Day Two Cloud 087: Inside The World Of A Technical Marketer

Engineers are skeptical about vendor marketing–for justifiable reasons. Marketing language is typically filled with uninformative buzzwords, hype, and exaggerated claims. Instead of telling you what a product does or how a product works, vendor marketing insists that its hardware is powered by rainbows, the software is written by magic unicorns, and all your IT problems will be solved if you buy it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. On today’s show we talk with a technical marketer who wants to actually help engineers. His goal, and that of others like him, is to create practitioner-focused collateral that provides concrete information and can help engineers make decisions. Our guest is Martez Reed, Director of Technical Marketing at Morpheus Data. He makes the case for Technical Marketing Engineers (TMEs) as being on your side. We discuss: * How the audience for technical marketing is different from Web site copy and press releases * Creating content for engineers and practitioners * Maintaining technical chops as a TME * The role of storytelling and aligning messages * The content creation process * More Takeaways: There are openings for TMEs out there–folks who are engineers fit here. Communication skills are crucial. How do you relay information? Craft emails? Craft presentations for public consumption that aren’t too detailed/tedious? Can you both inform and persuade at the same time? Show Links: @GreenReedTech – Martez Reed on Twitter GreenReedTech.com – Martez’s blog Martez Reed on LinkedIn martezr – Martez Reed on GitHub Transcript: [00:00:11.350] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud, today’s conversation is all about what does it mean to be a technical marketing person? And we have Martez Reed for Morpheus data, who is the director of technical marketing there, to kind of school us on what that term even means and the process he goes through to create content. What stood out to you, Ethan? [00:00:32.150] – Ethan There is so much skepticism out there in the engineering community about marketing, but TME’s are your friend. So when you were evaluating a new product, it’s the TME. [00:00:41.620] That’s the one if you can find that person to talk to that person is the one who. Yeah, they’ve got a job to do. They’re trying to inform you about a product. And Martez goes into great detail about how he thinks about writing and delivering what he calls collateral out there for engineers to read. But they are also on your side Ned. This is the thing that stuck out to me the most because Martez came from the engineering field and understands the problem that engineers face and is trying to communicate in a way that helps engineers make decisions. [00:01:16.600] So they’re really yeah, it’s marketing and we’re skeptical. I get that. But still, the TMEs are on our side. That’s what I walked away with. [00:01:22.790] – Ned So whether you’re trying to figure out what’s the best way to evaluate a product or you’re thinking about a potential career move yourself. I think you’re really going to enjoy this episode with Martez Reed, the director of technical marketing for Morpheus Data. [00:01:36.960] Martez Reed, welcome to Day Two Cloud and let’s start out in the intro I mentioned you’r...