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 [...]

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, [...]