Developer Marketing Best Practices

In retrospect, the successes of companies like GitHub and Terraform seem like grassroots movements rather than marketing campaigns because their founding management teams respected a simple rule: The best way to market to developers is with the help of other developers.

Young companies usually start by asking their own software developers for help, which gets them out of a bind for writing a blog post or two, but it is not a sustainable strategy. Software developers already have full-time jobs, and every minute of their precious time should be spent on bringing new features to market before the competition. Also, they were never trained to produce marketing content, which explains why job titles like “Community Manager,” “Developer Advocate,” and “Technical Evangelist” are held by former developers who had to learn a new profession.

The immutable tenets of selling to developers are captured in the sentiments of the typical developer illustrated in the diagram below.

The realities of how developers feel translate into a need to provide free educational resources, open-source tools or hosted freemium services, and rapid time to value. It also requires an understanding that the point at which a developer likes your product is the start of the sales process, not the end.

Summary of developer marketing best practices

This article reviews the best practices for selling to developers, starting with a summary in the table below.

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Hire a former engineer on the marketing team

Traditional marketers without a technical background tend to focus too much on product benefits and not enough on product feature differentiation. The reasoning seems viable to them: They do it to elevate the conversation from the “weeds” and focus on business imperatives that propel companies to justify spending. They have been convinced that large enterprise IT executives, who rose through the organizational ranks over a decade or two, couldn’t translate product features to savings without their help.

There is a place and time for articulating the business value proposition, which may be a return-on-investment workshop at a later stage of the sales process to help IT executives persuade their finance teams. Still, it’s surely not on a website's homepage, product page, or the first slide of a sales presentation deck. All of IT exists to make processes faster, better, and cheaper, and focusing on those high-level aspects makes all products sound the same, leaving prospects unclear about your product’s competitive differentiation.

Articulating differentiators concisely, strategically, and compellingly in technical terms is an art mastered by former engineers who have become community managers or product evangelists, which is why marketing teams need their help. The example below is from Terraform’s main homepage. Note how they describe product functionality instead of using that precious real estate to harp on time savings and rapid time to market.

The diagram below shows the chain of functions that separates end-user prospects from their developer peers. It shows where product features are developed, prioritized, and explained. The boxes represent functions, not necessarily organizational structures. Small teams may combine the community management, marketing, and product marketing functions in one team or person. Either way, the fact remains that product differentiation must be explained in practical terms before prospective end-users can understand it and get excited about it.

Select content topics strategically

The topics used in your blogs, guides, website, and marketing materials should be selected based on Google search volumes as a proxy for market vernacular and demand as well as your product’s differentiating features, as illustrated in the Venn diagram below.

Selecting topics based on these criteria helps users relate to your functionality while advancing the cause of search engine optimization (SEO). This blog about content marketing delves into the best practices for using tools like Semrush to estimate the search volumes and using the help of subject matter experts to creatively identify ideal topics for blogs, product feature names, YouTube videos, webinars, and various other marketing assets.

For example, a company selling tools to lower AWS costs would want to write blogs on the topic “AWS savings plan,” which refers to an AWS contract that allows users to make a long-term volume commitment in exchange for cost reductions. The search intent here is aligned with the product’s value proposition, the keyword has a relatively high monthly search volume, and the ranking difficulty is moderate.

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Hire senior engineers to author content

There are three main categories of Google searches: navigational (looking for a nearby business, such as a coffee shop), commercial (looking for a product to buy), and informational (looking to learn). The last of these three is the SEO battleground, where vendors satisfy this need to learn by outdoing each other with the best educational content on the Internet to rank high on the Google search results page, bringing those searching to their websites so they can expose them to their products.

This article by Pinecone, which explains vector embeddings, is a good example of this type of content.

Pinecone provides a vector database solution, a new type of database technology designed for AI applications that convert unstructured data, such as text, into vector embeddings for storage and retrieval. By helping developers learn about this new technology, they provide thought leadership, show themselves to be helpful community members, and, ultimately, bring visitors to their website so they can expose them to their solution.

