From Active User to Advocate: The Power of Good Technical Content

Not all content is equal when marketing technology to a primary developer audience. In this post, Copywriter Jade Mitchell discusses the value of technical content that truly supports developers.

Not all content is equal when marketing technology to a primary developer audience. Different types of content aim to reach and engage this niche at every stage of their decision-making process. You need specific types of content to resonate with developers—and one of those is technical content.

When it comes to convincing a company to invest in your new solution, appealing to upper management is just one-half of the conversation. Developers and technical decision-makers help guide these high-level decisions. You need to keep them informed if you want to influence those decisions. The best way to do this is by creating technical content that developers value.

Developers want to save time and effort. They'll listen if you demonstrate that you can make their lives easier without overpromising capabilities. This article introduces how to create technical content that truly supports developers, so they, in turn, understand the value you provide and can advocate for you.

Right Place, Right Time, Right Document

When it comes to creating technical documentation for developers, people who work with developers, and people who make IT buying decisions on behalf of developers, there are two categories of technical writing to consider:

Conceptual Documentation

Procedural Documentation

Conceptual documentation typically takes the form of a guide, a report, or a product specification sheet. Its purpose is to illuminate the audience about new technologies or products, explore the ramifications of incorporating this technology as it pertains to an industry or organization type, or provide examples of how this technology has been used elsewhere. This is the “put your feet up” kind of reading a developer might do while trying to understand a new solution. It’s very much the “awareness and evaluation” messaging that your brand team might still take some interest in, but it’s also often where traditional marketing and sales teams cease their efforts, leaving information gaps that are either retroactively, or never, filled in.

As the name suggests, procedural documentation usually fulfills a post-purchase purpose and should be intended for use during implementation, expansion, or support. Where conceptual documentation might overlap with some of your wider marketing messaging, and can therefore sound a little more philosophical, it’s important to understand that procedural documentation is typically accessed by busy developers trying to build a solution on a tight timeline.   Technical FAQs, API references, troubleshooting scripts, tutorials, community boards, and how-to manuals can all be judged by: Did it have the answer I need?  How long did it take to find it?

“For a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent searching for answers/solutions adds up to between 333-651 hours of time lost per week across the entire team.” “Asked and answered: the results for the 2022 Developer survey are here!”, StackOverflow, June 2022

Good Technical Content: Procedural Clarity With Conceptual Detail  

Both forms of technical writing rely on the writer being able to clearly, and quickly, articulate:

• The intended purpose of the piece

• Its relevance to the intended audience

• A logical information hierarchy 

• Accurate and concise–but sufficient–technical detail 

Developers are notoriously busy, often dealing with multiple projects and priorities at once. However, this is also a group that prizes skill development and has little fear when it comes to deep-diving into new technological concepts. Documentation that allows them to quickly find an answer, but also allows them to “double click” into the details is documentation that has struck the ideal balance.

In our experience creating technical documentation for software providers and hardware manufacturers, there is a delicate balance to be struck between clarity and comprehensiveness that is best attained through a thorough discovery and audit process.

Some of the key considerations to define early on include:

1. Who’s Accessing the Document? 

It should be assumed that your primary audience is the software engineers, architects, and developers who will ultimately need to use your technical documentation to use your product or service as intended.

But it’s not just your customers’ developers who need to understand and engage with your documentation: internal audiences are just as vital for ensuring ongoing product iteration, support, and innovation.

This means having a good understanding of not just the roles and responsibilities of all the different stakeholders who will need to use the document. Effective technical documentation would also be graded according to each user group’s technical maturity, and the technical maturity of the organization as a whole.

2. When Will They Access It? 

As mentioned when we were defining the differences between conceptual and procedural documentation, different readers will be looking to the documentation to answer different questions at different times.

Information architecture, messaging hierarchies, formatting, and even the indexing system you use to organize information can help or hinder a technology’s successful rollout and adoption.

3. How Does It Fit Into the Product Information Ecosystem? 

Every FAQ, community answer, or document page fits into a broader story about the product or service, with upper funnel marketing at the beginning and technical support documentation at the end. Along the way though, gaps can appear in this story, leaving developers without the means to realize a product promise made in the early sales stage.

As part of a comprehensive DaaS offering (Documentation as a Service), a technical writer, or technical writing team, should conduct a thorough audit of available documentation, and zoom in on the features, capabilities, and precepts that need to be communicated.

That is to say, the reader can dive into a set of documentation to read more detail, or, they can step back out to see the bigger picture. As most developers identify as self-directed learners, the goal is to make it easy, fast, and intuitive for them to answer their own questions.

Internal Documentation: More Than Just Another Manual 

Many tech vendors market their solutions to developers assuming that the promise of the performance alone will help bridge the chasm between awareness to adoption. The truth is that the effort and thought that goes into producing excellent technical documentation is an extension of the organization’s attitude towards–and relationship with–the developers using the product. It can be as much an extension of your support function as the ChatBot you’ve been trying to train as a salesperson. 

Documentation aimed at internal audiences is just as important for building consensus, encouraging adoption, and inspiring innovation, unfortunately, it’s far more often neglected. The quality and accuracy of internal technical documentation can have a major impact on the sales or support teams who rely on it to build and expand customer relationships.

Using Technology to Augment Technical Content 

The principles of good technical content have always been the same, even within the specific needs of the developer community. But the tools used to produce and share it change all the time.

AI is already affecting every type of content production, and so we see technical writing also evolving, namely in the areas of advanced personalization, predictive navigation, and the ability to create documentation at scale. That said, journalistic integrity, natural curiosity, and human empathy are key to determining what qualifies this kind of personalization, and to ensure that an increase in scale is not a decrease in quality.

As increasingly daunting volumes of technical writing flood the internet, developers and IT decision-makers should look for vendors who provide them with documentation that is accurate, easy to use, and helps to build advocacy and trust between teams.

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Talk to Catchy about an evaluation of your technical documentation. We’re here to help you build a better developer experience.