Since I started my firm 11 years ago, I have had a vision for technology companies. In the wake of the pandemic, the generative AI boom, and the tech recession, this vision has only become stronger and more vivid.

In my vision, technology companies are active participants in their customers’ lives. No longer walled off and separate, tech companies are connecting human to human. They know intimately who they are serving, they know firsthand the difference their solution makes in the lives of their customers, and they are personally connected with their audience.

Today, tech companies create real human miracles — but their marketing and communication is often mired in technical jargon fit more for robots than human beings.

To better connect the humans in technology companies to the human customers they serve, tech marketing needs to engender trust, lead with humanity, and establish significance for the audience.

Seeing technology companies make strides toward this vision is deeply personal to me, because I’ve experienced firsthand how these solutions can make a difference in our lives.

In 2021, my life changed forever … and my family nearly changed forever, too.

In an instant, I almost lost my daughter

My two-year-old went into cardiac arrest in her highchair during lunch.

Four minutes of CPR from me, 10 minutes of CPR from the paramedics, two ambulances, one helicopter, 10 days in the ICU, a million doctors and one heart surgery later, she came home alive — with a new medical device implant attached to her heart.

Her diagnosis of an impossibly rare genetic disease came two weeks later, and it has changed our lives forever — but because of her implant, I have hope that she will live a long life.

While this experience gave me a lot of important life reminders, there’s one in particular I’d like to share with you today:

Technology is amazing.

Years ago, when I first left the corporate world to strike out on my own with Horizon Peak Consulting, the business gurus told me to choose a niche to focus on. While I worked with many different types of companies and clients in the first few years, I always came back to wanting to work with technology companies. I find tech endlessly fascinating, but I’m also in awe of how it affects the everyday lives of most people on this planet.

Saving the world, one human at a time

Technology is quite literally saving and changing lives every single day, in every pocket of the globe.

Technology gave my daughter a future.

A pediatric heart surgeon implanted an ICD (implantable cardioverter defibrillator) device just under my daughter’s ribcage, with titanium leads connecting to sensors on her heart. This flip-phone-sized device acts as a defibrillator should she ever go into cardiac arrest again, and a pacemaker if her heart rate gets too low. Every night as she sleeps, it sends data to her cardiologist, who now monitors her heart remotely.

With this device, my little daughter is safer. She will have the chance to grow up and have a full life.

Working with technology companies comes with unique challenges, but I embrace them — because if I can help just one client make one sale that changes one life for the better, it is worth every ounce of my effort.

I believe, right down to my very bones, that my vision for technology companies can be reality.

And I believe this vision is why I was put here, on this planet, with these skills — because there are so many more little girls in this world who need saving, and technology can save them.

How do tech companies actually achieve human-to-human connection?

After being in tech marketing for decades, I’ve seen a lot …

A lot of robotic marketing.

A lot of jargon heavy, overly technical nonsense.

A lot of algorithmic content.

I’ve also seen mission-driven founders taking a stand, sharing their knowledge, and doing real good in this world.

And it’s those founders who inspired me to develop an approach that brings that generous and thoughtful energy into startup marketing.

They moved me to create a human-centered approach to conversion content, and ultimately create a methodology that leads to revenue-generating results like these.

 

 

A human-centered approach recognizes the humanity on both sides of the commerce equation: The humanity of the customer, and the humanity of the company.

Customer: The bleeding heart reframe

“Bleeding heart” may have some negative connotations in the political sphere, but in marketing, it’s a call to empathetic action.

Having a bleeding heart for your customers means you’re making a concerted and consistent effort to know who you’re serving, what’s keeping them up at night, and what their experience has been as they’ve tried and failed to solve their problem.

It means making an effort to get to know your customers as human beings — and then communicating with them in a relational way.

Serving before selling. Connection before conversion.

Company: Where even really smart tech marketers go wrong

The problem with most tech marketing is the black box effect.

The solution is technical and complex. The company is technical and complex. And this leads to technical and complex approaches to marketing — especially content.

