How to Gain Developer Audience Trust by… Actually Being Trustworthy and Transparent

By 2023, there will be almost 30 million software developers worldwide. Over 75% of which will have a technical degree. Europe alone holds 5.5 million developers, 820,000 of which are UK-based.  

Source: Daxx

Developers are a highly educated and increasingly powerful part of the sales process. They also present a unique marketing challenge.

How should marketers tailor their approach to this discerning group? 

Creating evangelists during the buying cycle

B2B purchase decisions often involve large teams of stakeholders. It’s not unusual to have 10-15 people in the buying cycle of a B2B solution. One of the most important components of this is technical evaluation. If your technology is an API-driven infrastructure, it will be dependent on the approval of your customer’s developers.

Unlike other business stakeholders, developers want to experience a solution. This is also how you create real advocates - a group of people who tried your solution and loved it. So it’s crucial that developers can try a technology before they buy. 

It’s far easier to move the purchase decision through IT with internal evangelists on board. This can shorten the process of approval and due diligence from a month to a week or less. If developers have already experienced the solution it makes implementation faster too. The customer knows how your solution will be used and how it fits into their IT architecture, increasing speed and value to their organisation. 

Getting the sale through IT is no longer a formality. The old perception of IT as a ‘blocker’ also isn’t true any more. If you want to sell highly technical solutions, you will have to win hearts and minds. 

Respecting the difference

Some organisations have marketed extremely well to software developers. Mongo DB and Twilio have mobilised a developer community around their solutions very effectively. 

Source: Twilio

Twilio markets itself to developers by addressing them directly. The solution is built with the developer audience in mind. Their developer-focused branding matches this. From the start, Twilio recognised that the solution is so technical, it would be hard for a salesperson to sell directly. Instead, they pioneered a developer marketing community. Through this community a network of referrals was leveraged to create sales, growth and success.

Mongo DB similarly made an innovative solution for the market, but rather than opting for direct selling, they had technical experts stack their solution up against rivals in the market. This created instant brand awareness, singling them out as recognisably different. This point of difference made other developers keen to use and experience the solution too.

Marketing to developers must be different to other B2B audiences. Business audiences might be sold in the traditional B2B way; using LinkedIn, face to face meetings and a solid business case presentation. Developers need something truly interesting and valuable to win their attention. 

Developers have a reputation for scepticism, hating things that don’t work well and priding themselves on being the first to discover new technology. Creating a sense of competition and community around a solution effectively crowd-sources customers in an organic way.

To market to developers, you must think long term. Do you have a great solution? Will developers love playing with it? If not, correct this first. If your solution stands up, then think about building a small, loyal audience which can generate referrals and recommendations. This is the single best way to grow your solution. 

Successful developer marketing is simply about building advocacy.

Here are my 3 strategies on how to gain developers’ trust

UX. Instead of your normal sales process, focus on building an amazing solution that can be shared in an open way. Software developers want to experience your solution and enjoy working with it. Make everything about your solution simple and easy to use. First contact with the solution is vital, so make sure it’s a positive one: make your documentation easy to find, your sandbox incredibly user friendly, and delivery of support quick and efficient. Optimising this onboarding journey is far more likely to win developers than any traditional marketing tactics. 

Tone. Learn from the masters of developer marketing, Twilio and Mongo DB, and make sure your tone is properly segmented to suit its audience. Every brand must have corporate positioning, but it’s your job to nuance this for the developer community. Avoid generic statements or jargon that will alienate this audience. Be specific, respect their intelligence and technical ability, and remember that trust and authenticity start from a place of humility and openness. 

Show don’t tell. Here’s how we here at Modulr get our solution in front of the developer community. In payment processing, technology is often seen as cumbersome and dull. We want to show there’s a different route, and the way we did that was by injecting transparency and trust into the marketing. Rather than ‘telling’ the audience, we opted to create an open sandbox and easy-access documentation. This gives developers the chance to experience our solution properly, making up their own minds.

And the last lesson of this blog post… if you’re a developer, here’s a handy link to our sandbox ;)

And the last lesson of this blog post… if you’re a developer, here’s a handy link to our sandbox ;)

If you’re on the commercial side of your business, think hard about whether you’re trying to retrofit messages for inherently different target audiences and consider the advice I’ve provided and how it fits into your own go to market. 

The companies I’ve cited above are great examples, but would love to hear about any that you think do a great job. Leave a comment below to let me know.

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