Marketing Writing Vs Technical writing: Understanding the Difference (Content Publication)

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 continues from the previous section (The content creation process). You can also read the introductory session for context

Content Publication

Content management systems such as WordPress constitute one of the most used tools by marketing writers for content publication.

Marketing writers, especially in-house marketing writers, publish their content on their company blogs.?

To increase the reach of their content, marketing content writers also utilize platforms such as Medium, and social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn to broadcast their content in different forms.

This could range from just republishing the content on these platforms (Medium), or distilling the content into mini copies (Twitter and LinkedIn) for consumption by their target audience.

This act constitutes what marketing content writers call content distribution and repurposing.?

At this point, I must say that because marketing writers publish their content with a focus on a specific audience, we can describe content publication for marketing writers as individualistic in nature.?

Marketing writers create content just to serve the interest of a company or product. There is no such thing as contributing content to a common bucket in marketing writing—a practice central to content publication by developer technical writers.

Developer technical writers publish their technical content mostly in communities like Freecodecamp, Smashing Magazine,? Stackoverflow, Hashnode and Dev.to.?

These are big platforms that host thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pieces of technical content, and are followed by software developers all around the world.?

The huge amount of content they host and the fact that content publication on these platforms are open to all software developers makes it possible for software developers to simply worry about creating content without bothering "too much" about a target audience.

In other words, by simply contributing to a common bucket (communities), they could create content without being too specific about a target audience.?

The point here is that content publication for developer technical writers is community based, not from an individualistic viewpoint of a marketer trying to monetize a specific niche audience.?

You will often hear software developers use terms such as "contributing to the developer community" when publishing their technical content.?

For marketers, content publication is of a different mindset. It is about creating content that converts a target audience into paying customers.

For developer technical writers, the mindset is more of feeling satisfied giving back to the open source developer community that has built them.?

In-house technical writers, on other hand, have a different publication channel for their technical content.

The only similarity with marketing content publication is that in-house technical content publication is also individualistic in nature. That is, content is created to serve a company or a product that has a target audience.

In-house technical writers, of all types of writers, possess the widest repertoire of authoring tools and platforms for publishing their content.

These tools are mostly called documentation tools. They include static site generators such as Mkdocs, Jeckll, Sphinx, Docusaurus, MadCap Flare; API documentation tools such as Slate; and XML authoring tools.

Methodology such as Doc-as-code and DITA also form a core of technical content documentation and publication for in-house technical writers that work on company products.

It should be noted that all these conventions have an impact on the writing style of most technical content. Most noticeable is its stricter writing style compared to marketing content.

In-house technical writers usually don't engage in content re-publication and content repurposing like their marketing writer counterparts.?

Instead, they spend their time maintaining documentation by ensuring content is up to date to reflect the most current version of the product the content is created for; then, updating them through the usage of support tickets to reduce the workload of customer service.?

At this point, it is safe to say that while in-house technical content is more user/product-focused, marketing content is target audience focused, as I noted earlier.?

This is true because when technical writers talk about creating and updating documentation, a large percentage of such decisions is motivated by a change to the product or API the documentation was written for.

On the other hand, it is not unusual for marketing writers to create new marketing content or update their existing marketing content to match a new or a different target audience.

As I have noted earlier, marketing content forms an extra layer of content over documentation. It serves as a tool for companies to create content to match specific target audiences.?

This cannot be practiced with documentation as such will cause it to lose its main purpose, which is to provide information to users about the product—for a smoother user experience.

Rounding up...

So that's it about the difference between marketing writing and technical writing.

Let me know what you think in the comments...