You’ve got a technical financial product, it’s complicated to explain and it needs explaining well because your clients are smart, busy, and already understand the technology your service is built on. Technical Content Marketing is one of the most effective ways to link your customer pain points with your solution.
You’ve got several challenges when selling technical products in financial services:
- Convincing potential buyers that your product is better than several competitors (especially if they’re bigger or considered more advanced);
- Selling a product based on outcomes, benefits, and ROI instead of focusing on every technical detail;
- Making the complex simple and clear without oversimplifying and diluting the advantages of working with yourselves.
To solve these problems, you need skilled, experienced writers who can deliver technical content marketing, and do it well.
In this article, we explain what technical content marketing is compared to brand content marketing or thought-leadership, and show how we have created high-quality pieces of technical content for brands like Docker and Mastercard.
What is technical content marketing?
Technical content marketing is how you showcase the value of your product and brand. It’s a specialised form of marketing, based on close details of your product or service. It’s in-depth, educational, and value-focused.
Everything you write about your offer needs to speak directly to your audience, showing them you understand:
- Their pain points;
- The business case and ROI the right solution would produce;
- That your product can solve these pain points, giving your ideal client the outcome they’re aiming for.
Technical content marketing isn’t filled with fluffy candy floss explainers. The most effective technical content is data-backed, succinct, and focuses on hyper-specific examples of the value a product delivers.
Why do financial services need technical content?
Technical content marketing in the financial services industry does some serious heavy lifting. It carries every marketing channel with it because without technical content, the lighter, less in-depth marketing assets that your team or a partner studio produces won’t have solid foundations.
The functions this type of marketing needs to perform are:
- Explaining what your product does and who it’s for
- Talking about the product in-depth, with a technical audience in mind
- Differentiating your product (e.g., a payment service provider from dozens of PSP competitors)
- Making crystal clear links between the features and benefits of your offer
- Making the business case for your product, usually aimed at a different audience: the budget holders and decision makers rather than the technical product end-users
It involves a lot of juggling; balancing the needs of different stakeholders with the need to be succinct and in-depth at the same time.
Naturally, this is more involved and in-depth than your typical B2C marketing playbook.
In B2C cases, the audience isn’t usually subject matter experts. An accountant looking for accountancy software that also connects to payroll software doesn’t need to understand APIs to sign-up for a new product.
However, the financial and fintech sectors are built on layers of technical products. For example, a VP of engineering at a major bank already understands containerization platforms. The challenge ⏤ which high-quality, expert-written technical content marketing can solve ⏤ is showing them why your containerization platform is right for them, and how it’s better than the alternatives.
In this scenario, you don’t need marketing that explains, “What is containerization”, or “Why containerization is needed.” Your audience is time-poor and already understands the basics, and a whole load more!
As we demonstrated with Docker, the most impactful content marketing needs to get straight to the technical pain points your ideal client is experiencing, and then clearly articulate how your offer solves their precise problems.
With Docker, we turned the value of their containerization platform into something appealing specifically for enterprise Financial Services Industry clients.
How Uncommon creates in-depth, impactful technical content marketing
It’s better to show than tell. So, we’ll show you how we’ve delivered technical content for two of our clients: Docker and Mastercard.
Docker is a tech scaleup that makes it easier for developers to develop apps. Docker does this with containers: standalone, executable software packages that come pre-packaged with everything an application needs to run, including the code, system tools, libraries, and settings.
Docker is a market-leader in containerization, currently worth $2.1 billion following their last funding round, with $435.9 million raised in total since they were founded in 2008. Docker’s core products are Desktop, Hub, Build Cloud, and Scout.
Docker’s technical content marketing goals
When Docker first approached us, they were facing an interesting challenge. They had already developed an incredibly powerful containerization platform, but now they wanted to specifically target a new(er) vertical—enterprise Financial Services Industry (FSI) clients.
Our goal was to bridge the gap between Docker’s technical expertise and the specific business needs of their FSI clients. The audience they were trying to reach needed clear insights and relevant data that showed Docker’s FSI capabilities, and why FSI companies would benefit from Docker’s products.
