How I Followed the Money to Marketing While Staying True to Tech Comm

By Karen Ronning-Hall

I didn’t leave the field of technical communication willingly. As it turns out, I didn’t leave it at all. I stretched its definition to fit the times.

In December 2001, I was downsized, voted off the island, given the heave-ho. The office was cold. Everyone had gone home for the night except my boss, the human-resources director, the janitor, and me. My boss, the VP of engineering, pushed a thick envelope across the desk toward me. I’d never seen a severance package before. He smiled, as if he’d given me a gift. I wanted to smack him. In retrospect, I should have thanked him. But at the time, as I walked out of the office into the drizzle and darkness, all I knew was that I’d joined the ranks of the unemployed.

Up to that point, my career had been on a satisfying upward journey. I had advanced from technical writer to director of technical communication, responsible for thirty employees. I had a coveted corner office on the top floor of a software firm in Portland, Oregon. I was passionate about technical communication. I had served as president in the local STC chapter. Most of all, I loved working with my smart, diverse group of tech-comm friends and colleagues.

What Next?

The dot-com bubble burst that year, and I’d been hit with its debris. Some high-tech companies had failed; others were barely surviving. The tragedy of 9/11 had pushed the economy over the edge, and unemployment in the United States jumped higher than we’d seen in a decade.

Technical writers were hit especially hard. The Internet enabled many companies to offshore and outsource parts of product development, including technical communications. Disruptive technologies within our industry, like content-management and single-sourcing systems, were streamlining the way our jobs got done. Corporations wanted technical-publications departments to work faster and produce more with fewer writers, a theme that continues today.

I had a lot of company in the unemployment line. Technical-writing jobs were scarce. STC chapter meetings were downright depressing. Many of us were asking, "What’s next? Will tech comm survive?"

Our Skills Transfer Somewhere, Right?

After getting over the shock of losing my job, I felt optimistic, even excited, for my colleagues and for myself. I knew that our basic skillset as technical communicators—writing, editing, and research—were essential skills at every company.

Finding a newer, better gig required stripping off the old labels and repackaging these fundamentals. We needed to stop narrowly defining ourselves as technical writers, stop seeing ourselves only in certain roles within product development—roles that upper management wanted to eliminate. We needed to discover the people in our companies who could recognize, appreciate, and use (read "pay for") our skillset for the good of our organizations. Who would those people be? And how should we reach out to them? What would those future tech-comm roles look like? I got an inkling about that future by looking to my past.

During the 1990s, I was a tech-comm manager for a high-tech manufacturing company. My team was moved from one department to the next as upper management struggled to figure out where we fit. While some writers felt the changes were unsettling, I appreciated getting a glimpse of the way each department operated. We did a stint in the training department. A few years later, we moved to engineering, closer to our beloved subject matter experts (SMEs). The engineers got our jokes, and we were happy and productive. Unfortunately, the engineering manager thought that a good instructional guide could be written on a napkin. Money was tight in engineering, especially for product documentation. Finally, we landed in marketing as a result of a political grab by a new marketing communications (marcom) director. Initially, working with marketing folks—spin doctors, we called them—felt awkward and annoying, like wearing high heels on a beach. As long as their partying didn’t distract my SMEs and writers, we coexisted amicably.

Over time, I warmed up to the spin doctors. They smiled a lot, which helped. In addition to their upbeat attitudes, here’s what I liked:

• Marketing had more budget for writing projects than any other department because getting leads and influencing customers to buy is vital to corporate survival.
• The marketing director understood the value of good writing skills for creating a superior customer experience.
• Marketing offered new and varied types of writing opportunities for the technical writers in my group—including me.

In 2001, as many technical-writing jobs were sent overseas or eliminated, writing opportunities in marketing remained steady and paid better. Three months after getting booted from the software company, I strapped on my high heels and joined the spin doctors. I bought a laptop and rebranded myself as a freelance copywriter and marketing project manager specializing in technical content. My husband and I incorporated a marketing communications company, Kaia Communications. In our first year, we turned a profit, and we have continued to do so every year since.

Technical Content Becomes Marketing Content

Over the last 13 years of running this company, I’ve seen significant growth in opportunities in marketing for technical communicators. Good writing and editing skills are more important than ever as companies’ content—especially technical content—exerts increasing influence on consumers’ buying decisions.

