IOD’s June hybrid event brought together two forward-thinking minds in the tech content world to discuss one of the greatest challenges tech marketers face: how to build a sustainable long-term content strategy that works for you. In case you missed it, here’s a summary of the event “Creating a Content Machine” featuring IOD CEO Ofir Nachmani and Director of Growth at Snyk Oren Hacohen. 

The Pillars of Creating a Content Machine

One of the greatest bottlenecks when it comes to writing consistently great tech content, with an ongoing and predictable cadence, is your domain experts’ time. While creating great tech content is clearly understood to be an important marketing strategy, delivering on this promise becomes increasingly difficult over time due to other organizational constraints.

This happens because domain experts’ time is in high-demand; they usually need to be working on the actual company product, and content writers don’t have the required expertise to write the deep tech content themselves.

So why not bring both of these functions together to complement each other, and be able to deliver a sustainable long-term content strategy? Ofir Nachmani talks about the methods and practice of actually creating such a process in-house, so your content marketing strategy never lags behind your planned editorial calendar.

Below are the key tips Ofir provides for creating a long-term tech content strategy:

• • • Productize your process: View each article as a mini-project that requires the relevant assigned resources for research, development, and fulfillment, the same way you would define any other process in your organization.
    • Align expectations: Establish a clear article brief with all of the important project details to ensure the writer and you, as the client, are aligned.
    • Create a content plan: Build the project lifecycle.
    • Establish a review process: Have the rest of the team—from marketing to R&D to sales—weigh in.

Programmatic Content & SEO—Getting Content to Work for You

Programmatic content is another excellent content technique to master in order to build really strong organic website traffic, according to serial growth hacker Oren Hacohen.

We’re used to static content such as white papers, blogs, videos, and podcasts that need to be manually updated over time. Programmatic content, however, allows us to generate dynamic content tailored to specific audiences—on-demand.

Industry leaders use programmatic content to tailor content to target audiences and their interests or custom searches. You’ve experienced it when you’ve searched for a hotel and TripAdvisor appears at the top of your search with the “Top X Hotels in…” the city of your search, or restaurant sites, and much more that generate dynamic content tailored to what you’re looking for.

The programmatic content or SEO technique works by automatically building pages based on relevant search terms, by populating dynamic parameters your website fetches in real-time. This means that if you can tap into certain data sources—whether local or remote—you can create thousands of on-demand pages to give your site SEO power when specific terms are searched for—whether within your site or on a popular search engine.

Oren went on to share how this was done at Snyk, where this method was implemented with their Open Source Advisor tool. By fetching data in real time from a diversity of sources, including Github and their own vulnerability database, this tool provides immediate insights into the health of open-source packages by dynamically creating pages based on the search terms provided.

While this strategy takes time and resources to develop, when you find a meaningful reason to invest in programmatic content, you’ll be serving your product and website significantly.

Programmatic content is good when your project fits these three criteria:

• • • Scalable – with programmatic content you can unlock massive amounts of traffic
    • Evergreen – once you build the initial functionality, it will independently and automatically get updated
    • When programmatic content provides the most valuable answer that the search engine itself wants to see

You can get started with these guidelines to set yourself up for success:

• • • Find a compelling use case for your product by narrowing the scope
    • “Bulletproof the project” by doing the right research, validating data & potential search volume, and set clear KPI expectations for success 
    • Get executive sponsorship, these projects take time and investment, and you should have top-down buy-in when deciding to take on such a project (and like the previous step, make sure there is alignment and expectation setting on success criteria)

As the tech marketing world continues to evolve and grow, companies must carefully choose their strategies in order to reach their target audience. Expert-based content is the foundation. And new marketing technologies and techniques might be worth considering to help you get that content into the right hands.

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