learned at Napier is that the ultimate proof of a content generator’s value is always in the impact it has. Working with a specialist technical content agency should be a source of measurable efficiency and growth. Faster times-to-publishing; fewer incidences of endless rewrites (which gives the experts more time for innovation); more marketing-qualified leads; and better organic rankings for elusive, long-tail keywords are all positive signs.
Remember. A good technical writing partnership is not solely about the content. It’s about moving both businesses forward. If you’re not speaking the same language as your incumbent provider, look elsewhere.
