Why Do I Need to Hire Tech Writers? 7 Possible Reasons

• Friday, October 18th, 2019
• Blog, Business Tips & Tricks
• 2 responses

Before discussing why you should hire technical writers, let’s imagine this scenario for a moment:

You have an excellent product or service, but no content or technical documentation to support it.

Nothing, nada, zilch.

Before you shrug this off as a dystopian example, you should know that this is exactly how things go down in most cases. Tech companies are focused on creating a stellar product with sought-after features.

Which is exactly what they should be focused on!

However, without the proper content or documentation to support it, said product will end up as the best-kept secret in tech.

And I’m not just talking about the bare minimum: short product descriptions, datasheets and a basic website. People need more types of content before they’re able to decide on buying or moving forward.

47% of people consume three to five pieces of content before even speaking to a sales rep, while 16% of potential buyers consume more than seven pieces of content.

Image via RackCDN.com

There’s no debating whether you need content to support your tech products or services or not.

You definitely do!

More importantly, you need great tech content. You won’t stand out from the crowd with average re-hashed blog posts and web content.

The real debate is whether you should create your content in-house or hire tech writers.

After having worked with dozens of companies in the tech space, I know that hiring tech writers is the safest and best way to go. In fact, it’s the reason why Copywritech exists – to offer tech content writing services to companies who know it’s better to hire outside help than DIY.

If you’re not yet sure this is true, read on. You will find seven reasons to hire tech writers below. These reasons actually come from our own clients. This is what they answered when asked why they hired us.

Why Should I Hire Tech Writers? Find out from People Who Have Already Done it

1. It’s cheaper to hire tech writers than to create your content in-house
2. Outside tech writers are focused on your customer’s point of view and needs
3. Your SEO is on point
4. An outside tech writing team is easier to scale
5. Your in-house employees will have greater job satisfaction (and you’ll have a lower churn rate)
6. You will always publish great content on time without sacrificing other tasks just to write
7. Professional tech writers produce better content than people who only write as a side gig

A quick summary of all the above: hiring tech writers means you’ll get better and cheaper content for your business.

Now let’s get to the nitty-gritty of it all and see how this really happens.

1. It’s cheaper to hire tech writers than to create your content in-house

Does this flow look familiar to you?

• Assign a writing task to a staff member – usually an engineer because who knows your products better?
• Wait for them to finish the task – it will take some time because engineers or technical staff aren’t writers, so they don’t really want to do this or really know how to do this.
• Get someone to review it – a marketer, someone in sales or even the founder of the company
• The piece gets published after at least a month from the ideation stage.

This is the most frequent format in very small tech companies.

For bigger companies, the person who draws the short straw and has to do tech writing is either a marketer or a salesperson.

It may seem easier and cheaper to assign this to someone who already works for you.

But it’s neither.

Let’s take a look at the numbers.

Average engineer salary in the US, according to indeed.com

An average engineer makes almost $86,000 per year. Do bear in mind that this is an average. The salary of top talents is more than triple that sum. Even more significantly, salaries for software and hardware engineers in tech companies are way off this chart.

Average Marketing Manager salary, according to indeed.com

Average tech writer salary, according to indeed.com

Since the average number of working hours in a year is 2080, the average tech writer’s yearly salary is $41,787.2.

This is less than half what an engineer makes and two-thirds of what a Marketing Manager is paid.

I didn’t even look for CEO/company founder numbers because the calculations would simply look silly then.

Just by looking at this comparison we learn than when you ask a marketing manager or an engineer to do technical writing, you’re paying almost double what you should be paying a writer.

Even worse, they’re not even qualified for the job they’re overpaid to do (more on that below).

But that’s not all.

Most companies don’t even need to hire a full-time tech writer. When they look elsewhere for tech writing services (when they outsource it to a tech writing agency or to freelance tech writers), they don’t have to pay for:

• Extra office space
• Office equipment
• Utilities: heating, cooling, electricity
• Health and other benefits
• Various perks and bonuses

If you add all this up, the gap gets even wider. Hiring a professional tech writer is an additional expense. But when all the Ts are crossed and all the Is are dotted, it’s much cheaper than paying for the time of a random staff member. Especially if said team member can do better stuff with their time, like growing your business, coming up with better strategies or improving your existing products.

2. Outside Tech Writers Are Focused on Your Customer’s Point of View and Needs

No one knows your products better than you, right?

Especially when ‘you’ translates to someone in your engineering team, like in the example above. After all, they created those products, so it’s fair to say that they know them inside out. Literally.

While all that is true, it’s not necessarily a good thing.

Your content shouldn’t be about your business or your products. It should be about your customers and their needs.

Most tech companies who create their content in-house without a specialized team (and even with one) have one thing in common: they can’t see the forest for the trees.

Their content is typically correct from a technical point of view. But it also:

• Speaks about features instead of benefits
• Discusses products, not solutions
• Focuses on company wins, not on customer potential wins

On the other hand, when you hire tech writers who are ‘outsiders’, you get a fresh outlook on your products. The writers have a bird’s eye view over everything you have to offer.

