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 [...]

Advertising Basics An advertising campaign is a primary method of delivering messages to your audience as a component of an overall marketing strategy. While advertising can mean many things, digital advertising is generally categorized as either paid or earned. Paid advertising is where you are paying someone for space and time. Earned advertising used to be called publicity — and basically, it’s “free” advertising, such as press releases or media coverage. With paid advertising, you have the advantage of controlling the duration and the frequency of opportunities for your audience to view your ad. Optimizing these two factors is [...]

The More Things Change, The More Things Stay the Same Many developers are finding themselves under the gun, with more being expected of them in shorter amounts of time. Everything from new tools to new processes are now on the market, with the hope of making programming more efficient, more accurate, and more cost-effective.  CodeProject asked its developer community, “Is the process of writing software becoming harder and more complicated?”Survey Says...In the context of this survey, complicated was defined as requiring more pieces (build tools, deploy tools, different languages, multiple systems); harder was defined as each piece being harder to learn, [...]

D2D Advertising and Search If you are advertising to developers in developer-to-developer (D2D) communities, you may overcome their propensity to use ad blockers. But how can you use ads in D2D community websites and newsletters to influence search behavior? Fortunately, developer habits are in your favor. Web Search May Affect Your CTR So, what if your ad click rate is low? You’ve placed a link in a D2D newsletter, and a static ad on the D2D community website your audience loves. Don’t despair. According to our developer interviews, many developers will view an ad, but won’t click on it. [...]

It’s Not Just What You Say Developers are a skeptical technical audience. Sure, you can split hairs and say truthful things that are misleading by implication. But you do so at the risk of damaging your campaign and your brand. Learn what it means to have truthful developer advertising through and through. Use Straightforward Language According to our developer interviews, many developers like storytelling in advertising. It’s engaging and fun. As long as it is not disruptive, telling a quick, interesting story is welcomed. But make sure it is accurate and easy to understand. The developers you want to [...]

What Is A Developer Community? We’re defining a developer community as a place where developers congregate to build their skills, get questions answered, and share information to help other developers. If it sells advertising, it is probably not associated with a brand or vendor, but is associated with a particular application, language, tool or technology.  Because the strength of the community is based on the interaction between community members, we like to refer to these communities as developer-to-developer (D2D) communities. The Advantage Of Reaching D2D Communities D2D communities are popular with developers because they can share and obtain information [...]