Hiring a professional writer to write such an article based on research (as opposed to an engineer using first-hand knowledge) or using ChatGPT to produce it will be noticed by developers within seconds of laying eyes on the article. That lowers its time-on-page metrics and Google rankings to a place where it won’t get any traffic. Google’s search engine algorithms favor the content readers spend time on, scroll through, and link back to as a reference.

Search engines and AI tools like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT Search have evolved to the point that they can identify high-quality original content. The most effective way to be cited in a ChatGPT Search result is to rank on the first page of Google search results, which, in turn, requires the unmistakable narrative voice of a senior engineer writing original content. The days of keyword stuffing are gone, and fluffy, AI-generated content won’t rank high on Google or be used by ChatGPT Search.

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Collaborate with domain-specific newsletters and influencers

It’s hard to consider consumer marketing without thinking about influencers who can reach hundreds of thousands with their daily posts and who are paid to promote products, sometimes in subtle ways. Most of us in the B2B tech marketing space don’t think of influencers when targeting software test engineers, for example. That said, although influencer marketing is not a common technique in selling software, it has its place in a grassroots marketing program.

Take Console, for example. The weekly newsletter finds, evaluates, and recommends tools to software developers and allows other vendors—who are not chosen for evaluation—to advertise in their newsletter editions by paying a fee. In the example below, the tools selected by their editors are shown in the “Contents” section, and the advertiser is shown in the section titled “Sponsor.”

Console has over 30,000 subscribers. Even though that may not seem that much, members have subscribed to this newsletter because they are tool enthusiasts, resulting in an average CTR of 0.8-1.1%, according to our recent inquiry about their sponsorship program.

You can also find more specialized newsletters and thought leaders with thousands of followers, like this list from the website FeedSpot, which has identified 500,000 bloggers and lets you pay to search their database for the bloggers who match your criteria. Sometimes, they share a subset of their lists on their blogs, like this list that shows the list of 100 software testing blogs. Each blog may only have a couple of thousand followers, so it would be time-consuming to contact each and inquire about their sponsorship programs, but it would be worth selecting one or two if you are a vendor of software testing tools.

Other influencers have gathered followings on blogging platforms like Medium or SubStack. For example, this Medium blog lists a few software development blogs handpicked by the blog’s author.

Others don’t have a branded newsletter but operate under their name. For example, a SubStack author named Raul Junco, with 22,000 followers, focuses only on topics related to system design. His blogs would be ideal for companies trying to reach software architects, as exemplified by the ad below in one of Junco’s articles.

The only downside of this strategy is that the potential of each blogger is limited, which means that you must continue to find new authors and platforms. In other words, after running an ad for a few weeks, you will likely exhaust the interested followers.

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Be genuinely helpful in forums

Many company marketing heads ask their teams to promote their products on Reddit, even though they are usually unaware of how moderators control the subreddits.

Reddit has eight participation rules, which some moderators enforce more stringently than others. The enforcement ranges from preventing new members from posting in their channels to detecting hyperlinks in posts or removing promotional posts. Reddit also has an auto-moderator feature that automatically removes anything that looks self-promotional. If they didn’t do this, their channels would be spammed with sales and marketing messages, making it cumbersome for members to exchange authentic ideas.

Instead, Reddit wants companies to advertise their goods and services on their platform. However, managing a successful Reddit ad campaign is harder than it may seem. Subreddit participants tend to ignore ads and focus on their small group conversations. Refining an ad strategy requires rounds of experimentation and A/B testing in different subreddits.

To help advertisers overcome this challenge, Reddit maintains this webpage showcasing their most successful ads. The example below, taken from this page, is meant to inspire advertisers to write copies that read more like a regular post.

So, if moderators block out sales and marketing people, and running ads is not easy, is there any possibility of generating organic interest on communities like Reddit, StackOverflow, and the community channels hosted on Slack and Discord?

