What Is Technical Marketing, and How Should You Use It?

Back in college, I always expected to go into the technical writing field when I graduated. I took a couple of different technical writing classes, and my LinkedIn description for the longest time included the phrase “Prospective technical writer.”

Of course, I ended up getting a job as a marketing writer instead, and here we are. But there’s more overlap between my expected job and my actual job than you might think. That overlap comes down to an area called technical marketing.

Technical marketing can be very important, especially for businesses in more, well, technical industries. But what exactly is technical marketing, and why does it matter? That’s what we’ll cover on this page. We’ll go over the following topics:

• What is technical marketing?
• What’s the benefit of using technical marketing?
• Types of technical marketing
• Best practices for technical marketing

Keep reading to find out more. Then subscribe to our email newsletter, Revenue Weekly, to get even more digital marketing info delivered straight to your inbox!

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What is technical marketing?

Technical marketing includes any kind of marketing materials that focus on detailed, technical elements of a product or service. 

Whereas regular marketing might focus on more introductory concepts that the average person could understand, technical marketing dives right into the nitty-gritty of the thing, using lots of industry jargon and complex language.

What’s the benefit of using technical marketing?

It might seem like technical marketing is counterintuitive because it could just end up confusing people. And it’s true that technical marketing isn’t always the appropriate route, but there are cases where you should use it.

In many cases, your leads will already know a lot about your industry, so they don’t need you to break down basic concepts for them — they need you to demonstrate your expertise and talk to them in detail about your offerings. 

This is especially true in business-to-business (B2B) industries, but it can also happen for business-to-consumer (B2C) companies.

Types of technical marketing

Technical marketing can take many different forms, depending on your industry and your audience. Sometimes, you might use technical marketing in regular marketing materials like website articles. 

Other examples of places you could use technical marketing include:

• Instruction manuals
• Software programs
• Detailed help articles
• Product diagrams
• And more!

These are all areas where the subject matter will only be useful if you get into the technical details. If you’re trying to assemble an electronic product, you don’t want to feel like you’re reading a top-of-funnel blog post — you want language that makes it clear exactly what you need to do.

4 best practices for technical marketing

So, what does it take to create a good technical marketing strategy? How can you do technical marketing the right way?

Below, we’ll cover four best practices for using technical marketing, including:

1. Be concise
2. Know your audience
3. Be an expert in your industry
4. Blend technical and marketing elements

Keep reading to find out more about each one!

1. Be concise

The first thing to get right when creating technical marketing materials is to be concise. This isn’t the type of marketing where you should use lots of flashy words or vague statements — technical marketing should be streamlined and to-the-point.

When people engage with technical marketing, they’re not doing it to hear generalized statements about the quality of your products or services. They’re there to learn very specific information about how to do very specific tasks.

You know when you look up a recipe online, and you get annoyed by having to scroll through someone’s whole life story before you can find the list of ingredients? That’s what it would be like for your audience if you were to fill your technical marketing with fluff instead of getting down to brass tacks. 

Don’t let your marketing be like those recipe pages!

2. Know your audience

This is kind of a cardinal rule for marketing in general, but it’s especially important when using technical marketing: Know thy audience. Here’s the thing with technical marketing — it’s essential to know exactly how much knowledge your audience has about the topic at hand, as well as what knowledge they don’t have.

You don’t want to overestimate or underestimate your audience. If you overestimate them, you’ll end up throwing a level of jargon and detail at them that they’re not equipped for, which will quickly overwhelm them. But if you underestimate them, you’ll come off as though you’re talking down to them.

It can be easy to err too far in one direction or the other when using technical marketing, so be sure to really nail down whom you’re writing to when you create technical marketing materials. You can do that by looking at existing customer data and straight-up asking your customers what they’re looking for.

3. Be an expert in your industry

Expertise is always good to have when creating marketing campaigns. But it goes up to a whole other level with technical marketing.

That’s because with technical marketing, your audience often also has expertise in — or at least in-depth knowledge of — the subject matter. They already know enough about your industry that they’ve now worked their way down to advanced technical knowledge about it.

In other words, technical marketing requires you to be an expert among other experts. You must maintain a much deeper knowledge of the subject matter than your audience if you want them to continue to listen to you. For that reason, make sure you’re always learning more about your industry and staying ahead of the curve.

4. Blend technical and marketing elements

At the top of this list, I noted how your technical marketing should be a lot more concise than other types of marketing. And that’s true. But having said that, bear in mind that it is still marketing. That means that while you should avoid inserting a bunch of fluff, you can still include certain marketing elements.

So, how do you do that? While you might be communicating detailed, jargon-filled information, you can still choose things like what tone you use, what word choice and phrasing you implement, and how you tie that technical info back to your business.

By optimizing your technical marketing to fit your brand, you can ensure that it’s still doing the vital job of leading people toward becoming leads or customers.

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Get help with your technical marketing from WebFX

If you need a helping hand with your technical marketing strategy — or any other type of digital marketing — one of the best things you can do is seek help from the experts. And you won’t find better experts in the marketing world than WebFX.

With over 28 years of marketing experience, WebFX has all the expertise you could ask for, and we want to use that expertise to help you optimize your marketing. If you’re interested in partnering with us for our digital marketing services, just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!