Actions Speak Louder Than Words Demonstrations of any product, from vacuum cleaners to tools for AI developers, are always more powerful. However, with a technical and skeptical audience like developers, campaigns designed to show (and not just say) are essential. Advertising developer tools with any success means that ad campaigns will point developers to opportunities to try a tool. You Don’t Have to Give It All Away Maybe in the end, your ad’s performance will be measured in downloads. But you might get more if you offer developers a way to try a tool before a download. Documentation that [...]

A Dynamic Situation There’s a battle out there for people’s attention, and your choice of weapons is largely determined by the preferences of your developer audience. The key element is your outbound strategy and whether you go social or email. The biggest difference between social and email marketing remains the ability to better target your audience — specifically, group targeting with social media and targeting individuals with email. The marketing environment remains highly dynamic. On the social side, you have structural uncertainty at Twitter and regulatory concerns among the other social platforms. On the email side, privacy concerns have [...]

No Secrets People are curious to learn secrets, but sharing secrets on the internet defeats the whole purpose of having a secret. So let’s all agree, for now, that there are no secret strategies for marketing to developers — at least on the internet. In the quest to market to developers, what can be elusive are the opportunities to apply time-tested marketing principles to a unique audience which is clearly identifiable and scalable. So the not-so-secret secret here is the need  to focus on key marketing elements, and use those elements to engage our developer audience to prompt them [...]

Understand Your Developer Audience Selling any type of product to software developers is a challenge. To be successful, you must intimately understand your developer audience. Are you selling to the developer, or are you selling to the company the developer is working for? These are two different audiences, with different needs, triggers, and motivations. The primary motivation for a developer to consider purchasing a software tool or service is to solve a problem. The problem can take many forms, it can be a technical roadblock or it can be related to improving efficiency of a process, for example. To [...]

A Quick Review of the Last Few Years Most of us once considered the tech sector bulletproof — impervious to layoffs and downsizing. History has proven us wrong. Infinite variables are constantly in play in business and in life, especially in modern society, and anything can happen. Looking back to recent history, some of the blame can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in Fall 2019. The pandemic led to shelter-in-place orders and rapid change in the way we work, with a heavy reliance on digital technology. As we’ve slowly returned to something closer to a pre-pandemic [...]

It’s More Than a Feeling Are brand awareness and brand recognition the same? Definitely not — and understanding the distinction will help you in your brand marketing efforts. Loosely described, brand awareness is composed of the sights and sounds a brand makes, or the cues which make a target developer audience aware of the existence of a brand, without necessarily knowing or understanding what it stands for. Brand awareness is the cost of entry into the market, and it supersedes brand recognition. Brand recognition follows awareness. When you’ve reached brand recognition, your target developer audience knows exactly what the [...]

Note: This is an update of a previous post. Newsletters remain one of the best means of communicating with your developer audience. They should be an integral part of your communications program, along with email, blogs, and trial offers. Newsletters are trusted by developers because they enjoy and find useful the content you provide. With so much potential, newsletters should be an area where you devote a significant number of resources to ensure quality and relevance. Lead with the Reader Newsletters are a significant commitment in that they must be maintained as an ongoing effort. They should be planned [...]

Website Annoyances Companies love to solicit feedback. Whether it’s used to simply check a box to comply with their Net Promoter Score audit, or it’s actually used to improve the customer experience depends on the company’s culture. Feedback can be brutal, but it’s one of the few things that lead to change. Websites really are the storefront of your company because they are the most visible manifestation of your existence. Your website should be perfect, and while most aren’t, they could be! Devilish Details The developer community is a tough crowd. When it comes to website interaction, they know [...]

Let’s Talk About the Developer Experience The developer community is a highly technical audience. Many developers hold advanced degrees and enjoy working with complex numbers. How can you market to developers who tend to be more skeptical than the rest of the general population? The secret to generating leads from developers is that you have to make a compelling offer. That said, if you’re making a pitch to developers, the devil is in the details — and those details are typically deeply technical in nature. You also have to be quick - developers have little time to waste on [...]