Marketing Writing Vs Technical writing: Understanding the Difference (The Content Creation Process)

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 introductory section, which you can read for more context

The Content Creation Process

Content creation is a big part of both writing forms. This is one of the junctions where both writing forms set off in different directions in search for content.

First, let's talk about how marketing content writers sort for their content.

Ideally, to begin the content creation process, marketing writers would seek out the users and customers of a product.?

This is done to understand the target audience they are writing for.?

Extensively, especially for the rigorous marketing writers who are bent on creating top notch marketing content, they would follow up this initial research by consulting everyone in the company who is in contact with the customers of the company's product.?

This includes the customer service team, customer success team, c-executives, sales teams, product team, other marketers, and even technical documentation. It is a rigorous process.

At this point I must say, every single marketing content deliverable is tightly coupled to writing content for a specific target audience.?

Now, you might wonder why do marketing writers use this length process?

Well, the answer is pretty simple. Marketing content relies heavily on exploiting grey areas, nuances, and pain points of the target audience they are writing for. Marketing writers must write in such a way as to ensure the content resonates almost perfectly with the specific target audience.?

Discovering these grey areas, nuances, and pain points can only be achieved through a rigorous research process. Nuances and grey? areas don't easily unveil themselves. They need rigor and persistent research to find them.?

It is usually more of an epiphany when you discover them, like a scientific research that gave way to a discovery.

Unfortunately, most marketing writers lack this rigor so they create bland content that have little to nothing to deal with the target audience they are writing for. But, that's a discussion for another article. You can check here to learn more about how content creation for marketers look like?

Technical writers, on the other hand, have a much different process for content creation, and this depends also on their backgrounds.?

In the technical writing world, we have software engineers that do technical writing. Let's call them developer technical writers.

Then, we also have the technical writers who came into the technology industry as technical writers and that's pretty much what they do. Mostly, they work as in-house technical writers for companies.

Developer technical writers work mostly as freelance technical writers (they have a software engineering day job), and usually, they create technical content by participating in developer community writer programs hosted by companies, and also by contributing content to community hubs for software engineers like Freecodecamp, Smashing Magazine,? Hashnode, and Dev.to.

For developer technical writers, content creation is based totally on their practical coding knowledge and experience. It is no wonder most of their content consists of how-tos and tutorials.?

Secondly, content creation by developer technical writers is not tightly coupled to writing for a specific target audience as you have with marketing content.?

Content creation is more experience-oriented than target audience oriented. You write about what you know(practical knowledge). Period.

This is true because the need for a target audience oriented mindset for this type of technical writers is of mild necessity. More on this in content publication below.

Let's talk about the second type of technical writers: in-house technical writers.?

They work in-house as employees to create technical documentation for technical products. Documentation such as tutorials, how-tos, API reference guides, Getting Started, Installation guides, SDK documentation etc..

In-house technical writers source their technical content by consulting the technical team, the product team and the customer service team.

Tom Johnson, a lead technical writer, specifically identified some key set of people within a company that in-house technical writers consult in creating their technical documentation: software engineers, product managers, partner engineers and the quality assurance engineers.

In addition to this, in-house technical writers would also consult the customer service team for support tickets to update technical documentation.

This is in sharp contrast to marketing content writers who consult c-executives, customer success and sales team.??

Although there could be instances where they consult the same team for their content, such as the customer service, their needs still differ.

While the in-house technical writers would consult the customer service for support tickets to discover frequently asked questions, the marketing writers would consider not just the FAQs, but the entirety of the customer service interaction with customers in order to have a solid grasp of customer pain points and needs.

Like developer technical writers, in-house technical writing is also not tightly coupled to writing for a specific target audience—except that they are of different intensity. In-house technical writers must pay more attention to their company target audience than developer technical writers would to their target audience.?

Marketing writing, on the other hand, is of more intensity when it comes to content creation compared to in-house technical writing.?

While technical documentation could be written for a general set of people, marketing writing, which usually exists in most companies as another content layer over documentation (developer marketing and blogs), is where companies can tweak, experiment and create content to target specific niche audiences that cannot be covered or targeted in their main technical documentation content.

I hope you find it insightful. In the last part, I talk about how content publication spells the difference between both writing forms. Tag along!