How Uncommon solved Docker’s challenges with technical content marketing
- In-depth discovery and research. Understanding technical products starts with interviewing you and your team, the subject matter experts. For Docker, these interviews revealed the best way to position their product for FSIs: Faster application deployment and reduced server costs, solving two major pain points in their operational strategy.
- A specific message for financial service leaders. With a clear messaging direction, we structured the whitepaper to show how Docker’s containerization and microservices could reduce the time-to-market 65% for new financial products.
- Demonstrated the security credentials of Docker. Naturally, financial services have stringent security requirements (like SOC 2 and GDPR). In the whitepaper, we detailed how Docker’s security features, like enhanced container isolation and rootless Docker, significantly reduce the risk of vulnerabilities and data breaches.
From start to finish, the whole process was collaborative, and this ensured we could deliver a high-level of precision with the message and technical details, and how these were conveyed throughout the white paper.
Docker was delighted with the results:
“We have contracted out to several other writers and our collaboration with you has by far been the smoothest and easiest. You have really raised the bar in terms of what we now know the experience can be like.”⏤ Chloe Cucinotta, Director of GTM Strategy at Docker
For more information, you can read our Docker case study here.
Mastercard is one of the world’s best-known financial brands. Mastercard generates over $28 billion in annual revenues, is a Fortune 500 member, and employs more than 35,000 people worldwide.
We are proud to partner with Mastercard Developers, a tech-centric division that operates a suite of data-backed products like Open Banking and a BIN Lookup solution.
Bank Identification Numbers (BINs) are the first 6 to 8 digits of a card number. BIN lookup solutions play an integral role in payment processing. They can verify a card’s issuing institution, help to prevent fraud, and optimize payment routing.
Mastercard Developer’s technical content marketing goals
Mastercard wanted to turn a third-party analysis of competitors into something they could use as a marketing and sales asset. The goal is that this whitepaper encourages enterprise customers to work with Mastercard.
Despite Mastercard being one of the most recognizable financial brands on the planet, it still faces competitive challenges. In the case of our partnership on the BIN lookup content, these challenges included:
- There are several BIN lookup third-party competitors
- Several of these competitors have established communications, messaging, and marketing strategies running.
- Mastercard Developers were looking for ways to articulate the specific value proposition of their BIN lookup API, and they wanted an expert partner to make this project as successful as possible. The outputs were a data-backed whitepaper and supporting marketing materials.
How Uncommon solved Mastercard Developer’s challenges with technical content marketing
- Gaining a clear understanding of BIN lookup solutions. At the start, our studio team spent time learning about Mastercard’s BIN Lookup solutions. It’s a suite of technical products and their primary customers are technical leaders and team members in the payments sector.
- Competitor and Data analysis. An integral part of the whitepaper involved data analysis from the report Mastercard had produced. This gave us numerous data comparison points, and crucially, the BIN lookup accuracy scores of competitors compared to Mastercard’s benchmark 100% score. We also needed to analyze the competitor landscape using the report and our own research.
- Report writing. Now we had to turn all of that technical language and analysis into something that would be interesting, engaging, and informative. Data points and insights are only impactful when they encourage a reader to take action.
- Multi-stage edits. Every marketing asset Mastercard produces involves a multi-team editorial process, with high-levels of internal compliance: legal, messaging, and product. To ensure high standards were met, we went through several internal feedback cycles, and did the same with several different Mastercard teams.
- Supporting marketing materials. Having a white paper is only one marketing asset. To promote it, brands need supporting assets, and that’s what we created: an article for Mastercard’s developer blog, LinkedIn posts, and a 90-second animated explainer video complete with a professional voice over.
Working together, we used the data and a collaborative multi-stage process to shine a spotlight on the strengths and advantages of Mastercard’s BIN Lookup solution compared to its competitors.
The result is a clear reflection of the strength of the product, team, and Mastercard’s enduring brand.
You can read our Mastercard case study here.
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Technical content that needs writing?
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