First, Do Your Own Development Make sure you do the development involved in creating the developer persona(s) of the developers you need to attract. Understanding your audience is fundamental to successful developer advertising campaigns. Let’s look at three basic demographics using the Evans Data Developer Marketing Survey 2020 as a guide to provide baseline data. Education.  Of those surveyed, Over 70% had a bachelor’s degree or higher. While some people have a natural talent for understanding technology and software, the dynamic nature of the profession requires the developer to have a higher level of formal education to stay abreast of [...]

Developers are a particularly hard audience to capture with ads. Most of them know how digital advertising platforms work from a technical standpoint. As a result, they’re not particularly enthused when they find ads that don’t meet their standards. Yet, a truly great ad will definitely capture your target developer audience. Are your ads winning developers or losing them? You can improve your own developer ads by including these seven critical elements. 1. Authenticity  First and foremost, developers are skeptical of everything. It’s not because they’re paranoid, but because developers are usually scientifically-minded. The scientific mindset means that nothing is [...]

Go Where the Developers Are Capturing a developer audience requires first discovering where your ideal developer hangs out online, and then gaining their trust. You can accomplish both by sponsoring a developer podcast. Developers value commitment and transparency, alongside clean code (of course). You must be true to your brand and speak their language to gain their trust. There is no better way to communicate like a developer — without saying a word — than sponsoring a podcast. Why Sponsor a Developer Podcast? After a long day of squinting at code, developers welcome the break in screen time a podcast [...]

The Developer Experience Landing pages are critical to the success of your marketing campaigns, so let’s break their role in the developer experience down into stages to illustrate just how important they are. In Stage One, a developer’s attention is brought to your landing page link via an ad, or content with an embedded link. In Stage Two, the developer clicks the link and arrives at the landing page. Once they’ve safely landed, they view the content and decide whether to take the next major step, by committing with another click or giving up some personal information. In Stage Three, [...]

The Circle of Life Advertising The purpose of advertising is to motivate your audience to do something — specifically, to engage with your company and ultimately purchase your company’s products or services.  When this happens, your company will earn revenue, which will then trickle down into your paycheck, thus completing the Circle of Advertising. But that circle begins when your audience responds to your call-to-action (CTA). The CTA Your CTA is an often-overlooked imperative because it means that you need to think like a salesperson. The CTA is the digital marketing equivalent of “going for the close.” You’ve engaged your [...]

Action Equals Reaction There’s a natural tendency among marketers to have high expectations of their audience. With rose-colored glasses, and despite Newton's Third Law (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction), we expect positive audience reactions to the content we deliver. The caveat is that it’s an equal and opposite reaction, not an equal and favorable reaction. The good news is that if you have content of value, most developers will provide their name and email, and with that, you have the opportunity to earn their trust — the first step in establishing a meaningful relationship. Let’s [...]

The Rationale The primary role of marketing is to create demand in the market for specific products and services. Advertising plays a prominent role in the marketing mix, and can take many forms:  print, broadcast and digital media (including web ads, targeted search engine ads, and social media ads), display advertising in blogs, along with newsletters, forums, and content-rich sites. To create demand using advertising, identifying the audience is the first critical step. Then, get their attention. Engage with a relevant message. Finally, offer a path to satisfy their curiosity. We know developers are a deeply skeptical technical audience. [...]

Outbound Marketing The world has changed, and it’s time to take a fresh look at one of the simplest and most effective digital marketing tools in your toolbox — outbound marketing. The need is self-evident; the pandemic has effectively isolated people from normal channels of communication. It has also essentially eliminated two important avenues of communication: the trade show and the in-person sales meeting. While there are virtual trade shows and web meetings, neither replaces in-person.  With the shift away from contact marketing, outbound remains one of the best methods to reach and communicate with your audience. Outbound marketing [...]

Product Evaluation Preferences Evaluating a product for purchase is tricky business. As the cost and complexity of the product increases, so does the risk; risk of failure, embarrassment. Your reputation on the line when making a product selection, and decisions have to be made. So Code Project asked its developer community “How do you prefer to evaluate a product?” From a marketing perspective, there are a number of tactics you can use to promote a product for evaluation. In this survey, developers were presented with a list of common evaluation tactics and asked to rate them. Developers could choose [...]