Why is well-written content so important to companies? Buyers today complete from 60 to 90 percent of their buying decisions before they engage with a vendor according to Forrester Research (http://blogs.forrester.com/lori_wizdo/12-10-04-buyer_behavior_helps_b2b_marketers_guide_the_buyers_journey). Until people make their decision to buy, they inform themselves using websites and social channels. Even when they attend physical events, they evaluate products and solutions on their smartphones and tablets. They avoid salespeople until they are ready.

Content influences consumers’ impressions of a company throughout what marketers call the customer journey (see Figure 1). At every touchpoint—not just after a sale—what buyers want is what technical writers have specialized in all along: useful, authentic, relevant, accurate information that solves problems. Not fluff. Not spin. According to a 2013 survey by IBM, almost 89 percent of visitors to IBM’s website for technical product information reported that high-quality technical content was either "important" or "very important" to their initial purchase decision (IBM Survey, Intercom, May 2013, http://intercom.stc.org/2013/05/telling-the-right-story-proving-the-business-value-of-content).

Technical content has an impact on a company’s bottom line. That’s something a CEO can get excited about. So can you as a technical writer because you can express your value in terms that executives appreciate.

Opportunities Explode in Content Marketing

Today’s marketers need technical communicators to help them connect with their prospects and customers throughout the buying cycle, not just after the sale. Hubspot estimates that 60 percent of businesses employ content marketing—the creation, publishing, and sharing of content to acquire and retain customers—as part of their overall marketing strategy. Effective content marketers know that they need to develop different types of content for each stage of the customer journey, supplying the right information at the right time to help customers make choices they’ll be happy with. A 2014 study by the Content Marketing Institute found that business marketers face the following top three challenges: lack of time, inability to produce enough content, and inability to produce the kind of content that engages (http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2014/02/small-business-2014-content-marketing-research).

Hear the call to action?

At many companies, including my own, technical writers already create many of the deliverables that content marketers are looking for: blog posts, Web pages, white papers, videos, infographics, presentations, social content, and traditional documentation, such as user guides and maintenance manuals. In my experience serving high-tech clients, one of the biggest challenges is generating enough content to support the customer journey at each stage of the buying cycle. This content gap—the gap between available content and needed content—represents opportunity for those technical communicators who gain skills in developing a broad range of content types.

Mingling with Marketing

You’ll do well creating technical marketing content if you excel in the basics:

• clear, precise writing and editing
• strong research skills
• an ability to analyze an audience and deliver useful content when it’s needed

With marketing content, you can introduce emotion, jazz, and sizzle into your prose to motivate your audience to take the next step. Of course, the sizzle must be audience appropriate. For example, my IT engineering audiences love charts and tables that would bore a less technical audience into a coma. The key is to understand the audience’s challenges and craft content that inspires them to engage.

You also have an advantage in your career if you can think beyond a specific deliverable. Every content piece is part of a larger set of assets that work together to support the customer’s business goals. Content developers who understand this bigger picture can write strategically to leverage content across multiple media. For example, at Kaia Communications, when we create a white paper, we may create a companion blog post, tweets, and infographics to amplify the key messages across a broader audience. This approach saves our clients time and money, helping them reach their prospects and clients faster.

Even if you aren’t interested in becoming a marketer, consider developing a relationship with your marketing counterparts, who may not yet appreciate the influence that your valuable content has on buying decisions. Conversely, the marketing group may be able to help you better understand your audience with insightful market research or customer personas—information to help you improve your materials.

Conclusion

Like many of you, I started my journey as a writer of technical documentation. In a mid-career crisis, I rebranded myself and followed the money into marketing. I’ve seen the prospects for technical communicators continue to grow as information becomes more and more valued as a corporate asset. Excellent writing and editing skills are more important than ever as companies’ content deliverables increasingly influence the buying decisions of consumers.

Collaboration between marketers and technical communicators improves information assets, thereby improving the customer experience. Happy customers mean higher revenues. Higher revenues mean happier executives. And happier executives mean expanded career opportunities for all.

Karen Ronning-Hall is the president of Kaia Communications, Inc., an agency that specializes in helping high-tech organizations reach larger audiences for their ideas, products, and services. Read her blog posts on www.kaiacomm.com. Follow Karen on Twitter @karenronning.