We all know that developers don’t love marketing.
But it seems that the very best developer marketing campaigns can gain a lot of traction and shall I say… love among the devs.
Ok, but what are those dev marketing campaigns that work?
2022 was actually quite special in that regard.
The DevRel awards 2022 presented by Orbit had a special category devoted to “best developer marketing campaign”.
Nice, devmar is getting more and more recognition in the space!
Go developer markepears!
Anyhow, you may want to watch the event:
Some interesting campaigns were presented there (2 of them are below).
Plus, as I was looking for inspiration for my work I found a few good ones.
Figured I’d share them with you.
Ready? Let’s go.
GitHub Skyline
This was actually the winner of the “best developer marketing campaign” as per DevRel 2022 awards.
And it is a very cool project.
You type in your GitHub name and see your history in 3d.
- engaging 3d viz
- cool music
- button to share it on Twitter
And Voila!
You have an intrinsically viral brand awareness campaign.
Just brilliant.
Newsjacking by GitGuardian
Newsjacking is a great marketing tactic.
Especially when you can connect it nicely to your product.
And GitGuardian, a tool for secrets management does it beautifully here.
They ran a story on how Toyota suffered from a data breach.
Because they didn't manage their GitHub secrets properly.
Brilliant.
Ably periodic table of real-time
One of the nominees in the “best developer marketing campaign” as per DevRel 2022 awards.
“The Periodic table of real-time, the best way to increase your knowledge of the real-time landscape.”
It is a funky way to explain all the intricacies of the real-time event landscape - the core competency of Ably.
I really like this as it is:
- actually valuable to your audience
- closely connected to your brand
- snarky/tongue-in-cheek which (many) developers like
G2 quote Linkedin Ad format from Algolia
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A great example of a quote-style ad.
I like it because:
- it builds trust via G2 crowd reference and an actual person mentioned
- the quote talks about what the tool does and what is good about it
- links to G2 crowd profile, NOT your page -> more trust especially when I don't know the brand yet
Speaking of ads, you may want to check out this deep dive into paid developer marketing.
Make {DevOps} cry post format
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Make a {X} cry in 5 words or less.
Great Linkedin (or Twitter) post format.
This is one of those fantastic self-selecting mechanisms as well.
People who understand the joke are the people you are looking for.
You may get the exact people you want to follow your profile.
With a nicely targeted joke.
Love it.
VS page format from Ably
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Vs pages are a classic SaaS marketing.
But I like how Ably adjusts them to the developer audience:
- For each criterion, they say why it matters
- They link to their resources to extend further why Ably works great there
- They use a lot of developer jargon to make it feel like a dev wrote it for devs
- They go over a lot of different categories to make this comparison deep enough to be valuable for the buyer
Save time video format from Stoplight
How do you show "save time" to devs?
It is often hard as it is not objective.
But there are options.
Spotlight does it beautifully by showing two implementations next to each other solving the same task.
It is obvious which is faster and saves time.Great stuff!
Meme tweet format from Supabase
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Memes that resonate with your ICP (in this case website backend devs who use PostgresSQL).
Content like this helps people find their tribe.
And then those memes can get folks to follow your account.
If you mix your content well you can then push them further down the funnel.
Question/joke tweet format from Supabase
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One more from Supabase as they are awesome at this.
Create a connection with your ideal customer profile.
"Wrong answers only" questions are great for that imho.
If you liked those, you may want to read this article about how Supabase runs their Twitter account.
Auth0 campaign: Make login our problem. Not yours.
Make login our problem. Not yours.
This is a beautiful messaging of Auth0 solution.
Login
Simple explanation of what it does/gives you.
Simplified of course
Our problem. Not yours.
You "outsource" this boring but important problem to someone else.
It also has a feel of SaaS in there.
They will take care of it.
More developer marketing campaign examples
If you want even more examples, I have created a library of dev marketing campaigns, desings, and copy that you can use in your work.
I update it constantly with new cool stuff I see.
Check out the examples swipefile.
