How do you make copy engaging when marketing to a technical audience?

If you speak the language of your audience, they will be engaged!

I think it's a myth that technical topics are "boring" or "dry". These topics are VERY interesting to your technical audience, so mirroring their language on these topics is key.

A few tips to help:

• Be specific.
  
  For example, I market to developers, so there's high overlap with interest in video games. The phrase "Level Up!" comes up as a marketing suggestion often. But what does "level up" actually mean? If you talk about leveling up a character in a video game, the game matters, which release of the video game matters, which character matters, and which spells/weapons/damage/visibility/etc. "level up" unlocks matters!
  
  Simply saying "level up" doesn't signal to the audience that you genuinely understand why they're trying to achieve by moving to the next level.
  

• Quantify the impact.
  
  How much faster or more efficient? How many minutes or hours saved? What's the ROI? How many breaches prevented? It's not enough to say, "Ship faster" or "better performance". Most technical folks like to see the hard data, so quantifying the impact piques their interest.
  

• Be concise.
  
  Sometimes marketers get into a narrative or prose mindset. We want to write a long story, describing each character, creating metaphors, and repeating the same information in slightly different ways.
  
  NO. Technical audiences want you to get to the point! Long-form copy or extended narratives tend to signal "created by a marketer" to this audience, so trim, trim, trim and share the core message.

Just because an audience is technical doesn't mean the messaging needs to be boring.

The core way to approach messaging is to understand as much as you can about your target - where they spend their time, what resonates with them, etc.

Once you have these insights and also have the positioning for your company or product you can then test your way into the messaging that will resonate the most by creating several iterations of the messaging and testing it with current or target users. You may (and likely will) find that what you think is different than what resonates so I'd encourage you to be open to whatever you find resonates.

Good luck!