I heard that developers hate marketing, is that true?
From our experience, the short answer is no. We recently worked with software companies focused on developers – Business 2 Developers, and we realised that developers hate forced marketing, which is why many of them are using Ad Blockers because for them marketing = advertising, which is not true.
Developers hate marketing!
Marketing is more than just advertising, and it takes time and a lot of investments to do good marketing.
So what is developer marketing?
Everything you do to make your product (SaaS platform, APIs, SDKs, open-source products or dev tools) is adopted by the dev community (software developers in general).
Good developer marketing starts with understanding your developers, but then again, every good marketing starts with understanding and defining user personas.
Key activities of developer marketing:
- positioning and defining key messages for your product
- awareness – developers need to be aware of the product or the problem they are solving
- demonstrate how your product solves the problem
- demonstrate how your product is different from other solutions
- make it as easy as possible for them to try the product
- tell the story – about your company and about customers who are happy to use your product
- build a community – hire an
- exceptional developer relations team
As you can see, it is pretty much the same as traditional marketing.
And what is marketing?
Marketing is telling a story about your product to the right audience in the right place and at the right time. So it is obvious, in developer marketing, that your audience is developers.
How to achieve good developer marketing?
To get the right developers in the right market and at the right time, you need to build an ideal customer profile, think about user and buyer personas and most crucial thing, define your stage – innovators, early adopters, early majority and late majority. When we talk about the stage of the market, don’t forget about “Crossing the Chasm“.
Think about the right message – story, voice, tone, then about product positioning and messaging and also, who will communicate – DevRel team.
Developers love to learn and explore new technologies. – Don’t forget about this!
Zeljko was a guest at Funky Marketing Podcast on “How to Sell Your B2B Product to Developers (The Right Way)”
How can you help?
We can help you build a developer marketing team, write a bulletproof developer marketing strategy and organise a developer relations team.
If you are interested, drop us an email – contact@riha-stamac.co.uk