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 what content marketers were most curious about in 2019, and considered what it might mean for 2020.

#5. Show Me the Content!

Our most popular content on ContentLab is the technical content itself. Unsurprisingly, technical content marketers are curious about the content offered. What technical topics were those marketing to developers most interested in?

• Security – Security Is a Constant Battle and What Developers Need to Know About Content Security Policy
• Unified Modeling Language (UML) – UML Made Easy with PlantUML vs. Code
• Angular 9 – What’s New in Angular 9

#4. What Tech Content Do I Need to Start a Technical Community?

Our fourth most popular blog topic was related to creating developer or technical communities — Your Developer Community Technical Content Startup Guide. This post was inspired by an interesting MarketingLand article by SparkPost CMO Josh Aberant about developer community-building best practices. The blog post expanded on Aberant’s article to answer the question, “What content should accompany the useful best practices he lays out?”

#3. How to Create Consumable Technical Content

Technical content marketers really care about their audience’s experience. They want to deliver valuable technical content, and in a format that their audience can easily digest. Our post “How to Create Consumable Technical Content” offers data-driven insight anchored in surveys from the good folks at Evans Data Corporation, as well as advice from our own interviews with developers. The main takeaway? How you organize and present the information is just as important to developers as what type of information you provide. And here’s a hint: Don’t start with a deep dive.

#2. What Is the Optimal Tech Blog Frequency?

We asked the question ”Is A Blog Frequency of Twice a Week Enough?” The answer we discovered, provided by a Hubspot survey indicated… maybe not. This struck a chord with our readers, who were just as interested in the answer.

#1. What Are Developers’ Biggest Challenges?

Those marketing to developers are focused exactly where they should be (on the problems that keep developers awake at night). More specifically, they are focused on the biggest challenges developers face when trying to implement a new tool or technology. The main takeaway (documentation) is perhaps unsurprising, but it’s worth digging in and reading all the things developers have to say in the article, including the somewhat snarky comments.

The Road Ahead

What does all this mean as you look ahead to developing your technical content marketing strategy for 2020? Those following Aberant’s advice will invest in documentation that offers information in multimedia so developers can choose the format that works for their workflow, as well as tutorials to encourage new users to level up and interact with a community, and how-to’s and use cases that support members from novice to expert, among other things.

Investing in a variety of types of technical content (public documentation, tutorials, how-to’s, and case studies) is certainly important. Equally important are paying attention to how the information is organized, the media type used to convey information (video, text, images, and code samples), and providing a handy environment for testing (like an online code editor). Technical blogs remain a popular source of information, and increasing the blog publication frequency from twice a week to up to four times a week can make a big difference, particularly for new companies or new solutions.