Marketing Writing Vs Technical Writing: Understanding the difference (An Introduction)

Hi #technicalwriters and #contentwriters to keep with the "shorter content" culture on LinkedIn, this article will be published in three parts. If you want to read it once, you can just read the full article on Medium

This is the introductory part, you can skip if you want, but you can read it for context.

When I first came into the digital space, I kicked off with an interest in creating marketing content for software products: blog posts, articles, comparisons, etc. That lasted until March 2022 when I finally gave up on chasing a career in marketing (the rejection letters won't stop coming) and quickly navigated into technical writing. I quickly noticed the growth? potential was even bigger and there was more career stability.?

Initially, the technical writing world scared me off: there were too many "technicals" to deal with. Making complex topics simple, could I do that??

Recently, I picked up training myself as a software engineer so I could better understand how developers use the tools I want to create technical content for. It is said, experience is the best teacher, right??

I also picked up this self-training so I could start creating my own portfolio pieces that would be based on my coding practical knowledge.?

If you are very familiar with the software engineering/technical writing world, you will know that a majority of employers, if not all, will not hire you if you have zero experience.?

Now, you must understand that when I pivoted from creating marketing content to technical content, there were some mental adjustments I made with respect to content creation.

While I have not lost the mental orientation for creating marketing content, the switch brought within me a need to know the difference between technical content and marketing content. I believe that should happen to anyone naturally. This natural curiosity and spur to better understand the world and whatever we deal with in our day to day lives.

Of course, I did my Google research, but none of the answers were satisfactory enough. They were either too shallow and weren't hitting the nail on the head or they were totally off the mark.

So I started to think more about it: in what ways did technical writing differ from marketing content??

I mean the difference is right there when you stare at both content forms. Merely staring at them, and you will see the clear difference, the most obvious being the writing voice, tone and style. But I sought more concrete answers.

The epiphany didn't come until the morning I woke up and was paging through a horrible piece that tried to explain the difference between marketing content and technical content and was doing a bad job at it. I was so angry I got an inspiration.?

First, let me identify the specifics of how technical writing differ from marketing writing:

1. The content creation process

2. Content publication

In the next two parts, we would discuss each of them. Tag along!