If you’re here, it means you’ve heard about the greatness of Inbound Marketing. That means that you don’t have to go find strangers and turn them into leads. People just arrive to your site and turn to leads themselves. However, if you’re building a Developer Platform (also called a B2D), you know that developers aren’t typical people (Trust me, I’m one of them as well 😄). In this blog post, I’ll go over 5 ways you can target developers with your content marketing.
1. Write generic development content with an aside
The most important thing a developer should know is how to search on Google. I’d say (no offence intended) that a developer spends ~40% of their time searching for solutions there. If you write content that’s specific to your product (use cases, why you should use it, etc.) nobody will ever find it, nor read it nor share it. However, if you write insightful tips, tricks, solutions, benchmarks, etc. and you have good SEO (we’ll cover this in another post :boom:), there’re big chances that people will land in your blog after doing a google search. Even better, if the content is good, they’ll probably share it on Twitter amplifying your reach for free.
Now, you’re probably asking, if I write awesome posts not related to my product, how is that going to convert to possible leads to my product? Well, that’s easy :). On every blog post, add an Aside which will explain how this solution, tip or trick was either used in your product or how you can do something similar to that with your product.
For example, when Relay (from Facebook) was released, at Auth0 we did an intro post, and we wrote an aside about how to integrate it with Auth0.
2. Write post series
Usually, when somebody comes back to your site, they’re more likely to signup. You can leverage this behaviour by simply writing a series of post on the same subject, and making it clear in the first one that there’s going to be a new one at an specific date.
For example, at Auth0 we did an Angular 2 series where each week we explain a new concept from Angular 2.
3. Github (and open source) is your friend
Developers love Open Source software. They love it because it usually means they’ll need to write less code since they can reuse some existing library. If they need to implement some machine learning algorithm and somebody has coded an open source project that implements it, they’re just going to use it.
This is why you should always write as much open source software as you can. Github is always on the top results on Google searches so if a developer is searching for a solution he might just find your repository.
How can you convert this traffic to leads? Just add a link to the announcement from your blog and some credit about your company. If that’s not enough, doing open source will also help you with hiring :muscle:. Developers love to work on open source projects!
4. Have a newsletter
As I said on the tip #2, the more your visitors return to your site, the more likely they’re to convert. This is why you should always have a blog newsletter. If you have great content, people will subscribe and they’ll come back later on for more great articles to your site. BTW, you should subscribe to my newsletter to get more awesome posts like this one!
5. Distribution matters
If you have great content, but nobody can reach it, it’s like you haven’t written anything at all! This is why it’s really important to have great SEO (I’ll cover this in an upcoming post) as well as knowing where to share the post. For example, if you’re writting about Javascript and your post gets sent in a JavascriptWeekly post, you’ll have lots of traffic.
A few places I always recommend sharing articles are:
- jslive.com (To be sent to JSWeekly)
- Reddit: Check which subreddit has to do with the subject you’re writting about
- HackerNews
- Tweet about it mentioning the handles of key influencers on the subject
- Search for issues and questions on Github and Stackoverflow related to the topic
- echojs.com
That’s all folks
This is the end of the post. I’d love to hear from you about other tips that you have about how to target developers with your content marketing, as well as wether you’ve used any of this tips and it was useful or not.
Contact me if you have any feedback!
Thanks!