Do you offer a cutting-edge product or service? Is your technology filling a market gap? You have the potential to become a leader in your field. Now you just need to get noticed. As a tech entrepreneur or marketer, you surely know the power of content for increasing visibility and credibility, speeding time to funding, and driving business—even if your product is not yet ready.
In this webinar held exclusively for the portfolio companies of F2 Venture Capital, IOD CEO Ofir Nachmani offers insights and practical tips for how to build a winning content machine. F2 Venture Capital is a specialized, seed-stage venture capital fund backing Israeli frontier technology companies at the junction of big data, AI, and connectivity.
Check out these highlights from this exclusive webinar, with five steps to create a winning content machine.
1. Build Your Production Team
The first step is to build your production team. Rely on experts, writers, editors, and project managers to create the content you need. For experts, identify who really knows the trouble your users face and the pain points you are solving. Who will your solution resonate with over time? Those are your tech experts.
Next, match your experts with experienced writers. There are writers, and there are experts; usually they are not the same person. Choose a writer experienced in your field to collaborate with your expert. In the magic formula, you will have one expert, plus one writer/editor for each project. Remember: Marketers are not tech writers; and tech experts are not writers. Once you’ve identified your production team, you’ll be able to move on to the next step and plan your content.
2. Create a Content Strategy and Editorial Calendar
The next step is to build a content strategy that identifies the topics you want to cover.
Think about topics to include in your content plan. What would resonate with your audience? What does your audience want to know? To identify topics, take any of these steps:
- Ask your product manager.
- Conduct a competitive analysis by analyzing magazines and blogs (including your own!).
- Run and record one-on-one brainstorming sessions.
- Track influencers and online discussions in your field.
- Analyze your site performance. What was queried? What pages were popular?
- Ask customers and stakeholders about how people use your product or service.
- Use topic discovery tools such as Buzzsumo to identify topic trends.
After you’ve identified the topics, you can develop an editorial calendar to schedule the production and publication of that content. To start, see if you can plan for and publish two articles per week. The key is to publish regularly to maintain interest from readers and improve your Google search ranking.
3. Create a Wide Range of Content and Topic Pillars
The third step is to create a variety of content types and formats, such as blog posts, whitepapers, videos, podcasts, infographics, promotional pages, thought leadership articles, how-to guides, or product-related content. Content pillars might include topics such as cloud, DevOps, Application Delivery, BI, or NoSQL.
Does size matter? Yes! High-quality articles of over 1,000 words perform best and keep people engaged with your content longer than short articles do. For blog posts 1,000 to 1,500 words is becoming the standard. If the content is worthwhile, technical audiences will wade through complex technical information and long-form content such as ebooks or white papers of 2,000 to 3,000 words or more. So go ahead, share your expertise and get into the weeds on a topic. Your content will perform better for it.
4. Develop a Content Pipeline
Step four is to build a backlog of topics and content. When many stakeholders are involved in the content creation process, communication tools, such as Google Docs and Asana, will help to improve the efficiency of the process.
A good approach is to work in parallel to create multiple pieces of content at the same time. Planning projects in three-month cycles works well. Using project management software such as Teamwork or Monday.com to manage each content project will help to track the progress of multiple ongoing projects.
Each article is a mini-project that requires a workflow, planning, scheduling, tracking, and cost tracking. Remember to understand and measure the creation process of every single article. Be sure to quantify the efforts of each stakeholder (track the number of hours spent by the writer, editor, expert, and others involved, such as your CTO). Tracking these elements will help you to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of each piece of content.
5. Track Performance and ROI
The last step before writing your tech content is to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for how you will measure success. It’s important to set clear goals, such as increasing the number of visitors to your website or trust with your brand.
Once you have identified your KPIs, then write your content with a focus on aspects that will improve your specific performance indicators. Below, see KPIs for content and identify which ones most closely align with your goals.
Relevant Content KPIs:
- Number of visits to your website and traffic sources
- Time spent on website
- Number of pages visited per session
- Bounce rates
- Number of new visitors to your website
- Engagement with content (likes, shares, and comments)
- Organic traffic via search
- Backlinks to your website
- Conversions of people who take the desired action on your website
- Cost per acquisition
- Engagement with existing leads
- New leads
- Content marketing ROI
The more clearly you identify the KPIs that align with your goals, the better you can track the success of your content.
Start Building Your Brand
By following these steps, you’ll be able to create a tech content machine that appeals to your audience and drives traffic and lead generation to strengthen your brand and convert traffic into qualified leads.
IOD delivers curated expert-based tech content in a variety of formats, packaged and tailored to the needs of your tech audience. Start creating a winning content machine.
Access the full webinar to learn more about how your tech brand can maximize its potential.
