Business Many marketers that are new to targeting a technical audience use techniques such as static sales demos, datasheets with lists of benefits, and cold calls to try to sell their product. Savvy technical marketers, however, know that you need to position your content in a way that covers technical aspects of a service or product, as well as using educational techniques and strategies that resonate with a technical audience.
Even if you’re a pro at technical marketing and your campaigns are producing results, there are always ways to improve. Reading case studies of companies that have successfully implemented technical marketing campaigns and learning from experts is a great way to do that.
We’ve put together a list of technical marketing books where the authors share a wealth of data, tips, and examples. Read these technical marketing books to upgrade your technical marketing knowledge and deliver better marketing campaigns.
1. Smart Marketing for Engineers: An Inbound Marketing Guide to Reaching Technical Audiences
By Rebecca Geier
Understanding your technical audience is the key to being able to market to them, whether that’s their browsing behavior, content preferences, or where they spend their time. This book provides data that will help you form your technical buyer persona, as well as templates you can use to better market to this audience.
It includes examples from B2B companies and is targeted at both companies that are new to technical marketing, as well as those that are looking to improve the effectiveness of their inbound marketing strategy.
2. Developer Marketing and Relations: The Essential Guide
By SlashData, Nicolas Sauvage, Andreas Constantinou, Caroline Lewko
This book aims to help you understand how your favorite tech brands such as Google and Microsoft practice developer and technical marketing from both a strategic and tactical point of view. While it covers technical and developer marketing as a whole, it specifically helps you to hone in on your target audience, understand specific tools and strategies in technical/developer marketing, and learn how to build a community of technical users.
Chapters include
- Starting from Scratch: How to Build a Developer Marketing Program
- Structuring Developer Relations
- Using Developer Personas to Stay Customer-Obsessed
3. How to Creatively Market A Technical Product
by Heinrich Louw, Michelle Segreat
Datasheets and operation manuals are no longer enough to get the job done when it comes to technical marketing, says this book. How to Creatively Market A Technical Product looks at why a lot of techniques that marketers traditionally used are out of date and explains new approaches to take to ensure success.
This book focuses on content marketing, acknowledging that different audiences consume media differently, which means that you need to tailor your channels and approach depending on who you are speaking to.
4. Content Marketing, Engineered: Build Trust and Convert Buyers with Technical Content
by Wendy Covey
Technical marketing requires a different approach to content marketing. Oftentimes, the tone, format, and style of technical marketing will vary from traditional content marketing programs. In this book, Wendy Covey walks you through the steps you need to take to create content to inform, educate, and help your technical buyers.
This book covers the entire technical content marketing process from end to end, including:
- Planning
- Writing
- Publishing
- Promoting
- Measuring
5. Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing 1st ed. Edition
by Jared Bhatti, Zachary Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nunez, Heidi Waterhouse
To educate themselves about your product, your audience will need to read copious amounts of uninterrupted, continuous documentation. Providing educational materials to technical users, such as documentation, can and will accelerate their purchasing decision.
This book explains how to create great documentation that helps developers better understand your product. It’s aimed at technical writers, developer advocates, product managers, and other technical roles that are charged with creating and contributing to documentation. It also shows you how to measure the success of your documentation by using analytics and user feedback.
6. The Insider’s Guide to Technical Writing
by Krista Van La
One of the key aspects of technical marketing is creating impactful content that engages and resonates with your audience. You need to be able to communicate your value proposition and explain how your product works. This requires strong technical writing skills, as well as good general technical communication skills.
This book answers the following questions:
- What does it take to be a technical writer?
- What skills and tools do you need to get started?
- How do you create a schedule that won’t make you go crazy?
- How do you write around different development processes, including Agile methodologies?
- How do you create style guides, indexes, templates, and layouts?
7. Developer Marketing Does Not Exist: The Authentic Guide to Reach a Technical Audience
by Adam DuVander
Traditional marketing tactics don’t work on technical audiences. They don’t want to be sold to and have to sit through static demos or read marketing brochures with lists of benefits.
This book will help you understand what you should be doing to reach and authentically engage your technical audience so you can raise awareness of your product and improve adoption rates. It promises to provide you with “effective, non-sleazy strategies to reach more developers”.
8. The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success
by Mary Thengvall
Building a strong community is one of the keys to success when it comes to technical marketing. If you’re not sure why you need to foster a community, you’ll find out after reading this book. You’ll also learn how to:
- Define and sell the idea of community to your company
- Find, build, and engage with your community
- Maintain positive relationships with your technical audience
- Determine how and when to hire community managers
- Build your brand
It features interviews with experienced technical marketing professionals from companies such as Google, Mozilla, Chef, and Twilio.