More importantly, they know what your audience wants to read – in general, or about your products. And they deliver just that.

Tech writers who are worth their salt know your industry VERY WELL. So they know what appeals to your buyer persona and what doesn’t. Whether a feature is crucial or just ‘nice to have’.

Case in point: our iPaaS client, Cazoomi, was looking for tech writers who knew their industry and their target audience. They had previously invested in content, working with in-house and outside writers.

But they never got the results they were looking for.

After they started working with Copywritech, they got the results they were looking for. Our tech writers’ approach shifted the focus from Cazoomi’s services to client benefits and to offering real solutions to real pain points.

Read all about how Cazoomi generated 50% more leads and converted 25% more leads with tech content written by Copywritech. Check out the detailed case study.

3. Your SEO Is On Point

SEO isn’t just nice-to-have. It’s a must.

Even if you are in a competitive industry and SEO will take a longer time than usual to produce results, you have no excuse not to try.

Search engine users still prefer organic results over paid ones.

Image via SparkToro

But they are not willing to scroll too low to get answers.

Image via Backlinko

No surprises here: the first organic position gets most of the clicks, while positions 7 to 10 get a similar number of clicks.

However, if you’re nowhere to be found on the first page, you will rarely get any clicks. And it would be a shame to waste the best traffic source, wouldn’t it?

Think about it, when you optimize your content for keywords that are tied to your business goals, you get to reach people who are already interested in what you’re selling. Half of your job is already done.

However, SEO is not something you can do without skilled writers. Aside from writing itself, SEO means:

• Keyword research
• LSI keywords research
• Competition research
• Keyword gap analysis
• Keyword integration
• Meta descriptions and alt tags
• …and so much more

And this is just on-page SEO. A ranking blog post can take hours or even days to write.

When you hire tech writers with SEO background, your concern doesn’t lie with how long it takes but with results only. And if said tech writers are worth their salt, you’ll see results pretty soon.

Every piece of content and copy Copywritech wrote for this London networking company ranks on positions 1-3 in Google. Check out the case study and find out how we did it.

Tech writers aren’t just people who can put words together and make them sound nice. They also have a marketing background (for Copywritech it’s a prerequisite of getting hired) and they know how to optimize tech content for search engines without making it sound unnatural.

On-page SEO is not about keyword stuffing. Quite the opposite in fact.

The days when keyword stuffing worked are (thankfully!) gone. We now know that keyword stuffing is spam and that you will be penalized if you use it.

This is a great step forward for a better internet all around. But it makes writing for both human readers and search engines all the more challenging.

It also puts a premium on truly good content. Without it, your chances of ranking are slim to none.

4. An Outside Tech Writing Team Is Easier to Scale

There are very few tech companies that don’t want to grow. From bootstrapping startups to unicorns and then to multinational corporations – this is the dream of most founders.

Irrespective of the stage you’re now in, you know there is room to grow some more. Heck, even Amazon wants to keep growing.

But there is such a thing as unsustainable growth and it mostly stems from not having the resources to support your latest growth spurt. Most startups that fail ignore their ‘growing pains’ and end up crushed under their own growth.

Scaling teams is not an easy thing to do, especially when you’ve been accustomed to working closely with a few great people that you really trust.

The hiring process is time-consuming and strenuous.

This is where outsourcing tech writing comes into play. When you work with an agency, no matter how much your company grows (or scales back) you:

• Make a single hire – the agency is what you’re vetting, not individual tech writers
• Don’t have to worry about quality. If you hire the right tech writing agency, irrespective of their personnel changes, quality should remain the same.
• Have a single point of contact. You don’t have to manage individual writers. You speak to your account manager and that’s it.
• Only pay what you use. You don’t have to pay full-time salaries for several writers if you only need a few hours’ work in a month.
• Scale-up easily. You don’t have to make a new hire whenever the workload increases (like when you launch a new product, for instance). You can work with the same agency and not worry about what happens behind the scenes.
• Scale down easily. Smaller workload? No problem! There’s no one to fire. You simply pay less.

Outsourcing usually gets a bad rep. When you hear that something is outsourced, you immediately think of cheap labor, underpaid workers and gruesome conditions.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. There’s outsourcing to mercilessly cut costs and then there’s outsourcing to optimize workflow, operations and to sensibly cut costs.

In other words: don’t hire the cheapest tech writers. Hire tech writers that know what they’re doing, that can grow their brand and that are fairly paid.

5. Your In-House Employees Will Have Greater Job Satisfaction (and You’ll Have a Lower Churn Rate)

Let’s face it: no one wants to be the Jack of all trades. Engineers do not love writing tech content – trust me, I tried.

Marketers’ time is better spent coming up with new strategies.

CEOs’/Founders’ time is better spent growing the business.

And so on.

All these people shine at something else. No one wants to be doing something they don’t like and aren’t good at.

Sure, in the beginning, they’ll take the proverbial one for the team. They’ll hustle for a while and pick up tasks that aren’t in their job description.