Yes, there is: by being patient and authentic. Moderators want engaged users, and they warm to members who participate in conversations genuinely, even if they are looking for opportunities to find a job or sell their products.

The best approach is to have a technical colleague carve out 15 minutes weekly to be helpful by answering questions and sharing free, educational, ungated long-form articles aligned with your product’s value proposition. Once in a while, someone will ask a question about the functionality or service you represent, and by then, you may have earned enough trust for the moderators to let you share a link with information about how you can help.

Produce webinars and courses

If you can produce the best long-form educational articles, those searching will come to your website, where you can get a small percentage of them interested in learning about your product. If not, at least they were exposed to your brand for the first time.

Webinars work in the same way. As long as they are 80-90% genuinely educational, users will be willing to listen to them and give you a chance to promote your product for one or two minutes at the beginning or the end. Basing webinars on recently produced articles is a great way of leveraging your investment by creating derivative content.

In this webinar series example, the company LangChain, a leader in agentic AI technology, establishes itself as a thought leader in AI technology by training users on fundamental AI concepts.

Marketing teams often think of webinars as presentations about their products. While there is a time and place for such webinars, as we will discuss next, it’s best to teach topics related to your product in vendor-agnostic terms to attract first-time visitors. This helps position your company as a thought leader willing to help the community you serve. Ultimately, this goes beyond SEO strategy; it’s also about your brand’s essence and what your company stands for.

One effective approach to training users on your product is to create a course that results in users obtaining a certification that they can display on their LinkedIn profiles. Creating an entire course is time-consuming, of course, but companies like DeepLearning team up with software vendors to help them produce courseware, as they did in the example below for CrewAI, which features the company’s founder as a presenter.

Maintain public product documentation

Publicly accessible product documentation helps in two ways. First, it induces confidence in developers before they reach out or sign up for your product. Second, it occasionally helps gain rankings on Google’s search results page.  In the example below, Kubecost (acquired by IBM in 2024) ranked for the keyword “Kubernetes cost allocation report,” with its documentation page intended to help users configure their products.

Companies that offer a self-service trial sign-up process keep their product documentation available to users and website visitors alike. Companies that don’t support a self-service, software-as-a-service model avoid publicly accessible documentation because they feel it would help competitors learn about their products. However, even though it’s true that competitors will use it to get ideas from your product, constraining access to all prospects is too big of a price to pay for secrecy.

Collaborate with product management to design a free-forever offering

Free-forever offerings attract users who don’t have access to a purchasing budget, which some marketers call “professional freeloaders.” This makes it so the conversions from a freemium service to a paid one are typically very low.

Despite the downside, it’s a key ingredient to a successful inbound marketing program because it’s a tall order to ask a developer who just landed on your website to request a product demo or to speak with a salesperson. Developers like to tinker on their own before they are ready to take the next steps, as the automated infrastructure provisioning service offered by Qovery allows them to do in the example below.

The keys to designing a freemium service are to:

• Achieve a time-to-value figure of 5 to 10 minutes. The solution might have to be prepackaged with a specific set of configurations to achieve this objective, but it’s critically important to leave a strong first impression; otherwise, a poor first impression could work against the desired goal of persuading visitors to use your product.
• Deliver sufficient value for weekly use of the free tier while leaving a significant incentive to upgrade to a paid service to obtain additional features. Determining a “surgical incision line” in the feature value stack can make or break a company and is worth the entire management team’s focus to experiment with for months.
• Avoid needing expensive hardware (or public cloud hosting resources) to provision a free tier account. This consideration is mostly about the need for data storage and CPU processing power for hosted services (vs. downloadable open-source tools). For example, if your service requires data ingestion every minute or hour, you should exclude data storage beyond daily in the freemium service.

Measure key performance indicators (KPIs)

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. This is particularly true in digital marketing, which requires constant optimization.

