When it comes to tech blogging, it’s the people with hands-on experience you need to persuade—whether cloud, DevOps, cybersecurity, or AI experts—especially for bottom-up adoption.

A security client was in need of a blog post showcasing how their platform had intercepted a phishing attack and had taken action before the user’s credentials could be compromised.

Writing this at a high level and in very general terms would have been simple. But such a blog wouldn’t have anything to offer in-the-trenches practitioner personas. And content that’s too basic can actually harm your reputation.

So instead of rushing out a blog post that lacked technical depth, the IOD team met with not only the PMM but also a lead architect on the project. They walked our team through the platform’s incident response, pointing out why other platforms might not have detected or mitigated the problem.

The resulting article highlighted not only abstract risks of credential theft but also included a step-by-step analysis showcasing the platform’s unique ability to respond and prevent compromise for more technical audiences seeking concrete details.

As our example shows, producing an effective technical blog post takes lots of effort and expert consulting from a whole team of people—across the entire organization.

It requires consulting tech teams including R&D, the CTO, support, and subject matter experts (SMEs) across every department. But with so many different perspectives, the content production process can become complicated.

• How can you bridge the gap between these departments to produce blog posts that resonate with your audience?

• What goes into producing a compelling technical blog post?

• Where do the greatest frustrations lie?

• How can you save time and avoid delays?

Let’s take a look.

Clash of Departments: Marketing vs. Tech

The central frustration when it comes to creating tech blogs comes from a fundamental clash between marketing and tech departments’ expectations, which can create serious friction within your organization—and no wonder.

• Marketers come in with an “I want it NOW!” attitude, assuming they’re asking for a quick and easy write-up. They’re not familiar enough with the nitty-gritty of the product to write persuasively for a tech audience. But surely (they figure) tech teams—who work with the product day in and day out—can explain it, describe the problem it solves, paste in a few screenshots to convince readers, and boom, the work is done. 

• Tech teams are busy. Developers are developing. Testers are testing. Ops are keeping the lights on. And since the specs for the product came from on high in the first place (they figure), it should be somebody else’s responsibility to put pen or pixels to paper to share the wonders of the product they’ve worked so hard to bring into the world. The marketing department is supposed to do all of that, aren’t they? With so many departments passing the buck, often nobody steps up to take responsibility for the tech content publishing schedule.

Because of this friction and the complexities of coordinating different departments and stakeholders’ expectations for the process, content, and end result, producing a “simple” blog can easily take weeks at best, if not months. I’ve even seen technical blog posts take over a year to produce!

The lag between commissioning the blog and getting it published might even be so extreme that the marketing opportunity you hoped to address—like a product launch or big industry conference—is long past by the time you’re done. 

The result? A whole lot of wasted work and frustration all around.

Lengthy Delays: Everybody’s Problem

You might think problems with delivering content on time would happen primarily with enterprise clients, where physical distances between team members and a lack of coordinated content production methodologies can lead to lengthy back-and-forth cycles. But in truth, it’s not limited to any one type of organization.

The Enterprise

With enterprise companies, delays can result when marketers realize they need a heavily technical piece of content, requiring the involvement of a tech contributor, such as the security platform architect mentioned above. In that case, it was lucky that she was involved early on. Sometimes, marketers only realize later in the game that they need to bring in someone from R&D to review the content. 

A tech persona brought in to review a blog post draft might find major issues with the content itself, requiring a whole new outline or draft. Or they may even reject the topic outright, sending all the work done so far right down the drain.

The Startup

What we’ve often seen with smaller organizations and startups is that marketing is not systematic and strategic. Without a marketing plan, tactics can change mid-stream, while a blog post is still in production. In fact, several early-stage startups began pilots with us, but the lack of direction on their end resulted in lengthy review cycles.

We’ve found that working more proactively with startups can help them clarify their strategic goals so they don’t end up with incomplete content that loses its timeliness before it can be published.

Tech Blog in Progress: A Good Number of Cooks in the Kitchen

Before we explore the stages on the way to a perfect, polished blog post, it’s important to understand that having so many stakeholders involved in producing a post is both an advantage and a drawback.

Remember the parable of the blindfolded men and the elephant? After touching a different part of the elephant, each one of them comes up with a very different description of what the animal is like. The man touching the leg declares that it’s tall and rough like a tree trunk. The man touching the tail says it’s flexible and fibrous, like a rope.

They’re not wrong, of course. They’re just not touching the whole elephant.

Your blog post has to capture the “whole elephant,” meaning that at every stage, you’ll need many hands involved in the process—representing technical, executive, marketing, editorial, sales, and other departments.

As the topics, outline, and finally the draft are circulated around the relevant stakeholder departments, each will need time to come up with their own comments, feedback, and/or approval. For example, during the outline stage, some departments may feel the outline needs topics or bullet points added or removed.

Depending on how many people are involved in the process, this can take a while. For starters, people can be busy, leading to delays in waiting for feedback and sign-offs. If any key person in this cycle is away, the blog can sit on their desk for some time before they get to it. 

The writer will then have to incorporate any revisions and resubmit their work, beginning the cycle of feedback and approval all over again.

Of course, delays can cause frustration. If the marketing team finds themselves waiting weeks for a blog, which they assumed would be completed in a couple of days, they can start pushing tech teams to hurry up. This can lead to an unsatisfactory result and friction, with key processes skipped or drafts delivered in suboptimal form. 

Given all of this, it’s a little easier to understand some of the inevitable delays along the line as we explore the stages of quality tech content production in the following section. 

In some cases, the marketing team may decide that by the time they have the draft in their hands, too much time has passed and they no longer need the blog. But with a professional approach, you really can plan better and start producing high-quality tech blogs on time and at scale—and with less effort and friction.

