Developer Marketing

Developer Marketing is the process of getting your product or tool adopted by the developer audience. Whether it's a dev tool, API, SDK, SaaS platform, Opensource-related, or anything in between, your audience is highly technical and marketing-averse, and you should focus on educating, enabling, and inspiring them rather than convincing them to buy your product.

Another distinction to make is between developer-first and developer-plus marketing. Marketing to developers differs from marketing in general. However, simply speaking about your product in the right way, to the right people, in the right place, and at the right time is what marketing is all about. But keep in mind that your audience is highly technical.

Here are a few things that can help you reach your target audience:

- The market's current stage

- Ideal client profile

- The user persona

- Product positioning for a brand

- Research where your target audience gathers or where you can find them.

- Analytics and audience attribution

- Roadmap for the Customer Journey.

Another interesting fact is that developers are the best people at marketing to developers (this is where DevRel shines). They can understand the pain of the

developer and be able to help them solve their issues.

Some Best practices of Dev Marketing

- know which developer you’re talking to (hope you know that a Java dev is different from a JavaScript hobbyist)

- Let your product educate the developers and make it easy for them to get help. - Let your documentation be written by dev for dev.

Another lesson is the channels at which you can use to market to developers. They include but are not limited to social media platforms, forums, conferences, blogs, OSS, documentation, YouTube, and more.

Finally, here are a few tactics that can help you when you’re marketing to devs

- Create competitor focus content

- Create integration with popular frameworks or libraries

- Sponsor a related podcast/YouTube channel or event

- Run cold ads and create signature content.

A very good example of a platform that has good developer marketing is algolia

You can check them out and see what they do and how they do it. Start from their website through to their marketing mediums and see if you learn one or two.