But everyone will eventually wonder why you don’t just hire tech writers instead of delegating writing to people who aren’t paid for it.

When you pile up tasks on already over-worked employees you end up with people who want to quit. People who no longer love their job and aren’t eager to innovate anymore.

In the medium- and long-run this spells trouble for your business.

Not only will you get a staff that’s no longer motivated, but all the tasks they perform (not just the tech writing) will be mediocre results at best.

6. You Will Always Publish Great Content on Time Without Sacrificing Other Tasks just to Write

Following up on the point above about unmotivated employees – do you know what happens when someone doesn’t want to perform a certain task?

They keep pushing it.

They have better things to do now. And tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow. And so on.

This is how your content calendar ends up a mess and you publish a new piece of content once in a blue moon.

Even more, this is not just about not wanting to do something that’s not in your job description. Very often, the excuses are as real as it gets.

People with jobs other than tech writing will always consider that the most important thing on their agenda is the one they were hired to do. The rest can wait. Indefinitely.

And they are right.

For an engineer, it’s more important to push the changes they just made.

For a marketer, it’s more important to analyze the results of the latest campaign.

However, when you hire tech writers, writing is their one and only priority. Not only will they do it in time, but they will also do it right.

What happens when you miss publishing deadlines and you don’t have enough fresh content on your website? Well, a few things – none of them good:

• Your rankings drop like flies. Google loves fresh content and when you don’t add any for a while, your existing rankings start to drop.
• You don’t get any new rankings. No new content means no new keywords which spell no new rankings.
• Less content = fewer chances of becoming an authority in your industry. The more content you add, the higher your chances for social shares, more hits, more backlinks and so on. The more people read your content, the better your chances of having some of them come back for more. But what happens when there’s nothing new to come back for? That’s right – they move on to your competition.
• You lose some of your biggest fans. People are creatures of habit. If they noticed you publish a new piece of content every week or every two days, they’ll be there waiting for it. When it doesn’t appear, they get disappointed and, again, move on to a more reliable publisher.

When you hire tech writers that are dependable, you know that your content calendar is always buffed up. Ideally, your content should be pre-written one month in advance to make sure that, come what may, you will have something to publish when the deadline is there.

For instance, the clients who have an on-going contract with Copywritech receive the content they order well before it needs to be published. Our oldest clients always have 2-8 blog posts in their ‘ready-to-publish’ folders.

They never miss a deadline and they keep on building their rankings and their authority.

7. Professional Tech Writers Produce Better Content than People Who Only Write as a Side Gig

Motivation really takes you far.

Remember the examples above with marketers and engineers who push writing tasks further down their calendar every chance they get?

Sure, it’s because writing isn’t part of their job description. But it’s also because they aren’t very good at it. They take much longer to produce a piece of content than a tech writer and when they do finish it they always doubt themselves.

My first job with a tech start-up involved a lot of writing. From datasheets and user guides to web copy and blog content.

Since some of this writing was highly technical, I tried to involve the engineering team in it. While a couple of them were excellent writers, they didn’t want to do it. Because they didn’t believe that they were good.

Even when told that their writing is great they didn’t care much about it. This was not a skill they wanted to develop. They were interested in coding and in getting better at coding.

It took me a while to understand this. When I finally did, I didn’t ask them to write anything. I simply asked them to check everything my department produced to make sure there were no technical errors in the content and the copy.

This worked great because it respected the natural order of things,

When you hire tech writers, they are interested in your feedback. They want to get better at writing because that’s their bread and butter. They care.

And so they always strive to produce better content.

Plus, if you hire the right tech writers, they will also have a marketing background.

Their work is infinitely better than that of people who also write because they spent time (years!) honing their craft.

They don’t have to look up how to write a blog article that ranks. Good tech writers already know how to do that. And their ‘Google Fu’ is spot on. They can research any topic, no matter how complex, at least twice as fast as someone who’s not accustomed to looking for information for their content.

Again, because they spent years honing this skill.

Do I Need to Hire Tech Writers? – Final Thoughts

You have to hire tech writers for tech content just like you have to hire programmers to code and marketers to set up funnels and social media campaigns. In a digital world that’s crammed with low-quality or mediocre content, you won’t get too far with more of the same.

Your only chance to stand out from the crowd is exceptional content. And that kind of content can only be written by professionals.

At Copywritech, we hire only the best tech writers, along with marketers and engineers. Every piece of content we produce for our clients is always technically accurate and designed to rank and to generate or convert leads.

In other words: every piece of content you order from us gets input from three different departments (technical writing, engineering, and marketing).

Need this kind of content for your tech business? Fill in the contact form below and let’s chat. You’ll never have to hire tech writers again – Copywritech can take all writing off your plate.

Adriana Tica

Adriana Tica is an expert marketer and copywriter, with 10 years in the field, most of which were spent marketing tech companies. She is the Owner and Founder of Idunn. In October 2019, she also launched Copywritech, a digital marketing agency that provides copywriting, SEO content writing, and strategy services to companies in the tech industry.