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Don't persuade. Educate, enable, and inspire.

Start with mapping the product development cycle of your developer persona and see where can you pitch in. Understanding the trigger (what led them to search on google) is the most important step.

Understand the trigger:

A good place to start is:

  • How to do X: Jobs to be done / use case type content.

  • Tools for X: Listing tools in a category with some framework for comparing them.

  • X alternatives: Options for switching from a particular tool.

  • X vs Z: Comparing your tool with a competitor or two competitors.

Here's how you can start:

Define a problem:

Before talking about your product's benefits, it's important to understand what problems developers face. Instead of just saying your product is awesome, focus on truly grasping their struggles. Show you understand their issues without claiming your product fixes everything. By explaining how they can solve problems themselves, you build trust.

Be a reliable resource. Help with their problems even if it's not directly about your product. This builds a relationship naturally. Marketing content should feel useful, not like a sales pitch. Discuss the challenges developers have and how they can handle them on their own.

This approach is especially powerful for basic resources:

  • Describe the developer's problem

  • Explain how to build the solution

  • Show your expertise by demonstrating your deep understanding

Your first step should be to acknowledge the current way of doing things. The alternative you’re offering could be:

  • Something inefficient or manually managed

  • A DIY or free open-source option

  • An established and relevant tool

As a Devtool company, your main competition often comes from teams trying to create their own solutions. It might seem strange to suggest this to a potential customer. Some might actually try to build it themselves. But many will find it harder and costlier than they thought—and that’s where you come in. You’re in the best position to offer them a solution that really works.

Declare Your Company Keywords

Declare Your Company Keywords - The developer content mind trick is not just an SEO tactic, but executed well, it will improve your search rankings. You’ll want to carefully consider the keywords you use to describe your signature content. These keywords should both match terms your customers use and be relevant to the product or service you provide.

Focus on the problems or solutions developers search for when they (hopefully) discover you. Chances are you already know what two or three words this is for your company. It’s likely one of the primary problems upon which your company was founded.

You want your signature content to show up during this developer’s research. When they find it, your guide will teach them how to implement your technical solution, even without your product. (source)

Give Developers a Blueprint / Build v/s Buy

“Give developers a blueprint,” as said by LaunchDarkly's Founder and CEO.

If a potential customer is unsure whether to build or buy, show their developers exactly how to build. When they see how hard it is—either through your detailed guide or by trying it themselves—many will return to buy your solution. That’s the real trick.

But it’s not actually a trick. Nobody wants to be fooled. Instead, you’re proving your expertise to developers and earning their trust. To gain that level of respect, you can’t just throw 300 words on a page and surround it with links to your signup page. You need to create a comprehensive guide that acknowledges and addresses developer pain points.

It can be tempting to dive straight into implementation details, but the guide should set the context at a higher level first. Some sections to consider:

  • Introduction: What is your topic and why is it important?

  • Use cases: Why would someone build this solution?

  • How it works: What are some common approaches to solve this problem?

  • Tutorial: How can a developer try out an example implementation?

  • Resources: What are the next steps and further reading?

Remember, you’re not promoting your product within this guide. It’s general education around a problem your product also solves. While your other developer tutorials may rely on your product as an example, this is not the place for it. If any list of steps begins with ‘Sign Up for an Account,’ you’re doing it wrong.

Technology Marketing vs. Product Marketing: Which Is Right for You?

Definitions First: What’s Technology Marketing?

Technology marketing enables category creation and can accelerate your product’s usage from early adopters to mainstream users.

We usually define technology marketing as any activities that accelerate acceptance of a technology in the market. A “technology” could be anything from a programming language, to a development framework, to a popular software tool. The reason for marketing a technology is that readers with goodwill towards that technology may extend their goodwill towards your company or product (or at least be curious about it) if they see that the two are related.

Why Companies Do Technology Marketing?

  • Making Products Built on the Technology Easier to Understand (and Easier to Sell): Take Gradle.com, for instance, offering an enterprise-focused version of Gradle, using the same open-source technology as Gradle.org. Explaining this commercial solution to non-users of Gradle would be quite complex, but for current Gradle users, it's as simple as saying "it's like OSS Gradle, but faster.

  • Building an Audience of Qualified Prospects: When someone invests effort into using a technology, it shows its importance to them. If they're already using it, there's a higher chance they'll be interested in related commercial services. This makes them warmer prospects compared to those with no prior connection to the technology.

  • Generally Building Goodwill and Increasing Brand Awareness: Aligning your product with well-known technology can enhance brand recognition. Additionally, when prospects recognize the connection between your product and a technology they're familiar with, selling becomes easier.

Example: check out how Hightouch educates on their "Reverse ETL"technology. They have over 50 blogs just explaining this (plus videos on Youtube).

Should Your Startup Do Technology Marketing?

Sure! Technology marketing isn’t just about traffic; it’s part of your overall business strategy. For content marketing, tech-focused efforts for a developer-centric company can be very beneficial.

However, extra traffic is useless unless it leads to sign-ups, leads, and paying users. When deciding on tech marketing, we’d look at how well it fits with our main product or service. If users can easily move from using the tech to paying for our service, we’d promote it.

