Business to developer marketing—or B2D marketing—is a comprehensive approach designed to build awareness and advocacy among the developers who use or want to use your solution. Successful B2D programs combine developer marketing and developer relations (DevRel) strategies to drive ongoing engagement throughout the customer journey.
If you’re not familiar with these two strategies, here’s a high-level overview of both:
- Developer marketing campaigns typically provide developers with high-level awareness assets with the intent to gain attention and elicit a deeper dive into a company’s products and solutions.
- DevRel campaigns build and bolster relationships with developer communities through activities that occur after a developer is “known,” or has been placed into a CRM or database.
When combined, these approaches can nurture long-lasting relationships with their developer communities that lead to deeper partnerships and advocacy.
Who is the audience for B2D marketing?
The audience for B2D marketing is developers, right? Well, yes, but it’s not that simple. It should come as no surprise that developers are not a monolithic audience—yet marketers often treat them that way. Not only are developers individuals with their own individual interests and needs, but software tools, hardware, and languages they work with vary widely depending on their role, industry, and project type. Another challenge when it comes to targeting is that we’re seeing the roles across industries becoming more hybrid in nature, often functioning beyond what their job titles would suggest.
It’s because of these challenges that anyone marketing to developers needs to avoid broad audience messaging and understand the subsets of those audiences to instead target the stages of the developer journey. So, instead of looking at the endless list of different developers, let’s look at the four cross-functional buckets most developers fall into.
Engineers.
These are the developers that build “stuff.” That stuff could be software products, digital products, databases, computer games, and more. These are the builders looking for the tools they need to create and optimize solutions. Some job titles you might find in this bucket are:
- Full-stack developer
- Software engineer
- Web developer
Architects.
An architect is not the one doing the building, or at least that’s not their focus. Instead, architects are focused on the planning and infrastructure side of projects. They will oversee personnel, determine what code will be utilized in frameworks, and plan exactly how all the different components will be linked together. Some job titles in this bucket include:
- Web architect
- Software architect
- Database admin
Data scientists.
Data scientists engineer information. Essentially, they are responsible for making sense of the numbers. These developers find trends in data sets and create algorithms to decipher raw data and make it more useful. The titles found in this bucket often feature the word data in them, such as:
- Data engineer
- Data scientist
- Data analyst
DevOps.
These are the people behind the curtain who keep things running. If the other roles on this list individually create the code, implement the code, and test and analyze the code, these are the developers that oversee it all and have their hands on every step of the process. Titles in this bucket include:
- DevOps engineer
- Systems engineer
- Network engineer
- SysOps administrator
- Chief information officer
Marketing GenAI infrastructure? See how the target personas are different when you’re talking about GenAI.
What are the best channels for business to developer marketing?
The best channels for B2D marketing are the places where your target community is already congregating to post questions, recommend tools, work through specific issues in their projects, and just chat with other like-minded devs. But don’t think you can barge into one of these “watering holes” pushing your solution. Across the board, these audiences tend to be very wary of marketing and will close their ears if they perceive you are only there to “sell.”
Here are some of the most common B2D marketing channels:
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- StackOverflow. The largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn and share their knowledge is ideal for expanding reach, building awareness, and driving discussion.
- Reddit. A network of communities based on people’s interests is a great place for driving the discussion and connecting with developers interested in specific groups and topics.
- Twitter. Developers tend to use Twitter to quickly share information and resources and is a great way to directly engage and build community across a broad spectrum of developers.
- Facebook. This channel provides the largest reach and access to developers, making it ideal for acquisition and growth objectives.
- Niche marketing channels. Niche channels, such as IOT World Today or DZone serve well as great ways to connect with developers interested in a specific topic/language/hardware/focus area. These channels are smaller online groups, often more concentrated and focused on micro issues and resolutions. They are generally more expensive but allow you to reach developers who are, on a whole, more likely to be interested in your solution or message.
Get a crash course in developer marketing channels 101.
What is the right content for business to developer marketing?
The tricky part about creating assets for developers is not only the wide range of projects they may be working on, but also the wide range of experience and knowledge they may have. From a high-level perspective, the best way to move forward is to make content that more or less addresses the needs of the many, within multiple cycles that target specific developers at different points in their journeys. (For a more in-depth perspective, check out our post on creating content developers actually want.)
Choose your content wisely and make sure it speaks to the audience you want to reach. For example, code samples can be handy for experienced developers, but may come with a bit of a learning curve for others, which may require you to connect tutorials to the piece. Either way, that content is wanted, addresses a specific need, and can be used immediately—exactly what your audience prefers.
What outreach tactics are best for B2D marketing?
As mentioned before, developers don’t like traditional marketing and can sniff it out and move on quickly. The key to B2D marketing outreach is community. At their core, channels like Stack Overflow are communities where developers come together to learn, educate, swap war-stories, and converse. Most companies that fall short of their goals attempt to push their product onto this audience instead of joining the community at large to push toward the united goal of bettering software solutions. Instead, take a peer-to-peer approach that focuses on providing real value to the community, whether or not they adopt your solution. From this foundation, true and long-lasting partnerships can be born.
Here are some tips for better outreach to drive a more effective program:
- Don’t wait to acquire leads. Capture minimal contact information from the start and begin establishing rapport as early as possible.
- Use acquisition data to influence other tactics. Aggregating demographic and engagement information from acquired leads can help validate your ideal customer profile (ICP), hone your audience targeting, and inform content gaps and roadmaps.
- Have a nurture plan ready. The acquisition serves no purpose if the audience only receives opportunistic communications or vague newsletter updates.
Want to go deeper? Find out why developer-turned-dev-marketer Robert Kane says most companies are doing DevRel all wrong.
The Iron Horse insight.
Developer acquisition takes time. So, brace yourself for a long but rewarding journey.. It often takes numerous visits to a brand or product site for a developer to seriously consider adopting a solution or product. Once they have the product or solution in hand, it takes countless more visits for them to get acclimated and comfortable with integrating an offering into their project. At either stage, your goal is to build trust through frequent positive interactions.
