Technology is complicated. Technology marketing doesn’t have to be. Content marketing gives technology marketers the power to simplify technological topics and explain them clearly. For tech brands with complex solutions for complex problems, there’s no better way to provide relevant and useful information to current and potential customers. That’s why more than 95% of tech brands use some form of content marketing. However, despite the popularity of content marketing in the tech sector, some brands still struggle to deliver on its full potential. After all, there’s a difference between content marketing and great content marketing. Here at TrendyMinds, we’ve spent years helping tech brands like Salesforce and Agilify create content marketing that really resonates with customers. Along the way, we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to make tech-centric content marketing great. Here are three ways to guarantee content marketing quality for tech brands: Understand your audience. Every decision you make about your content marketing should be made with your audience in mind. They’re who you create content for; they’re who you want to engage, educate, and encourage to become customers. Your content should serve to demystify your tech products and solve your audience’s problems with relatable and easily understandable messaging. Positioning your content marketing around your tech brand’s audience may sound like a no-brainer, but it can be easy to lose sight of this in the face of business demands from various internal stakeholders. Sixty-nine percent of technology content marketers say they prioritize the audience’s informational needs over their organization’s promotional message. When you have a new product to promote, you should by all means do so, but only with the aim of helping your audience in a real, actionable way. To get to know your audience better, consider using personas that describe key characteristics of your different audience segments. This will help you visualize  potential customers and tailor your messaging to them. You should also always meet your audience where they are. Use the channels they use, and create content in formats they’re interested in. Content marketing isn’t just blog posts. It can be videos, infographics, white papers, e-books, social posts, or any number of other interesting and creative things. It all depends on your audience and what they want. Develop a committed strategy. While a majority of tech brands are committed to content marketing, it seems that many struggle with committing to an effective strategy. Seventy-three percent of technology marketers say their organization is extremely or very committed to content marketing — but only 42% say their organization has a documented content marketing strategy. Once you’ve defined your audience and created personas, it’s imperative for you to develop and document a real plan and strategy for your content marketing efforts. Without an informed, research-based creative strategy, your writing, design, video, and social teams will be like sailors adrift in a ship at sea without a captain or a map. They may still carry out their individual tasks well, but they’ll have no idea where they’re supposed to be going. Great strategy takes time. Remember, your tech brand’s content marketing needs to achieve many goals. Your audience needs to be interested in and engaged with it, it needs to promote your business and drive conversion, and it needs to be created by your teams on time, under budget (we can dream), and at scale. Strategic inspiration can come from your customers’ top questions, industry buzz, your future product releases — anything that relates to your tech brand and your audience. Once you’ve committed to a content strategy, be sure to meet with your content teams frequently to refine your plans and map out scheduling for your marketing efforts. Get analytical. In marketing, data isn’t everything — but it’s close. By tracking the right analytics and making adjustments accordingly, any brand can take their content marketing strategy to the next level. Unfortunately, this is an area where tech brands tend to stumble. Only 23% of technology marketers say their teams are extremely or very proficient in using metrics to monitor content marketing performance. The key to tracking analytics is to figure out which metrics will give you the most valuable information in relation to your tech brand’s content marketing goals. For instance, knowing how much traffic is driven to your website by email and how much is driven by search can help you develop content that aligns to the journeys your audiences take through those channels. By customizing content marketing to your customers’ journeys, you can help inspire those journeys to arrive at conversion. The more metrics you track, the more you can learn about your audience and how they interact with your content marketing. If data shows that your videos are more popular than your blog posts, you’ll know to focus more of your content efforts on that platform. If data shows that one of your white papers didn’t get the attention it deserved, you’ll know to re-promote it in a few months’ time. Remember, when it comes to developing marketing content of any kind, creativity is your secret weapon. Data and analytics are indispensable, but there’s nothing more valuable than a genuinely creative idea. Big creative risks may seem daunting for many tech brands, but when they’re done right, there’s nothing audiences love more.