Content development is playing an increasingly valuable role in technology PR, helping to grow your audience mindshare and establish your online search superiority in a competitive marketplace. It’s an ideal means to educate and entice readers, customers and prospects, providing market context for your strategic product initiatives and establishing your credibility as a technology and/or application expert. Best of all, well-architected content can help your audience solve their real-world design challenges – the ultimate end goal for any technology vendor.

Content is particularly important as the tech media landscape continues to contract, revealing a huge opportunity for technology vendors to become engaged in their own publishing efforts, expanding their visibility beyond traditional media channels. Which is not to say that traditional media has closed its doors to vendor contributed content. The media continues to provide myriad opportunities to propagate vendor-written content – more so now than perhaps ever before.

As content opportunities proliferate, search engine optimization (SEO) has emerged as an important discipline, with significant implications for content discoverability. After all, your audience won’t read or even see your content if they can’t find it online.

So there’s growing attention being paid to how we write content that’s optimized for discoverability by search engine algorithms. These conversations typically focus on the merits and variants of long tail keywords and targeted search phrases, illuminating our best practices when it comes to optimizing content for SEO.

But there’s an important distinction that’s often lost in these conversations: Algorithms don’t make product purchasing decisions. People do.

You can game your content to capture search, but that’s simply not enough. And at worst, it devolves into a keyword stuffing extravaganza that doesn’t serve either audience particularly well (and it could get your content de-listed from search engine results if it’s deemed egregious).

It perhaps isn’t a major revelation to say that your content must connect and resonate with your living, breathing audience. And while technology PR isn’t exactly brain surgery, it’s very much informed by brain science.

Like any propaganda, your content must affect human brain function on an emotional level in order to influence your audience’s purchasing decisions.  This plays to a host of neurotransmitter functions firing in the human mind at any given moment, locally from cell to cell or across wider regions of the brain, all of which can shape behavioral outcomes. Are you motivating your target audience with the promise of professional or reputational rewards? Are you unmooring their preconceived notions by sowing uncertainty? Do you want them to fear an unpleasant outcome if they make the wrong design or purchasing decision?

You can engineer these emotional responses in the same way you engineer your hardware or software.

Ultimately you want to provoke people. And you want them to remember you for it.

You can string together keywords to your heart’s content and the search engine algorithms will follow (if you’re good at it). But never lose sight of the zeros and ones that guide our human programming, bit by bit.

You can re-wire a brain just like you can re-wire a transistor. With a carefully crafted content program, you can re-wire your market.

To learn more about Rainier’s Market Engineering™ program, click here.