Picture this, you’re in charge of tech content for your company, and you’re doing everything right. You’ve got a blog up and running. You have a top-notch product or service to promote.

On paper, landing new clients for your blog should be simple.

But here’s the thing:

Even if you’ve got a talented tech content writer waiting on your instructions every day, you still need a plan that will predictably take people from “Let me Google this.” to “Just take my money already!”.

So how do you convince these folks to whip out their credit cards on the spot? You use content marketing.

To that end, here’s a step-by-step guide to creating a cutting-edge tech-based content marketing strategy. All you have to do is keep reading.

Step #1: Figure Out Your Goals

A lot of companies do things out of tradition. Maybe they have a website because every business has an online presence these days. Or maybe they run commercials or maintain a blog because that’s what previous marketing teams have always done.

While all of this can certainly keep content teams busy, if you were to ask many marketing executives a question like “How much money did we make off of this?” many would be hard-pressed to give you a straightforward answer.

The beauty of content marketing is that it allows you to set firm goals and create concrete measures of success. And while success for some companies will involve more abstract ambitions like generating visibility or becoming industry thought leaders, other companies will try to quantify their goals through KPIs.

Whatever your company goals happen to be, every content marketing plan establishes clarity around what you want your campaign to achieve.

Step #2: Get to Know Your Audience

In content marketing, we talk a lot about the importance of delivering value to potential customers. Why? Because people are more likely to buy from someone they know and trust.

However, even before you start putting your content team to work mass-producing all those articles, you must understand your audience. What needs do they have? What problems are they thinking about by the time they’re visiting your site?

Whether you’re selling to businesses or individual buyers, no one in their right mind will look at a well-priced and well-designed solution to their problems and say, “Yeah, I’m going to pass.”. But as a marketer, you have to find a way of letting these people know that you can help them.

Sourceg.net talks specifically about content marketing for trade shows, but the general advice is sound in a broad range of contexts. Appealing to your target audience makes it easier to set up an irresistible trail of content that grabs the attention of your prospects and makes them reach for their wallets, and say “I need this right now!”.

Step #3: Do a Content Tune-Up

Imagine being sold on an end-to-end cruise and travel adventure by a slick digital ad campaign only to discover that the hotel was busted, the ship had cracks, and the furniture was too weak to put your suitcase on. Even if you didn’t say it, you’d probably be thinking that the company should have prepared the foundation of the trip before spending money on ads.

When it comes to tech content creation, companies are often excellent at describing the features of what they offer. But once you’ve figured out your target audience and you’ve set your goals, you don’t want your leads to be stumbling over old content that doesn’t align with your current marketing strategy.

As you look through your old posts and your current content, you might find that some posts are more ready for primetime than others. But overall, while the auditing process might take a little bit of time upfront, your content marketing strategy will be more coherent as a result of your efforts.

Step #4: Create a Content Calendar

Over the course of a quarter, it’s easy to make publishing every week a part of your quarterly to-do list only to find yourself throwing all of that ambition to the wayside when the end-of-quarter crunch comes around, and you’re scrambling to get tie up loose ends.

The truth is that finding the time to come up with a subject that engages and entertains readers every week isn’t easy. In addition, knowing what images and visual assets to create can be tricky as well.

But what if generating that level of tech content was as simple as opening an app and following a checklist? What if you could publish the type of content that draws eyeballs and keeps fresh leads in your pipeline without having to reinvent the wheel with every post?

A content calendar is a simple tool that can tell you what to publish, where to publish it, and when. It just doesn’t get any easier than that.

Step #5: Have Each Step in Your Customer Journey Figured Out

So you’ve got people clicking on your headlines and finding your site. Great! Your readers are getting real value out of your writing. Even better!

But as people scroll down to the bottom of your page with their credit cards in hand, your final paragraph leaves them feeling so confused that they just shrug their shoulders and hit the back button. Talk about leaving money on the table.

The key to turning your tech content into a money-making machine is being able to consistently keep people moving from one stage of your marketing funnel to the next. But if you and your writers don’t know what the next stage of your funnel is, they can’t make the ask. You can sidestep this potential pitfall by simply mapping out your customer journey and building your plan out accordingly.

You and your content team will be glad that you did it.

Here’s How You Can Take Your Tech Content to the Next Level

Content marketing in tech is kind of like watering a garden. You often have to do the right things for a while before you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.

It’s not always easy to take your prospects from browsing the internet to buyers, but with the help of the five steps we’ve just listed, you now have the information you need to build a top-notch content marketing strategy that can bring results in today’s world.

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