The Loop
Stay in “The Loop” on developer marketing and industry trends with DeveloperMedia’s Blog.
Balancing Branding and Activation Advertising for Developer Audiences
Why Strike a Balance? As we talked about in making your brand top of mind, brand recognition is inextricably linked to the next step a consumer will take, whether it is to move your brand from long-term to short-term memory, or to act. Activation ads ask the consumer to take an action, which for digital advertising usually begins with a click. [...]
Gen Appeal: How to Reach Millennial Developers Without Alienating the Rest of Your Audience
“OK, Boomer. Whatever, Karen” Generation wars are fun to exploit for t-shirts and trolls, but are not much of an asset when building a developer community or reaching a developer audience (look here for the definitions of Boomers, Millennials, Gen Xers, Gen Z, and why you should care). However, the generational lens does inform your audience’s technical content preferences and motivations. [...]
Make Your Brand Top of Mind for Developers
Developers Are Consumers First It’s tempting to characterize developers as a completely different species, rather than an audience with specific distinguishing characteristics. But the developers we interviewed in our Meet the Developer series have said many of the things you’d expect from any consumer — among them, that they are much more likely to click on links from brands they recognize [...]
Beyond Content: Tips to Boost Search Traffic
Developers Rely On Search Engines Increasingly, developers are relying on search engines to find their technical content. As you can imagine, at ContentLab, we frequently work with clients to help raise their profiles in Google searches. Usually, we focus on developing concepts for actionable, high-quality technical content to help provide a leg up in attracting organic search traffic. But sometimes when [...]
Tech Content Marketing Behaviors and Motivations by Generation and Experience
Generations and Years of Experience Many developer roles wind up influencing purchases when it comes to developer tools and platforms. Both age and years of experience as a programmer shape the lens through which developers perceive technical content. Unfortunately, sometimes we only have data for one or the other. So while generations refer to age (look here for the definitions of [...]
Developer Advertising Strategy Principles
B2B Plus D2D Developers are fundamentally consumers like anyone else. Like other B2B audiences, they look for information about the tools they need through industry media and sites, search engines, peers, and social media. Within these sites, they spend a lot of time on developer-to-developer (D2D) communities. These can include communities built around technical discussions and articles (like CodeProject), or those [...]
The Importance of Generational Segmentation for Successful Technical Content Marketing
The Top Challenge for Technical Content Marketers When the Content Marketing Institute asked technical content marketers what their top challenge was in 2019, 68% said: creating content for multiple roles. Even tech content marketers who consider themselves extremely successful struggle (66% of top performers compared to 68% of tech content marketers overall). Identifying multiple roles, as an issue, is still ambiguous. [...]
The 5 Most Popular Technical Content Marketing Topics of 2019
The Power of “Did You Know?” Without a doubt, developer marketers really want to understand developers: who they are, what drives them, what keeps them up at night. Based on our own blog traffic, they are also very interested in answering questions about the most effective content marketing strategies. We took a look at our page visits and content campaigns, evaluated [...]
Zero to Hero: Less Time in the Valley of Suck
The Valley of Suck Anyone who has created anything has experienced this valley. Creatives are making something new, and to succeed, they need to acquire new tools, knowledge, and experience. And that process requires repeatedly being thrown into the valley of conscious incompetence, a.k.a. The Valley of Suck. If you have a technical audience, they are thrown into this valley more [...]
5 Must-Haves For Developer-Friendly Advertising
Developers look for information much in the same way as any other consumer. They use search engines, peers, and social media. But unlike the average consumer, they also rely heavily on developer-to-developer (D2D) communities, and newsletters from these communities that alert them to technical content and news. Within the context of their D2D environment, they do consume advertising like banner ads. [...]