What is Developer Marketing?

Developers are important — really, really important. From their very capable hands comes the next iPhone, productivity software for the enterprise or even that app that helps you lose 10 pounds and make you look like a stud. How do developers get started on building these important products? Early on they’ll make a decision on what codebase they want to use, how they envision people consuming their product and what SDKs or APIs they want to implement to round out the end user experience.

Let’s say you run a small business selling soy candles and your storefront is a website — how do you get paid for the candles that you sell? You could implement a payment API (let’s use PayPal for this example) on your website and customers could easily buy your candles. PayPal takes their cut and you get the rest a win-win scenario. How does marketing get involved in this? When a company develops an API or a suite of tools related to their business, the usage of that tool is only as helpful as getting developers to implement the API. How do developers know that the API even exists? Marketing.

Here is the exciting part of what developer marketers get to do: build a marketing plan to get developers to learn about said API, try it out and eventually adopt it. There are probably over 100 different marketing tactics I can think of that one could use to make this happen, its just a matter of understanding the details of your vertical, developer persona and end customer.

People ask me all the time, how is developer marketing different than consumer marketing?

1. The Challenge. Developer acquisition is a tough problem to solve. Developers are inherently skeptical, respect strong technical talent, need analytical justification for almost everything and have great pride in their work. I enjoy that added challenge. I always say if you can get a developer to adopt your API, SDK or platform you can succeed in almost any marketing capacity. Cost per developer acquisition is much more resource intensive than cost per consumer acquisition.
2. One implementation can reach thousands. One API implementation can drive thousands of consumer impressions. In the example I stated above, every person that purchases a candle from the website now knows about PayPal as a brand and that if they were to ever build their own business, using PayPal as a checkout mechanism is an option and an option that they’ve used before that works.

I had this exciting conversation with my parents over the weekend and felt the need to share it with all of my family and friends! So in case you were wondering what I did at Microsoft and what I do now at Facebook, this is it in a nutshell.