Don't delay product marketing for tech marketing. If buyers are ready, you need the right info on your site to close the sale. Focus on pages that rank high for buying keywords, case studies, and other sales materials to avoid losing customers.

Example: VideoSDK

VideoSDK's Learning Hub is also a great example on content that is specifically focused on educating their user persona. Check out their Learnings Hub.

LogoLearning Hub for Developersvideosdk.live

"We started Video SDK with a simple mission: to make integrating audio-video solutions into applications as easy as possible for developers," says Arjun (Co-founder, VideoSDK)

In the early days, Arjun and his team set out to address a common pain point among developers: the complexity of integrating audio-video features into apps. With this insight, they began crafting a robust Video SDK, prioritizing simplicity, reliability, and user-friendly documentation.

keeping it simple:

"We saw how developers struggled with adding audio-video capabilities to their apps. Our goal was to simplify that process"

Inbound Engine and Content:

They might not have the decision-making power right now, but someday they will and you should be their go-to tool. Bonus points, If you can help them do better in their professional careers.

By consistently sharing educational content, companies can nurture leads over time, building brand recognition and loyalty. This long-term approach ensures that when developers are ready to make a purchasing decision, they are more likely to turn to the company that has been providing them with valuable insights and support along the way.

Moreover, Arjun highlighted the scalability of inbound marketing compared to traditional outbound methods. He explained that while outbound strategies like cold calling and email blasts can be effective in the short term, they often require significant time and resources to maintain. In contrast, inbound marketing relies on creating evergreen content that continues to attract leads organically over time, allowing companies to generate sustainable growth without constantly chasing new leads.

Recognizing the power of inbound marketing, Arjun and his team dove headfirst into content creation. They used platforms like YouTube, Dev.to, and Medium to share informative how-to guides, tutorials, and technical documentation. By providing valuable resources, Video SDK quickly established itself as a trusted resource in the developer community.

"Content marketing played a crucial role in building trust and credibility within the developer community"

Dev.to:

Dev.to became a favourite spot for Video SDK to share detailed technical articles and insights with the developer community. They regularly published articles covering various topics like API integrations and troubleshooting.

"Dev.to was perfect for diving deep into technical topics and interacting with other developers. It helped us build credibility and get our name out there"

Community Involvement:

Community engagement has been central to Video SDK's growth strategy. Arjun actively participates in developer forums, hosts webinars, and holds office hours to connect with the developer community. The mai role of the community is to provide support to the users.

"Our community is the backbone of our success. Their input guides our product development and enhancements. it helps us innovate consitently. " emphasizes Arjun.

Example: Posthog

Another great example: Posthog took it to the next level by creating their Handbook. It's a guide just like this one on how they operate.

LogoHandbook - PostHogPostHog

Some Do's and Dont's :

  • Don’t: Create product-led content that shoves the product into your reader’s face.

  • Do: create a transparent guide to what your product can and can’t do. But make sure you don’t over-promise (or even sound like you’re overpromising).

  • Don’t: Write thought leadership content that relies on cheesy trend predictions.

  • Do: Create thoughtful, technical essays based on experiences from engineers and founders. But make sure your claims are authentic as well as relevant and well-supported as well as novel.

  • Don’t: Produce hollow, manicured case studies.

  • Do: Create technical case studies that describe, in detail, what a customer’s experience was really like – including the gains, the stresses, and the adoption and integration processes. But make sure the focus remains on the customer's problem and not on your solution.

Further readings:

LogoGetting started with a Medium publicationMedium Help Center
LogoHow to Write Better Technical ContentDraft.dev

With Content, Distribution is Key:

Distribution is key to getting your content in front of the right eyes. Here's a handy checklist from Dyte for maximizing the reach of each blog post or content piece:

Newsletter sponsorships

If you're aiming to target developers, consider sponsoring top developer-focused newsletters. If you have the budget to experiment, costs typically range from $500 to $1000. Here's a sample list to get you started.

Name

Cost

Javascript Weekly

$3,590.00

Frontend Focus

$1,800.00

React Status

$1,100.00

Codrops

$ 860.00

Kodeco

$ 800.00

Pointer

$ 750.00

React digest

$ 735.00

Programming Digest

$ 615.00

This week in React

$ 600.00

Web design weekly

$ 525.00

Web tools weekly

$ 525.00

Devdactic

$ 500.00

Weekly Vue & Nuxt News

$ 450.00

Community-Driven Content Promotion

You can boil down content promotion to this single concept: Find places online that contain a lot of people in your target audience so you can share your content with them.

There are two ways that we’ve found to do this successfully:

In a welcome email or by sending out an email asking a question

Ask them where they hang out and the influencers they follow in discovery calls

The biggest value that comes from promoting your content through communities is that someone has already done the hardest work for you — they’ve built an audience of people within your target market.

Therefore, your goal is twofold when it comes to community-driven content promotion:

  1. Find the communities that contain your target audience

  2. Engage with the community, form relationships, and share your content so that it adds value (instead of spamming the community).

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