How to Run a Content Marketing Program for Developers

TL;DR:

• Developers don't respond well to pushy marketing tactics and prefer to be educated and try products themselves.
• A good developer marketing program includes developer docs, educational content, code references, and distribution across various channels.
• Community building, both online and offline, is essential for successful developer marketing.

Learning how to target a new audience as a marketer is hard enough. Throw the technical, marketing-averse developer community into the mix? Oh, boy.

Normal marketing playbooks don't apply to devs.

At Letterdrop, we work with Devtools companies like Doppler, Explo and Census. I sat down with Allie Beazell, former Marketing Chief of Staff at Census, who joined the company when there were only eleven employees. She's played a big part in its growth and understands what it means to market to developers. She graciously let us pick her brain for insights on how she and her marketing team get things done.

In this guide, I'll save time and energy by helping you approach developer marketing using lessons from Census.

How Is Developer Marketing Different from Marketing?

"Developers" Are Very Fragmented

Developers are a highly fragmented group, making marketing to them a very nuanced exercise.

Are you marketing an API to first engineers at startups? Are you upselling a managed version of open-source software to engineering leaders? Or perhaps machine learning observability to a Head of Data Science.

Each persona is extremely different. So let's be clear that "developers" is an umbrella term, and you need to go a level deeper.

Developers Don't Like Being Marketed To

Developers are a highly independent group. They do not trust anything promotional.

Developers are very aware when they're being marketed to. — Allie Beazell

Nobody likes marketing that's pushy and sales-y. But devs really don't like marketing that's pushy and sales-y.

Most technical folks won't engage with explicit marketing on principle. For example, if you were to ask most people, they don't think about whether they're clicking on organic or paid results on Google. Paid acquisition is notoriously challenging for developers since many use VPNs, ad-blockers and privacy browsers or ignore ads and skip straight to the organic results.

Here's Allie's take on how developer marketing differs from 'normal' marketing.

Developers Want to Be Educated While Building and Trying Things Themselves

The best approach to dev marketing is to inform and educate rather than sell. Developers prefer to come to their own conclusions about what they should use by researching and trying products.

This means you need to create the resources for them to educate themselves — docs, blog posts, tutorials, hackathons, and conferences.

Show up as a helpful, unbiased resource while they're trying to solve a problem. Be careful not to push your product on them in the process.

Content needs to be:

1. Direct and to the point
2. Conversational, so you come across as authentic

You need to be capturing [...] a very conversational kind of insider baseball tone to those sub-communities that you're plugging into, which goes to the same point of, you want to appear 'of the people' instead of a poser. — Allie Beazell

They also like to try before they buy. Creating interactive demos and freemium projects is an excellent way to use product-led growth to convert devs.

Developers Want to Build Your Product Themselves

If you ask any engineer about a new tool, they often respond, "I could do that in a weekend."

They're not wrong. Often, you could jerry-rig a solution together in a weekend. But there's the cost of maintenance and ongoing improvements. Or what happens if the person who built it leaves the company?

Engineers are inclined to build internal tools themselves. This is a common obstacle in selling to devs. HackerNews is rife with these kinds of comments.

The best you can do? Show them how much time they could save by trusting in the product instead.

Suppose the service isn't directly related to the core product. In that case, it is better to trust an entire company and community devoted to solving the problem than an internal tool that becomes an afterthought. Engineers have better things to do with their life, like building features.

SEO Requires Understanding Developer Searches More Deeply

Allie says that they found lots of high-traffic, low-competition long-tail keywords you can go after that seemed directly relevant to their category, but the traffic was also not qualified. Don't spend your time on these.

She recommends considering "above funnel" keywords adjacent to your product in such scenarios. For example, someone who wants to buy Census might have just bought Snowflake. Can you create content around data warehouses and transition that to Reverse ETLs?

Also, many lucrative keywords might appear to have zero search volume, at least according to tools like Semrush and ahrefs. Because of the way they estimate search volume, these kinds of queries often don't show up.

You've got to understand what people are asking on StackOverflow, in your API docs, user interviews, etc. to uncover them.

Developers Trust Other Developers

A marketing manager can't author your developer-focused content. Who your content comes from matters. Developers are looking to learn from people who've done it themselves and are unbiased.

This means:

1. You need developers in bylines for content.
2. Your CEO is hopefully a developer themselves and is okay with becoming a trusted face in the community through thought leadership.
   1. See the CEOs of Vercel or Resend for examples.
3. You need to invest in third-party unbiased partners who can give you their stamp of approval.
   1. Sponsoring newsletters is a great way to reach these ad-averse audiences.

How to Get Started with Developer Marketing

Here are a couple of things to consider before you dive into dev marketing.

1. Get clear on your ICP. This applies to all product marketing, but make sure you know who you're selling to. The title can't just be software engineer, it must include some filtering for persona, like skills.
2. Set up reliable user support. Devs don't always reach out since they like figuring things out independently. But if they run into an issue they can't solve, it's one of the few times they're willing to talk to someone on your team. Make sure you can help them.

We asked Allie what she would tell someone wishing to start in dev marketing. There are three steps she advises new dev marketers to take.

1. Get Clear On Your Brand and Product Narratives

When community building, it's important that you present yourself to prospects consistently across channels.

• Your founder and company origin stories need to line up.
• You need to be very clear on why the product was built, its benefits, how you see it evolving, and your thoughts on the space.

How your community sees you greatly influences brand perception, so ensure you build the same image across platforms.

2. Focus on Partnership and Influence Work

Usually, your founder and content marketers become the faces of your company — but in this case, developers need to become the face of the company. Your founder needs to take on this role; down the road, devs must be in charge of developer relations.