Tech Content Production Lifecycle

The key to addressing all these issues—coordinating departments, unclear responsibilities, and uncertain expectations—is to establish a service level agreement (SLA). This sets up clear expectations so that everyone involved understands the process of writing a detailed tech blog post, as well as how long each step might take. 

Clear internal SLAs are essential to a well-oiled publishing schedule; your marketing department must take responsibility for spearheading these. For example: “3 days to complete article review, and if this is not done, we move forward to the next draft.” 

To accomplish this, you’ll need buy-in not only from marketing team executives but also R&D. A single point person needs to track all content projects continuously to guide them as they progress from one stage to the next.

Once that’s done, you can draw up a schedule that everyone involved can agree on and stick to. 

Let’s take a look at the steps of a typical marketing content production cycle.

1. Choose the Topics and Create a Brief 

Each stakeholder may want to review the article brief to make sure it’s on message, a process that may take two or three days—multiplied by the number of stakeholders who need to have a say before the brief is finalized. This stage can involve more work than you might think! 

To come up with great topics, for instance, the tech team needs to do research into industry trends and interests, take screenshots, and possibly perform other background work. All this can take a long time, especially given that tech teams will always be focused on their core functions—whether development, releases, or vulnerability management, for example.

2. Create an Outline

The next step is creating an outline based on the approved article brief. This sets a roadmap for each blog and ensures everyone is aligned on the content and messaging. Ideally, it might take another three days for stakeholders to review and add their feedback and suggestions, which the writer has to incorporate.

3. Write a First Draft

With the outline finished, the writer sets about creating a draft. Depending on how much information the blog covers, this can take around a week, assuming no other more urgent tasks (such as media releases for a launch event) take precedence. So, already, we’re at around 10 to 14 days. 

4. Send to Editorial

Next, the editor should review the content for language, clarity, and flow while also ensuring consistency in style, voice, and brand messaging. The editor must also check that all of the information mapped out in the outline is covered. This stage may take a couple back and forth cycles between the writer/marketing team and the editor/editorial department, although it can take longer if there is a disconnect between marketing and editorial. 

5. Submit the Draft for Review

All relevant stakeholders will review the first draft, giving their feedback and comments, which generally takes at least three days. The more people involved, the more revisions will likely be needed—some reviewers will also more likely be late with their comments.

6. Create a Second Draft

The writer now has to make adjustments based on all the comments and feedback. This may take another three or four days, depending on how many revisions there are. The writer may also need time to clarify certain points with stakeholders if some comments are not clear.

7. Submit for Approval

After a last review by the editor, the final draft goes back to the marketing department and is signed off on by all relevant stakeholders. The post may, however, still need graphs, images, formatting, or social media messages.

Planning Ahead

To avoid running out of time, strive for cadence and consistency; it’s important to plan ahead and understand what needs to be done to get the output the marketing department is looking for.

To generate four articles a month, for example, you’ll need to create the articles at least a month in advance and in parallel so that the blogs are ready for publishing the following month. Ideally, you should even be creating content three to six months in advance to ensure a regular publishing cadence.

If this is the first time your team has tackled this process—for example, if you’re starting a new marketing campaign—you may want to allow for some additional lead time to give all stakeholders the chance to find their feet and get used to what’s expected of them. You may want to consider establishing a “content committee” where each stakeholder has a clearly defined, designated role and understands how many articles they will need to be involved in so they can plan accordingly.

Be Prepared for Quick Turnarounds

Sometimes, it truly isn’t possible to plan ahead, and you’ll find yourself needing to turn a blog post around in a much tighter timeframe. For example, if there’s a news announcement or shocking industry development (e.g., a zero-day attack) that demands a blog post, marketing teams need a fast track to make sure they can publish in under a week. 

To fast-track the process, you may need to limit the number of stakeholders reviewing the piece, opt for shorter blog posts (for example, 700 words versus 1,500), and create a lighter and less detailed brief.

Plan for the Short and Long Term

When creating a publishing calendar, you should think both short and long term. For the latter, you’ll need a bank of articles ready to last around six months. These could be evergreen topics or articles written to coincide with a planned product launch or a regular industry event such as AWS re:Invent, Black Hat, or KubeCon. 

Shorter-term planning is all about having those blogs ready to go for the next one to three months, together with that fast-track process for any blogs you may need to get out quickly. 

With all these processes, it’s important to be strict and stick to the timeline. The more stakeholders who get involved with a project, the more potential there is for delays. Overrunning by a day here or there could throw your entire schedule into chaos. If you’ve allowed three days for a certain process, try to make sure everyone sticks to it. 

As with anything else, you’ll get better at all of this with practice, and as departments begin to understand their responsibilities along with the benefits to the entire organization of producing high-quality tech content at scale.

Building a Solid Foundation

Expert-based blog posts that appeal to practitioners and end users are one of the best ways to build a solid tech marketing foundation. But balancing the demands of the marketing team with the availability and capacity of your tech team is key to your success here. 

It takes a lot of planning in advance and organization to be agile enough to publish content at the cadence and volume required to maintain your edge.

Organizations like Microsoft, Check Point, NetApp, and Wiz have turned to IOD to streamline content workflows and maximize reach by tapping into IOD’s vast network of experienced tech content creators in the fields of cloud DevOps, cybersecurity, data engineering, and AI. 

These include practitioners in the field, tech marketing writers, editors, video producers, and graphic designers, all working together with your tech and DevRel or marketing teams to deliver expert-based content that performs: 

• Bringing in new users

• Boosting retention and upsell

• Establishing thought leadership in your field

With IOD’s proven systems and workflows, you’ll retain total control over content while ensuring you have what you need to grow and thrive. Book a consult with IOD today to start powering up your tech content machine.