Really appreciate this article and wanted to add a few of my thoughts. I’ve been an inhouse marketer in the Dev Tool space for 2 different SDK companies over the last 5 years. The majority of my focus has been on paid / organic search channels (primarily google) because these two channels had the largest impact in the number of leads we generate.
The first thing I wanted to touch on is the idea that developers hate marketing - this is 100% accurate and I would recommend anyone doing marketing in the dev tool space to have this mindset.
For me the way I’ve dealt with this concept is to try to reframe what my objective is as a marketer. Fundamentally the SDK’s I’ve worked for do deliver value to a developer by helping them develop tools faster and in a more polished fashion. For some developers this is super useful and for others it will never be an option. For obvious reasons I focus on the developers that would see value in this and do everything in my power to make them aware that our solution exists.
My approach to developer marketing:
- Try to be direct as possible in how I communicate the features / capabilities / benefits while avoiding marketese / jargon etc
- I have a philosophy that if you provide value without any strings you benefit in the long run. That’s why I’ve always opposed gated content or even gating trials if possible.
- Developer experience is fundamental to the success of dev tools business. In my organization marketing takes an active role in dev experience - for example we helped reorganize documentation to make it more accessible and easier to navigate for our users. This had a dramatic impact in product adoption.
- Having a good demo should be the cornerstone of your marketing activities. It’s how developers see what you can do and gives your sales team the tools to sell your product effectively.
- Make use of things like live demos so developers can anonymously learn and observe your team without directly talking to a sales representative.
Some of the things I disagree with in the article.
Google display never works:
- This is not always the case. For obvious reasons retargeting is especially disliked in the developer world but in some cases it works. For me I’ll run a Google display campaign that targets any user that’s downloaded our SDK. For these users I focus on delivery display ads that help them integrate the product more effectively. For example I will create ads for these users that promote free trial support to help them build their POC. Typically marketing is not incentivized to drive an increase in support calls but if a user is having trouble building a POC then this is the ideal candidate for us to send to support.
- This also works for marketing pages - users who land on a marketing page will see ads for ungated content like “Buy vs Build” etc
The missing link between paid and organic traffic
Something that seems to be consistently overlooked is how the effort and money you spend on paid channels should help you make better decisions on increasing organic traffic. This is sometimes the main downside with hiring an agency - they might be really good on managing the paid side but don’t provide input on how you can use this to increase organic channels. For example:
- Identify which paid keywords drive conversions and use this data to prioritize your organic channels.
- Use the number of search impressions for your keywords to accurately measure demand for a service
- Use A/B testing to improve CTR in organic search. For example we had a really good blog article that did not have a great title. I ran a display campaign with different titles for this blog article. After about a month there was a clear winner and we renamed the blog article resulting in the ranking and traffic going up for the article.
Paid search and SEO do increase brand awareness
We primarily focused on paid search and SEO which resulted in a significant increase in the total number of users that searched for a brand year-over-year. The number of people searching for your brand is one of the best ways for you to measure brand awareness.
With all this said I do believe that ultimately any success you have marketing to developers manifests from your intentions. I’ve always believed that my intention as a marketer was to “help developers” by providing them tools to make their lives easier. I think this intention is mirrored in the work I do and has been a part of the reason we’ve been successful.