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“Developer Marketing Does Not Exist”

Interview with Adam DuVander

Jul 06, 2021

When you are reaching out to developers, traditional marketing solutions like leadgen forms or ppc ads won’t work on their own. What is the right approach then? How to convince developers to use your products or services?

In this episode Adam DuVander (principal consultant at Every Developer) and Kristof Van Tomme (CEO at Pronovix) discussed

  • how and why “marketing” to developers is different from marketing to other audiences,
  • how to change your mindset and toolset to transcend and complement the classic funnel-based approach,
  • how this way of “promotion” might even affect marketing in general in the future,
  • and Adam also presented his new book, “Developer Marketing Does Not Exist”
     

Also available on Anchor, Google, and Apple.

Resources:

Contents:

1:26 Adam is a returning guest, he is publishing a new book
2:15 storytelling - companies should do it more
2:44 developer marketing: manipulation vs education - is it only for developers?
4:00 developers are more sceptical - developer marketing tactics and approach can work at other audiences too
6:40 developers are typically difficult to reach out to with traditional promotional means
9:05 journalism: you have to find the point, and it is not to promote; developer relations: see personally how the team connects with developers
11:05 content can do a lot of the relation building for you
13:00 balance between marketing and devrel: have something that is not branded and try to connect it - let the halo effect work
14:00 the content can induce the natural next step: CTAs: “Sign up” or “Check the platform”
16:00 2 sales modes: 1. Establish credibility 2. Switch to sales mode when someone shows interest and ready to buy
17:21 make the step natural and don’t chase the developers away by asking too much (don’t ask for phone number, etc.)
19:00 blatant promotion is abusing trust. Attention is too expensive today
21:00 Why are developers different? Why are they ahead in the process?

  • Because they received a lots of promotions
  • Job of a developer: is to unpack how things work - they are decoding the message and look at the product and the way it works - they naturally want to understand how things work
    24:54 Product vs Services
  • Marketing says: you only need to buy this product and you can immediately achieve your goal - it is a fake promise.
    33:40 How to teach your colleagues – how to bring new people into doing content
    35:30 develop the same taste in your team
    36:30 The title of Adam’s book: Developer Marketing Does Not Exist. You can lay this philosophy on your funnel approach! Provide authentic content that helps to convert - it provides the audience with authenticity
    41:30 Shift in approach - cooperative, without competition

    Back to all API Resilience podcast episodes.

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