DavidDeveloper marketing encompasses a set of strategies and tactics aimed at developers to increase the awareness, adoption, and advocacy of software products.
As a B2B SaaS software company, it’s obvious that marketing is crucial to the success of your product. However, Business-to-developer (B2D) marketing requires a unique approach and most companies I’ve worked with or seen, do it wrong. That's where developer marketing comes in. In this article, I'll define developer marketing and provide an overview of its importance and key strategies.
Definition
Developer marketing is a specialized form of marketing that focuses on targeting developers as the primary audience for your software products or services. Developer marketing aims to build trust with developers by establishing your product's value and highlighting its technical features and benefits. The end goal is to convince developers to adopt your product and become loyal customers.
Importance
Developers are a unique audience and require a different approach compared to other target markets. They have a technical mindset and are always on the lookout for tools and resources that can help them work smarter, faster, and more efficiently. As a result, developer marketing plays a crucial role in building awareness, establishing credibility, and driving adoption of your software products.
Key Strategies
- Be authentic - Developers are allergic to marketing fluff. So, keep it real and focus on highlighting the technical aspects of your product. Provide examples of how your product solves real-world problems.
- Highlight technical features - Developers love to see the technical details of your product. Provide detailed documentation, code samples, and use cases that demonstrate your product's technical capabilities.
- Build a community - Developers love to connect with like-minded individuals. Create a developer community around your product to encourage collaboration, discussion, and sharing of knowledge.
- Utilize social media - Developers are active on social media. Utilize platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub to engage with your audience, share updates, and highlight new features.
- Provide excellent support - Developers value excellent support above all else. Ensure that your support team is responsive, knowledgeable, and willing to go above and beyond to help customers.
Successful Developer Marketing Companies
There are many SaaS companies that have successfully marketed to developers, but three that stand out immediately in my mind are Twilio, Atlassian, and Stripe. These companies have done an amazing job creating developer-focused products and services, built thriving communities around their platforms, and provided resources and support to help developers succeed.
Twilio is a cloud communications platform that provides APIs for developers to build messaging, voice, and video applications. The company has built a strong community of developers around its platform, offering free online resources, documentation, and support.
"Developers are the key to our growth. They are the people who can take our platform and make it into something magical." — Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO
One of their secrets of success has been to publish hundreds of blog posts every quarter. They don’t spend time on videos because it not only is expensive and time consuming, the target audience prefers text and code examples they can quickly read and copy and paste.
They also create long form content like tutorials and guides. And most importantly for the developer ecosystem, having a solid, up-to-date, and detailed (with code examples) API docs.
Atlassian is a collaboration software company that provides tools for teams to manage projects, track issues, and collaborate on code. The company has a strong focus on developers and their most well known products are Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. These are products that are specifically designed for software development teams. I’ve personally use all three and can certainly understand they stickiness factor. I prefer Github vs Bitbucket though, tbh.
"We focus on delivering products that developers love to use, and that creates a virtuous cycle of adoption and advocacy." — Dave Meyer, Head of Product Marketing
Stripe is a payment processing company that provides APIs for developers to build payment solutions into their applications. The company has a strong developer community, offering resources, support, and developer tools.
“Our developers are our biggest advocates. They love Stripe because it's easy to use and it helps them solve problems quickly." — Cristina Cordova, Head of Product Marketing
Personally being a developer and having built payment processing plugins for WordPress (back when I ran AppThemes), Stripe was a godsend. At the time, PayPal was the dominant player in the space and their developer marketing was horrible. I mean, their API docs was so unfriendly and it took forever to get something testing properly. That’s honestly when I started thinking about how marketing to developers is vastly different and it’s going to be a huge movement in the future. Stripe was just ahead of the curve and the funny thing now is that PayPal completely copied their success and API docs layout. 😆
In summary, these companies understand the importance of developers in driving their success and have made it a priority to provide the tools and resources that developers need to succeed.
It’s really amazing how many companies out there have products for developers but use the old lead generation tactics and outbound sales playbook. That’s where I can come in and help their business.
Conclusion
Developer marketing is a unique form of marketing that requires a specialized approach. By focusing on authenticity, technical features, community-building, social media, and support, you can establish trust with developers and drive adoption of your software products. If they think you’re marketing to them or sales is knocking on their door, developers run for the hills (I know because I’m one of them!).
