By David Ronald
Developers are a tough crowd.
They don’t like to be sold to, they have limited time, and they certainly don’t pick up the phone.
Marketing to developers requires a distinct approach compared to traditional marketing. Developers are often skeptical of typical tactics – they value authenticity, practical information, and community engagement.
Marketing to developers is different, but not difficult.
After all, many companies, including Atlassian, GitHub, MongoDB, Stripe, and Twilio, have built hugely successful businesses by marketing to developers successfully.
Community is Crucial
Developers prefer a different buyer journey than the ones used in traditional SaaS marketing.
Specifically, they prefer to discover, activate, and scale with your product, with little or no involvement from your sales team, at least initially.
The best developer-focused GTM often exhibits consistent, methodical investments that pay off in the long run. It also avoids optimizing for quick wins.
It’s important to understand the mindset of developers. Here are two things to keep in mind:
- Developers can tell if a community is legit by how much people are contributing.
- Developers attend events to level up their skills, not to buy software.
So, how can you attract developers to your product? Begin by building a developer community, and consider leveraging the following:
- Forums—developers come passively to ask questions or exchange experiences at community forums. Quora, Reddit, and Discord are good options.
- Events—developers can exchange ideas at these events or, even better, gain hands-on experience with your product exchange in classroom-type environments. Hackathons can also be very effective, if you are feeling ambitious and have the time to oversee this type of event.
Be mindful that if a developer doesn't feel like you're speaking to them and their needs, they will lose interest. This is the topic of the next section.
Building Your Brand
Your brand is key to winning over a developer audience.
Above everything else, developers value four things in their engagements with vendors:
- Authenticity—understand your audience and reflect them in your brand’s voice. Avoid any BS in your marketing (and sales, if you use it).
- Clarity—say what you need to, without ambiguity or hyperbole.
- Usefulness—make your marketing materials genuinely helpful, not just something you're trying to get developers to buy.
- Honesty—keep users in the loop about what changes you’re making and why—from both a product and commercialization standpoint.
Successful marketing to developers requires respecting, and even protecting, the community that you’re building.
Developers value high-quality, informative content that helps them solve problems or learn new skills. Creating in-depth technical blogs, step-by-step tutorials, and comprehensive documentation can position your product as a valuable resource.
This not only builds trust but also demonstrates the practical applications of your product, making it easier for developers to see its value.
Pricing for Value
Many software companies these days let people try their product before buying—a free offering has become “table stakes” for developer-first companies.
Your goal, of course, is to convert your free users to paying customers.
Think about how pricing affects the perceived value of your product—too low, and it might be seen as low quality; too high, and it could deter potential users. When pricing is set appropriately, it can attract a broader user base, ensuring that the product is accessible to its target audience.
Successful companies price their software on value.
(See my blog post, The Benefits of Pricing Your Product For Value, for more information on this subject.)
The moment when a developer identifies the value your product provides is typically when they commit to buying from you.
This is the topic of our next section.
Getting to “A-Ha”
Many companies have the mindset of, “If we build a great product, people will just know how to use it.”
The reality is that converting someone from a free trial user to a paying customer is an art—it requires a strategic mindset, careful planning, and empathy.
A key goal is how best to guide your buyer to the “a-ha” moment, that place in the buyer’s journey when your user realizes the value that your product provides to them (e.g., increasing productivity by x%, lowering costs by $y).
Accomplishing this requires good engineering—your product needs to be easy to use and unambiguously address important customer pain points. And you may need to get creative in leveraging your product to entice users to convert.
It also requires marketing that informs users about product functionality, encourages them to use the product often, and incentivizes them to refer additional colleagues.
And, although sales shouldn't be the first touchpoint with your product, sales can pull the conversion forward.
Contrary to what you may think, developers are happy to engage with sales people, as long as these engagements are perceived to be informative, succinct, and well-timed.
This is where PQLs come in—a PQL is a product-qualified-lead, meaning that actions taken in the product by a free user help to qualify that user for outreach by the sales team.
Tracking free user activity is vital, and helps your sales team to know when to become involved.
This may be the action that enables your prospect to reach their “a-ha” comment.
Conclusion
Marketing to developers requires authenticity, clear communication, and community engagement.
Show real-world applications of your product, use targeted platforms, provide honest and clear information, and actively participate in developer communities.
By understanding and respecting the unique preferences of developers, you can create effective and meaningful marketing strategies.
Thanks for reading – I hope you found this blog post to be useful.
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