Developers are often seen as a hard-to-reach audience for marketers. They are sceptical of traditional advertising, they value peer recommendations, and they have high standards for quality and relevance. However, this does not mean that developers are immune to marketing. It just means that marketers need to adopt a different approach to engage them effectively.
One of the most powerful ways to market to developers is through influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is the practice of partnering with influential individuals or organizations that have a strong connection with your target audience. By leveraging their credibility, expertise, and reach, you can amplify your message and drive awareness and engagement among developers.
Content & Context Are Key
There are two pillars when it comes to marketing to developers: content (what is said) and context (who says it and where it is said).
Content
Developers are not interested in generic or irrelevant messages. A typical “marketing” tone won’t work with them. Instead, go straight to the point and talks specifics. Tell them exactly how you help them. In a world saturated with airy claims, stand out by being honest and direct. After all, developers are the ultimate users of your product and they can quickly verify whether you stand up to your claims or not. Give them content that speaks their language, addresses their challenges, and provides practical solutions.
Context
This is an often overlooked part of developer marketing – but the context of who and where your message comes from has a big impact in marketing. Imagine if you were finding a good restaurant to eat at. Would you trust a food review by the restaurant hosted on their own website or a review by a food blogger on Instagram? Definitely the latter. Developers behave the same way too. Even if your product is a perfect fit for their needs, it always makes a greater impact if they hear it from someone other than you, and somewhere other than your own channels. It doesn’t matter if you have the perfect message when it appears on an ad space or on your own website. It’s missing the extra mile of credibility.
How Influencer Marketing is The Answer
To create good content, why not tap on your target audience directly? You can partner with influencers who can speak the language of developers, and understand their pain points and needs. Remember, influencers are also developers themselves. By partnering with influencers, you can create and distribute content that is tailored to your target developers.
Developer influencers also help you create the optimal context. They are not directly related to your organisation and are seen as more neutral parties. On top of that, they are able to reach developers on social media channels like Twitter and YouTube where developers will be less sceptical. Compare that to a sponsored spot on google search or running email drip campaigns where it’s blatantly obvious that you’re “marketing” to them.
Some examples of content that you can create with influencers are:
- Social media posts: You can collaborate with influencers on social media campaigns or contests. You can also ask influencers to share your content or promote your product or service on their social media accounts.
- Blog posts: You can invite influencers to write guest posts on your blog or vice versa. You can also co-create blog posts with influencers on topics that interest your audience.
- Videos: You can feature influencers in your videos or sponsor their videos. You can also co-create videos with influencers on topics that showcase your product or service.
What You Can Achieve with Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing can help you achieve various objectives throughout the marketing funnel. Depending on your goals and strategies, you can measure the impact of influencer marketing using different metrics and indicators. Some of the benefits of influencer marketing are:
- Brand awareness: Influencer marketing can help you increase your brand visibility and recognition among developers. By exposing your brand to a large and relevant audience of developers through influencers’ platforms and channels, you can generate more impressions, views, clicks, visits, and followers for your brand.
- Brand reputation: Influencer marketing can help you enhance your brand credibility and trustworthiness among developers. By associating your brand with reputable and respected influencers in the developer community, you can build positive associations and perceptions for your brand.
- Lead generation: Influencer marketing can help you generate more leads for your product or service among developers. By creating and distributing valuable and engaging content with influencers that showcases your value proposition and encourage action, you can drive more conversions, sign-ups, downloads, trials, demos, or inquiries for your product or service.
- Customer acquisition: Influencer marketing can help you acquire more customers for your product or service among developers. By leveraging influencers’ endorsements, testimonials, and referrals, you can influence developers’ purchase decisions and persuade them to choose your product or service over your competitors.
- Customer retention: Influencer marketing can help you retain more customers for your product or service among developers. By providing ongoing value and support to your customers through influencers’ content and interactions, you can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy for your product or service.
Best Practices When Working With Influencers
Influencer marketing is not a one-off transaction. It is a long-term relationship that requires mutual respect, trust, and collaboration. To ensure a successful and fruitful partnership with influencers, you need to follow some best practices.
- Choose the right influencers: Select influencers who are relevant, credible, and influential for your target developers. You need to consider their niche, expertise, audience, reach, engagement, and alignment with your brand values and goals.
- Define clear objectives and expectations: Communicate your goals and expectations to the influencers clearly and transparently so that they can optimise their content to meet your objectives.
- Provide creative freedom and flexibility: Respect the influencers’ creative vision and style. You need to give them the freedom and flexibility to create content that is authentic, original, and appealing to their audience.
- Offer value and incentives: Compensate the influencers fairly and adequately for their time and effort. Having performance-based compensation is a good way to motivate influencers to go the extra mile.
- Monitor and measure performance: Track and analyze the performance of the influencer marketing campaign. You need to collect and evaluate data on the key metrics and indicators that reflect your objectives, otherwise you wouldn’t know whether your campaigns are giving you your desired ROI.
Influencer Marketing – A Powerful Way to Reach Out to Developers
Influencer marketing is a powerful way to market to developers. By partnering with influencers who have a strong connection with your target developers, you can create and distribute content that is relevant, valuable, and compelling.
However, it’s not a magic bullet. It requires careful planning, execution, and evaluation. It also requires a genuine relationship with influencers based on mutual respect, trust, and collaboration.
If you want to learn more about how influencer marketing can help you reach developers, feel free to reach out to us here.