The example below shows a Google Looker dashboard displaying collected data from Google Search Console (the widget to the right), Google Analytics (the widget to the left), and a combination of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for the widget (in the middle).

We would have to dedicate an article to fully cover all the metrics relevant to organic traffic analysis. In this section, we will only explain a subset of the metrics displayed on the dashboard above.

The Search Console Performance widget shows a metric called Total Impressions. An impression is when someone searching on Google sees a result from your website. The metric Total Clicks increments when someone clicks on an impression and lands on your website.

Let’s move to the Analytics Traffic widget on the left of the dashboard, which shows the Engagement Rate metric. This measurement calculates the percentage of visitors whose visits to your website last longer than 10 seconds, involve clicking on a call-to-action (CTA), or include more than one pageview.

The most important metric is in the widget in the middle of the dashboard, which shows custom metrics that count the conversions during the selected time period. In this case, we are measuring two types of conversions: soft and hard. Soft conversions increment when a visitor navigates to the website’s pricing page or downloads a white paper, while hard conversions increment when a visitor signs up for a product trial or demo. The terminology is arbitrary to the project showcased in this example, which is meant to show the metrics that can be measured using free tools provided by Google.

The long-term graph below shows a monthly growth trend in organic impressions and clicks fueled by publishing SEO-optimized content at a regular monthly pace.

The key takeaway is that measuring traffic is critical to planning a successful campaign, whether organic, paid, or social. Without it, you fly blind.

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Reach out to prospects on a personal level

Drip nurture campaigns are viewed as spam, and cold calls are seen as intrusive. Prospects want to engage only when they are ready, and even then, ideally, by doing so on a self-service basis and without speaking with a salesperson.

Given this expectation, should outbound campaigns still be part of a marketing campaign? The answer is “yes”—if it is genuine and doesn’t come from the sales team.

Below is an example of a message that would be shared over LinkedIn only after a qualified prospect agrees to connect, which is when they can be messaged directly via LinkedIn. For such a campaign, the prospects should be carefully selected. Blasting a message to a long list that contains unqualified contacts wastes everyone’s time.

The purpose of the outreach must be authentic, not merely a feeble disguise for concealing a sales call. At the end of the call, the person interviewing the prospect—who may be a product manager or a technical marketing team member—can gauge the synergies quickly and, if there is interest, offer to connect the prospect with a technical sales engineer for a product demo.

This may seem like a roundabout way to engage a prospect, but in a world where cold calls are scorned, and nurture campaigns are considered spam, a genuine request for help has the best chance of success.

Collaborate with your sales team to build consensus within a prospect’s organization

The sales process only begins once a developer agrees to a product demo or signs up for a free trial, assuming a positive technical evaluation outcome. Any significant level of spending requires multiple stakeholders to agree. The larger the organization, the more complex and tedious the purchasing process.

The diagram below shows how the technical buyer is one of many stakeholders who must agree to purchase, while their peers might prefer other products or even an in-house solution to address their needs.

Marketing teams often view their jobs as being done once they share a list of leads with the sales team, while the sales teams complain about not hearing from the leads once they message them—even those who signed up for a free trial—and consider them unqualified. This chasm of expectations must be bridged with collaboration among the sales, marketing, and product management teams and a monthly review of the most and least qualified leads.

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Last thoughts

Effective developer marketing requires authenticity, free community resources, and rapid time to value. Creating such an engagement model requires close collaboration among company teams, guided by a technical community manager. The key ingredients are:

• The participation of a former engineer on the marketing team
• Long-form SEO-optimized educational content authored by engineers
• Data-driven analysis of traffic and conversions
• Collaboration with domain-specific newsletter publishers and influencers
• Authentic participation in community forums
• Educational webinars
• Public product documentation and, ideally, a self-service user experience
• Personalized outreach to qualified prospects

After all this work, and once a developer engages, the sales process only begins. This process requires sales and marketing teams to work closely together to close sales opportunities and use the lessons learned to refine the lead qualification criteria.