Jargon.

Super technical language.

A complete disconnect between how the company speaks and how customers speak.

It’s a language barrier.

The reality is, though, that even the smartest technical founders, the most degreed engineers, the most cutting-edge marketers are all human.

Technology companies are human-run organizations — and to engage an audience of human customers, you need to reveal that humanity instead of hiding it behind complexity.

HPC’s 3 Pillars of Meaningful Tech Marketing

When I founded Horizon Peak Consulting over a decade ago, I brought enterprise tech experience, practical marketing chops and vast writing skills to the table.

Leaving corporate tech to work with clients, however, meant I had to work differently than before.

It wasn’t enough for me to check boxes and call it a day anymore — I needed to make a real difference in sales for my clients’ companies if I wanted them to keep hiring my small-but-mighty firm.

So I spent an inordinate amount of time analyzing what was working and what wasn’t. What made content perform well in the near term (convert) and retain value in the long term (be memorable)?

In the end, I found three key factors common to high-converting and memorable written content (and the content strategies that produce those assets) — and those are now HPC’s core tenets:

Tenet 1: Trust

Most importantly, high-performance content builds trust with the audience.

Trust has three components: competence, integrity, connection.

Competence is the ability to meet goals and objectives. It means your content has a purpose — for your company and your audience — and it clearly fulfills that purpose.

Integrity means you’re honest and do what you say you’re going to do. It means your content is never a bait-and-switch situation. Your headline makes a promise, and the rest of the content fulfills that promise.

Connection happens when people believe your values are similar to theirs. It means your content reveals your company values, and your target audience resonates with those values.

When any of those three components is missing, trust doesn’t exist.

Worse, when any of those components are removed from a content strategy, trust gets broken — and in today’s marketplace, broken trust isn’t fixable. Here’s a real-world example I spotted on LinkedIn.

Tenet 2: Humanity

I’m not talking about human-written vs. AI-generated content here (though I do have opinions on that).

When I talk about humanity, I mean treating customers like the humans they are, and remaining customer-centric in your thinking. This is the core of human-to-human communication.

I also mean revealing your own humanity in how you communicate.

The longstanding trend in technology marketing is to have developers and engineers write the content — or have folks from the marketing team interview these subject-matter experts, edit the transcriptions, and publish those interviews as content. While these SMEs are always incredibly smart, they are not always the right people to be communicating with customers.

The most human faces of the company are often the founder, their leadership team, and product evangelists. I want to see more tech companies communicate through relational leaders — not just engineers, salespeople or marketers.

Let’s see more of the human faces behind the tech that’s changing the world!

Tenet 3: Significance

Significant content is valuable and meaningful to the intended audience, and it’s written thoughtfully. It makes a lasting difference in customers’ lives — even if that’s just remaining in their memory long after a touchpoint.

What is valuable and meaningful content? It helps the reader do or understand something, or it serves to inspire them in their lives.

Valuable, meaningful, thoughtful content also:

• Reveals the values of the author (whether that’s an individual, a team or the company).
• Contains human stories.
• Uses the same language/vocabulary the target reader uses.

Finally, valuable and meaningful content exists for a human, not purely algorithmic, purpose. Even if it is part of an SEO strategy, it is first and foremost written for your human audience.

The real opportunity for technology companies

When I look at the modern tech landscape, I see limitless potential — not just for innovation, but for meaningful human connection. Technology is capable of saving lives, building communities, and transforming the way we experience the world. But only when it’s wielded with care, intention, and a deep understanding of the people it serves.

For decades, I’ve worked with tech companies to bridge the gap between their innovative solutions and the people they help. By focusing on trust, humanity, and significance, I’ve seen how thoughtful, meaningful content can make a profound difference — not just in business outcomes but in lives changed.

If my vision resonates with you, I’d love to learn about your goals and explore how we can bring human-centered, conversion-focused strategies to your marketing.

Schedule a call with me today, and let’s start creating the kind of content that changes lives — one human at a time.