A Beginner’s Quick Guide to Developer Marketing
Imagine you are on a luxurious bus when a man carrying a basket filled with bottles of liquid content comes in. He introduces himself as a marketer with years of experience and starts telling you about the bottles’ content, uses, and prices. You might immediately dismiss him as a scammer who only wants to make money from everyone on the bus. This approach hardly works in traditional marketing and can be harder to work for developer marketing.
So why can’t this approach work for developer marketing? And what approach would work?
Before answering these questions, let’s define developer marketing. Developer marketing is getting software developer audiences to accept your product. Simply put, developer marketing is marketing to developers. This can include marketing dev tools, APIs, SaaS platforms, SDKs, open-source, or anything. It involves a collection of techniques and methods used to create and grow awareness, adoption, and advocacy of software tools, solutions, and SaaS platforms by developers who would use them.
Developer marketing includes contributing as a peer to reach developer communities and micro-communities, participating in productive discussions, providing products, resources, and solutions to enhance workflow and development efficiency, and creating advocacy by promoting and publicizing the product.
As a developer marketer, you should ask yourself: Who are the developers and companies that will use your product? What core benefits can developers get from your product? How do you want to position and communicate your product? How can you make developers aware of your product and the problem you are solving?
The approach in the beginning illustration will only work for developer marketing if developers want evidence that the product can solve their problem. Persuasion is a turn-off for developers, so they will need more than traditional marketing to work on them. Developers need to try or test the product to believe in its effectiveness.
What approach will work for developer marketing? Don’t just talk about your product; show developers how it solves their problem and make it easy for them to try, buy, and use it in their organizations. Once they get started, communicate what the product does to make users/customers more successful and tell the story of your successful customers to further increase awareness of your product.
The main difference between traditional marketing and developer marketing is that traditional marketing involves persuading the audience that the product will solve their problem, while developer marketing entails showing the audience how the product can solve their problem.
Traditional marketing hardly allows customers to use the product briefly before buying. Still, developer marketing convinces customers by allowing them to use the product for a short period before buying. In developer marketing, product awareness, and usage increase tremendously when developers who have used the product successfully recommend it.
In conclusion, developer marketing is a sure way to build visibility and create awareness about your product, so it should be done correctly. To get started with developer marketing, you need to think like a developer and answer the questions listed above to guide you to the best approach that will work.
