From my experience, the most popular developer marketing channels that you should try (probably in this order) are:
Check out articles and examples on dev marketing channels below.
There are a few developer experience gems here:
Also, their design is super clean, non-invasive, and simple which makes for easy content consumption and more developer love.
Great example of programmatic SEO from Snyk.
They created a page called snyk advisor.
It is a repository of pages about open-source packages.
Each page is created automatically out of publicly available information.
Enhances it with Snyk-generated security scans and reports.
It builds awareness for other Snyk products in the security space.
A lot of those pages rank high in google for the {package} keyword which is incredible.
And when people land on the package report page the CTAs to Snyk products push conversions.
Beautiful growth loop that uses GitHub PRs to spread awareness even internally in the org.
And just one dev needs to sign up for the product to start it.
Works like this:
Heard about it on Lenny's podcast episode with Ben Williams (the story starts at 20:53)
... and then signed up to see the actual PR.
I really love this one as it allows you to spread inside the organization even if everything is on-prem and you never get to see it.
Those PRs are just working behind the scenes doing marketing for you.
Brilliant!
Sometimes your product just wins on price.
I like how New Relic owns it on this page:
After reading this I'd trust them to give me a solid price estimate and that it will likely be cheaper than Datadog.
Obviously price is not the only reason why we choose tools, but if that was a problem I had with Datadog, they have my attention.
There are a lot of boring vendor t-shirts at conferences.
And they get boring results.
I like this bold design from GitGuardian:
Nice.
Is it better to do one big prize or many small prizes?
This is a decision you have to make when thinking about running a swag campaign.
Turns out that a small number of huge prizes can get you way better ROI on the same budget.
And NannyML has done it brilliantly here.
They are a monitoring tool and they give away monitoring setup.
This is something that actually can go viral. And it did.
Memes are good top-of-funnel, awareness-type content.
Many companies use them on socials as they can "go viral".
But.
You need to either:
I like how Datree connects it to the product here.
They are a Kubernetes configuration tool and talk about exactly that here.
They do that with jargon too "k8", "config". When used well it can help you belong to the tribe you are marketing to.
I like how they use the black dot to show the mouse movements in the UI.
Simple but powerful and clear.
I like the simplicity of this announcement.
What: "Vercel Edge Middleware"
Why: "Start delivering dynamic, personalized content without sacrificing end-user performance."
Visual supports this but is super minimal.
Devs like diagrams.
When you explain a complex concept in one diagram it is just very shareable.
If you are interested in reading more there is an entire "blog post" when you click see more.
Just a very solid content format.
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.
Digital Ocean went for an ad for the Hactoberfest in a tricky place.
To keep it in the medium that fits YouTube shorts they:
I think doing YouTube shorts is an interesting opportunity in a yet unsaturated market (as of 2022).
And doing ads that fit that medium so nicely is an art.
Good job DO!
I like how it has a proper "hero section" feel to it but it adds a developer-focused twist:
The rest of the Readme is great as well but the hero section is gold imho.
Dorky joke right?
But it does two very important things beautifully.
It gets a smirk (from some people) and when it does you know you just moved someone closer to your brand.
It has a clear CTA which is hard to do with joke-format ads.
This subtle call to conversation/check us out does the job.
Love it!
Very cool project.
You type in your GitHub name and see your history in 3d.
And Voila!
You have an intrinsically viral brand awareness campaign.
Just brilliant.
Vs pages are a classic SaaS marketing.
But I like how Ably adjusts them to the developer audience:
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.
A great example of a quote-style ad.
I like it because:
Great stuff.
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.
Using memes in the product release.
If you understand your ICP (in this case open-source backend devs) it may be a great idea.
An additional benefit is that people may share a meme... that actually has a link to your announcement.
Create a connection with your ideal customer profile.
"Wrong answers only" questions are great for that imho.
Great SEO tactic.
What folks from Cronitor did is:
This can be used for many dev-focused tools as by definition they use commands which can be templated.
I've heard about it originally from Harry Dry over at https://marketingexamples.com/seo/cronitor
Say what we are all thinking.
This tweet is great as it states something that most of us feel.
It is something that you may have had a discussion about with someone recently.
You might have fought about one tool or another.
But at the end of the day tools don't matter.
You can share it with someone as:
