Reaching Your Developer Audience With a Paid Media Strategy

Need help finding and connecting with your developer audience? Hear from Amy Shotwell, Associate Director of Marketing at Catchy, about the benefits of breaking down barriers with a developer-focused paid media strategy.

Almost all of our work as an agency revolves around finding and connecting with developer audiences. This is a tricky process for several reasons: In general, these audiences are highly technical, solution-oriented, overexposed to product messaging, and fragmented across a wide range of communities.

Paid media is a critical piece of our solution, allowing developer marketing initiatives to break through the unique challenges associated with a particular audience. By providing targeted reach, high visibility, and strategic messaging, it gives us the ability to reach the right audience in a meaningful way, and track our results across a range of metrics. This data allows us to analyze campaign performance, make strategic decisions, and continually improve our campaigns.

What do all of these benefits mean for you and your developer marketing program? Depending on your objectives, it could mean promoting events, driving lead generation, maximizing brand exposure, or facilitating product adoption. It’s up to you!

A paid media strategy provides a foundation for success across your program by delivering messages that reach your audience and data that informs your developer marketing decisions.

Targeting Developers With Paid Media

While a lot is said about developers being averse to traditional marketing approaches, the reality is they’re an audience, like any other, looking for solutions that make their lives easier. To do this, they often lean on the power of community, as well as niche sites, publications, newsletters, and resources that provide information relevant to their functional roles.

Understanding the preferences of your developer audience and the communities they’re involved in requires an individualized approach based on their characteristics. A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t going to work and you won’t see engagement from traditional banner ads.

Audience-based Targeting

You can use paid media to target specific segments of your developer audience on an individual level. Key factors to consider for filters include:

• Traditional targeting through age, location, role, industry, interest, and keyword

• Developer-specific information, like tech stack, seniority, affiliated groups, and company type or size

Additionally, paid media should be supported with organic presence across your primary channels:

• Engaging 1-on-1 with developers shows your investment in their work and communities

• Encouraging discussion around your brand or product provides credible exposure by word-of-mouth

• Creating a web experience that is search engine optimized with relevant keywords allows your audience to find you when they’re ready

• Leveraging a strong website supports your paid media strategy, improving ad strength and creating a cohesive user journey

Objective-based Campaigns

To get the most out of a paid media strategy, you need to consider your objectives as well as your audience. This means approaching all angles of the funnel and being particular about the channels you use at each stage. The same messaging doesn’t apply to both awareness and adoption, and your developer audiences will lose interest if they see the same message too many times throughout the funnel.

Considering a newsletter sponsorship but don’t know where to start? Here are some options worth exploring:

• Hackernoon - The Noonification Newsletter: Multiple advertising opportunities, from newsletter sponsorship to targeted ads

• TLDR AI: Large subscriber base with a focus on startups, tech, and programming

• AI Weekly: A collection of news and resources about artificial intelligence and machine learning

• Towards AI: Publishes over 30 AI and machine learning articles and tutorials weekly

• Pointer: What current and future CTOs are reading and thinking about

There are hundreds of other newsletters based on the developer audience you’re targeting, from front-end to mobile and everything in between.

Additionally, here are a few starting points for targeting on different platforms:

• LinkedIn: Developers often have updated profiles here so targeting is more accurate across member groups, roles, seniority, and company type or size

• Facebook and Instagram: These are good platforms for targeting interests and page likes, best used for awareness and retargeting

• Twitter: This is a useful platform for targeting thought-leader and brand-specific handles layered in with keywords

• Stack Overflow: Developers ask technical questions on here which are useful for identifying specific question and answer tags related to your brand or product

• YouTube: This is a good place to start for keyword searches and influencer channels

• Newsletters: Sponsoring a newsletter can generate exposure with an already-engaged audience

Engaging Developers With Effective Messaging

Detailed targeting sets the stage for engagement but it’s the messaging you put in front of developers that wins buy-in. Meeting them on an individual level will bring them into a dialogue. Keeping that dialogue going throughout their journey will ultimately help you achieve your objectives.

Longevity and maintaining a consistent presence on each channel is hugely important. Developers, like anyone else looking for a product, will take multiple touchpoints and ads before they’re ready to engage. Running on one channel for a few weeks and then stopping may mean losing their interest and awareness.

Use the profiles you built out for targeting to serve tailored content to different segments of your developer audience. A startup developer has different needs compared to an enterprise developer. The same goes for front-end and back-end developers, and any other combination of profiles that might be in your target audience.

Speak to the Individual Developer

Developers need solutions to their technical challenges. They don’t need sales and marketing fluff. Brief, informative copy is ideal. Humor works when it’s authentic and applicable but this means that it needs to be audience-specific.

Here are a few starting points for messaging throughout the funnel:

Audience lists are a good place to start putting these principles into practice. This is your prime audience of people who sign up to use your product or receive your services. On many marketing channels, you can upload audience lists so that you can serve them with mid-to-lower funnel content, as well as create lookalike audiences that help you reach net-new people. This is especially useful in evergreen or long-term campaigns that are in-market for over 6 weeks.

Build a Content Library Developers Can Use

Developers like to do research on their own first before they feel like they’re ready to reach out for an interaction with a brand. Make sure you have a mix of blogs, technical documentation, tutorials, videos, and more that they can easily find.

This process will help your developer audience:

• Find the tools they need to make decisions on their own

• Access free API keys and playgrounds so they can get an idea of how your product works

• Navigate support documentation on their own to see if they’re technically comfortable using your product

Retargeting is an good example of how you can leverage your content library to serve your audience. It can be done without a specific audience list (no emails or personal information needed) from people who visit your website, read your blog, or watch your videos. By implementing tracking pixels on your website, you can capture this activity and continue serving content to engaged audiences across multiple channels. You can also serve your retargeted audience specific messaging based on what you know about their engagement (to match their content interests).

Building Your Paid Media Strategy

A paid media strategy is fundamental to the success of any developer marketing program. While it’s a highly-technical and detailed process, it’s also the difference between reaching or not reaching your developer audience. Experience and skill in paid media isn’t enough - your team has to know developers, their preferences, and the communities they go to for support.

Building your paid media strategy is only the beginning. You’ll need to collect and analyze performance data over time and use the insights you gain to optimize your strategy. Each iteration will bring you closer to the developers in your target audience and help you move them through the funnel more efficiently.

---

Catchy has managed developer-focused paid media campaigns for over a decade. Get in touch to learn how we can help.