6 Reasons Why You Need to Hire Technical Writers instead of DIY-ing Your Content

A lot of startups, small businesses or mid-size engineering companies don’t bother to hire technical writers. Whenever they need a data sheet, a manual or even a blog post written, they assign it to one of the engineers on-staff.

After all, who knows the products better that the people who created them?

That’s correct. Partially.

I’ve worked in and with tech companies for several years. I can tell you one thing for sure: there are few things more irritating than a product data sheet or a technical document written by someone with no technical abilities. You definitely need engineers involved in this type of writing.

But when we’re talking about technical web content or technical blog posts, everything changes.

If you have an engineer who’s also a wordsmith and has a marketing background on staff, then this article is not for you. But if you think that anyone who knows the product can write about it in a compelling manner (and also make it SEO-friendly), then keep reading.

I’m about to show you how hiring tech writers can be the best choice from the financial, promotional and operational points of view for any tech company, even a bootstrapping startup.

6 Compelling Reasons to Hire Technical Writers Right Now

At Idunn, we’ve worked with dozens of tech companies so far. In fact, tech writing is our specialty. Supporting brilliant new ideas and the creative people behind them is extremely rewarding.

So I won’t be telling you why I or we, the Idunn team think you should hire technical writers. Instead, the following reasons are taken from the feedback of our clients.

They encompass both their reasoning for hiring us as their team of technical writers and the results they had after working with us.

Grab a cup of tea, a coffee (or a glass of wine, why not?) and enjoy!

1. Hiring Technical Writers Helps You Save Money

Save money by spending money? Crazy, right?

And don’t worry; I’m not about to launch into explaining old clichés like “you need to spend money to make money” or “invest in people to get great ROI”.

Instead I’m going do a little math. (Very little, OK? I never really liked math.)

An engineer makes more than a technical writer.

This is an undeniable fact.

Take a look at the comparison between the two below. Take into account that they are broad searches that encompass any type of engineer. Furthermore, consider that the higher the cost of living in the area you’re in, the bigger the pay gaps.

Math gave us the financial reason to hire technical writers – save money.

And here’s another way to look at it: when your engineers don’t have to work on something that’s outside their scope, they have the time to focus on what really matters – building the bets products for your business.

Want to save money and make sure your technical content is on point? We can come up with the words that make your products and solutions shine.

2. Keep Your Employees Happy and Reduce the Churn Rate

Finding and, more importantly, keeping great engineering talent is challenging. It is a global issue.

And no, throwing more money at them isn’t going to cut it – even if you can afford it.

Today’s top engineers know their value. They know that they can find a new, better paying job in a minute. In fact, they get several job offers per month.

Whether they take those offers or not depends on how happy they are with your company.

Do you know what most of the engineers I worked with complain about?

The lack of challenges in their work. The fact that they need to keep learning new things every day so they can stay in demand for as long as possible.

Mind you, you are talking to very smart people. So telling them that doing technical writing every once in a while instead of coding is a way to “develop their skills” won’t fly.

They’ll leave.

They will get a job where their actual engineering skills are valued. I’ve seen it happen more times than I could count.

Want to risk it? Keep piling technical writing work on your talented engineers.

3. Technical Writers Are 100% Focused on Writing

Can you say the same about internal employees that have other job titles?

In my experience working as a Marketing Manager in tech companies who assigned writing to other employees, the results are never great. In fact, they are barely good.

When you hire technical writers, you know that this is their job. Their only job. When technical writing is done by employees, it’s typically put on the back burner. In the “I’ll get to that eventually” pile.

Do you know what that pile eventually turns into?

“Darn! The deadline is now. Let’s get this sh*t done quickly and get it over with.”

Hasty writing is easy to spot. It happens to both technical and non-technical companies. That’s one of the main reasons to work with professional writers.

Their jobs and revenue depend on the quality of their writing. The job of your engineers don’t.

It’s that easy!

If you care about the content of your technical content, you don’t want it done in a rush and by people who don’t really care for writing.

4. Tech Writing Is More than Understanding Technology

As I previously said your data sheets and your user manuals (especially those aimed for other engineers) benefit from the involvement of your tech team. For web content and blogging, on the other hand, you don’t need someone who’s an engineering wizard.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Allow me to explain.

Would you like to have your FitBit or iPhone user guide written entirely by an engineer? Or read about the launch of a new product in a blog post written by someone in the development team? I wouldn’t.

Sure, it would be chock-full of technical details. But I don’t want to know what PCBs it uses and whether you wrote your RTOS from scratch. I want to set my FitBit up and go running.

And for that you need to hire technical writers.

Technical writers know how to translate complex technical language into layman’s terms. So that everyone gets your message crystal clear.

Better yet, technical writers who are worth their salt also have a knack for marketing or a background in this field. So they can easily grok what your audience wants and how to deliver the message they want to see in the perfect tone of voice.

Of course, there’s also the small issue of grammar, punctuation, spelling and syntax. While no one will cancel their order because you made a typo, some people are put off by poor grammar and spelling.

It shows that you didn’t give enough Fs about them to spellcheck. Or to hire someone who knows how to spell and use commas.

5. You Get a Bird’s Eye View of Your Products and a Better Selling Proposition

Assign technical writing to your internal staff and you will get someone who knows A LOT about PART OF your products or services. Developers don’t all work on the same features. And while they all know what the product is supposed to “do”, they don’t have a deep understanding of every feature or development phase.

A technical writer on the other hand is far enough from the development team to be un-biased. When you outsource technical writing to someone who doesn’t work in your company, they are able to evaluate the product completely objective.

And this is where new opportunities happen.

At Idunn, our technical writers always managed to surprise our clients with promotional angles they had never considered before. Whether it was shining new light on a feature or a complementary service or addressing a new audience, we managed to help tech companies boost their bottom line through content done the right way.

In the end, this is (or should be) the goal of any technical writer – coming up with the best topics and angles to write content your audience can’t get enough of.

That’s what they are trained for!

6. You Get SEO and Content Marketing Done Right

No matter how good your content is, you need to help it along its internet journey. Don’t assume that a perfect blog post needs just one person to read it in order to become viral.

That’s not how things go.

And what good is amazing content if no one reads it?

If you hire the right technical writers, on-page SEO should come as part of their standard offer. So you have one promotional technique covered – you can get organic traffic.

Also, since your writers have probably worked with a lot of other tech companies, they have seen plenty of epic successes and failures in content marketing. (At least this is our case at Idunn.) So they can advise you on what to do and what not to spend your marketing budget on.

This isn’t an offer you should pass on, even if you have your own internal marketing department that you completely trust. An expert, unbiased opinion or advice can be priceless.

Conclusion

Let’s not kid ourselves: you run a business, so the decision to hire technical writers or wing it internally is ultimately about money.

But here’s the thing: aside from the saving I mentioned at reason 1, hiring professionals can save or bring you money in countless other ways. If you come to think about it, all the other reasons are about money, too.

Organic traffic (the right kind) can mean new clients. Content marketing done right can reel in leads and customers galore. A reduced employee churn rate means less money spent on HR activities and onboarding. Great user guides and blog posts means your current customers won’t be annoyed by extra-techy lingo and they’ll come back to you.

See where I’m going with this?

If you are ready to hire technical writers who can make all of the above (and much more) happen for your business, we’re just a contact form away. Talk to us – we’re super friendly and we’d love to show off some of our previous work and results.