Get your founder out on influencer platforms, and start building relationships in the space. You can learn a lot about what the community wants and responds to.

Founder-led sales is an important way to gain traction, which was a primary focus for Census when Allie first joined.

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‎Their founder's relationship with dbt, which has a huge Slack community for devs, was also an important building block for the company.

3. Ship Content as Quickly as You Can

You need to get content out there frequently and across platforms where your ICP hangs out.

Consider getting a steady flow of blog posts, long and short-form social media posts, webinars, and more.

This offers a great opportunity to refine content and messaging since there is a constant feedback loop with the community through comments, emails, and DMs.

You'll get a much clearer view of who you should be talking to, and your community will want to hear from you more (and faster.)

Components of a Good Developer Marketing Program

Developer Docs

The best marketing to developers is to help them do their job through structured tutorials.

Devs are not likely to trust content on your website written by marketing and sales. They know documentation is objective.

Docs help devs learn about the product features and allow them to troubleshoot on their own. That's onboarding and value-add all in one go — and a common way to convert devs into users.

Docs are also great for answering search intent, so make sure they're SEO-optimized.

Educational Content

Engineers Google a lot. It would help if you answered their questions with content, and StackOverflow and Reddit are places to find what devs are asking and what's trending in the space.

Ideally, you want to start a developer-focused blog that covers:

• Guides
• Tutorials
• Developer docs
• Aggregation and comparison pieces
• Industry trends
• Thought leadership articles by devs

Devs are a practical bunch, so use examples, screenshots, and code snippets wherever you can.

And you aren't limited to just written content.

• Allie ran and sunset a podcast with her CEO at Census. They're a great way to discuss common problems and build a community.
• Video content, such as demo and tutorial videos, is also popular with devs searching for quick fixes.

Use Code References and Example Builds in Your Developer Content

Dev-specific elements like code snippets can pose a technical barrier to a lot of writers without coding expertise. Common blog-building platforms like Webflow don't have native support for Markdown, languages, or syntax highlighting.

A tool like Letterdrop removes this kind of friction. It supports Markdown so you just type in triple backticks and choose your language for syntax highlighting.

Investing in a developer marketing-friendly toolkit helps your marketing team save time and avoid technical issues. Just ask Allie, who uses Letterdrop for marketing.

Letterdrop pays for itself for the hourly cost of a Content Marketer to just spend time formatting and mess with JavaScript. - Allie Beazell

Distribution Across Channels and in Different Formats

Devs hang out a lot online — probably more than your everyday professional. If you want your content to reach them, you must be active on social media and forums.

Blog Syndication Platforms

Devs are very active on:

• Reddit
• Hashnode
• dev.to
• HackerNews
• StackOverflow

You'll reach thousands more developers if you can feature content on any of these platforms.

Social Media

You should consider distributing content to social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit.

Surprisingly, many decision makers for developer teams are handing out and engaging on Linkedin, trying to attract great talent. Discord communities and Slack channels are also huge for devs.

And we're not talking corporate posts — use personal accounts rather than faceless company ones. Most people respond better to personal accounts, but devs are particularly suspicious of being sold to. This responsibility usually falls on Developer Relations or "devrel," but you should encourage all your engineers to practice employee advocacy and try to become an advocate for your tooling.

Open-Source Projects

Devs like to try things out for themselves, so a great way to reach them is through open-source projects. GitHub is their platform of choice for this.

GitHub also has an Awesome Tools List, which offers a bunch of valuable links to resources on a particular topic. Try and get your tool on the list for your category.

This can seem like a lot of legwork. It means managing posting schedules for multiple channels and repurposing content for each.

It's easier when everything is accessible in one place — and Letterdrop integrates with all the above platforms and more. With its AI tooling, you can automate distribution and repurpose content into socials in one click.

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Community Building is Both Online and Offline

We've already mentioned that devs are active on multiple social media platforms, which makes community marketing a popular approach.

With community marketing, you "become a coach for people to produce content," says Allie. This approach suits developers well.

Census has built up an impressive Slack community of over 3,000 developers.

But you should always try to take these relationships offline, too. Conferences and event marketing are excellent opportunities to showcase your product and meet devs out in the wild.

For their first summer community days and grassroots conference, Census got 2700 new leads and multiple new partnerships in four days.

Word of mouth is an underrated community-building tool in the dev space. Make a good impression at meet-ups so that other devs will hear about you from their coworkers and friends.

Practices to Avoid

It's best to take it slow when it comes to dev marketing. You don't want to jump in too quickly and get in over your head.

Here are two common mistakes that Allie warns new dev marketers against.

1. Starting a community too early. Trying to set up a community by yourself can be an overwhelming and labor-intensive experience. Be active in established communities first, get your messaging down pat, carve your place out in the space, and get team members to help you before creating your own community.

2. Going way too happy on marketing tooling. It may be tempting to go on a buying spree for expensive problem-solving tools, but it's best to stay founder-led until a real need for those tools arises.

Examples of Great Developer Marketing

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean gets devs. They offer an interactive tour of their product on their home page.

It's the perfect way to let the devs decide on their own whether or not it's worth buying.

Census

Here's an example of some founder-led social media content produced by the CEO of Census. It's also partnership content — double whammy.

CloudFlare

In this example, CloudFlare allows a dev to weigh up an alternative that is probably the result of a common search query. CloudFlare has a ton of content for keywords like this.

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Dev Marketing Requires Its Own Playbook

Dev marketing is a different ballgame. Marketing needs to be subtle, educational, technical, and conversational.

The best way to write for a space is to immerse yourself in that space. Don't be shy — make reaching out to devs both online and offline part of your routine.

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