Five Tips for Marketing to Developers

A few years ago, I transitioned from a full-time engineer (mostly Flutter and fullstack) to a full-time marketer. As a former engineer, I understand developers’ scepticism towards marketing. Traditional marketing tactics, with their bold claims and jargon, often fail to resonate with technical audiences. Developers value authenticity and substance. They want to see how a product will genuinely benefit them.

In this blog post, I'll share insights and tactics I've learned to effectively engage developers and cut through the noise.

1. Understanding the Developer Mindset

Technical audiences value authenticity, evidence, examples and most importantly, truth. The first step in building credibility with developers is simply showing up where they are and listening. Understand their challenges, and use that understanding to inform your content.

For example, at Stream, we frequently hear from mobile developers that push notifications are a major pain point. To help, our developer advocacy team created a detailed guide—both on our blog and YouTube channel—showing exactly how to configure push notifications for the latest version of iOS. While it had nothing to do with our product, our goal was to help developers and build credibility within the space. After publishing, the post was widely shared amongst the iOS developer community through X, newsletters, and Slack groups. It remains one of our evergreen pieces of content and it continues to drive steady sign-ups.

Too often, companies produce content that focuses solely on their product without providing real value to the developer community. While this approach might drive short-term conversions, we’ve seen engagement steadily decline—developers quickly learn to tune out brands that are always selling.
Remember that it's never just a transactional relationship. Constantly putting out content that only serves to promote your product will eventually lead to a decline in engagement. As my colleague, LaRae, often reminds me, it usually takes around three to seven interactions with your brand before someone converts, so make those interactions memorable!

2. Speaking their Language

Meme of a sales guy trying to downplay an oil leak.

Meme of a sales guy trying to downplay an oil leak.

There’s nothing more cringe than landing on a page or tweet filled with buzzwords and jargon. It is an instant turn-off. Use precise, technical language and code examples to demonstrate your point. Trade the typical hero image for a short demo or interactive element showcasing your product. A "show and tell" approach highlighting your value and solutions is far more effective than simply making claims without evidence. 

I am a huge fan of bun.sh’s landing page since it does a few things very well:

  1. The main headline is very precise, and the animation between the different uses for Bun immediately tells you how it can be useful for your project IE: “all-in-one toolkit”, “runtime”, etc
  2. Above the main header, you can quickly access their latest changelog and see what the team is shipping. As Lee Robinson once said, “Your product is your best marketing,” and a changelog is a great way to show that your team is always shipping and improving the core product. 
  3. To the right of the main content, there’s a very nice chart comparing Bun’s performance to other runtimes. More importantly, there’s a link to the source of these benchmarks, so anyone can read and scrutinise the numbers. 
  4. Installation, copy one line into your terminal and get up and running 
  5. No SAAS landing page is complete without the list of recognisable companies using it. Adding some recognisable logos is a great form of social proof and helps build confidence in your product.

Example of Bun’s Homepage: Very clear copy, easy to get started and compare

Example of Bun’s Homepage: Very clear copy, easy to get started and compare

For website demos, Liveblocks is another website I really admire. Their homepage instantly demonstrates how their SDK works in real time. Developers can view the code, switch between demos, and see the results without leaving the page. It's clear and accessible from the moment someone lands on the site.

Screenshot of Liveblock's website demo on their homepage.

Screenshot of Liveblock's website demo on their homepage.

3. Picking the Right Topics

A big part of developer marketing is simply picking the right topics for your product. Social listening and community engagement are invaluable tools for this. Platforms like X have features that allow you to monitor keywords and track trends relevant to your product. For example, on X, I've set up a Radar to track mentions of "webrtc" since it's closely related to our video API. This Radar makes it easy to identify the problems developers are facing and create content that directly addresses those pain points.

Example of setting up a keyword radar on X.com

Example of setting up a keyword radar on X.com

Additionally, tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs offer a powerful way to track different keywords related to your product and gauge their ranking difficulty. Even with the rise of AI, SEO remains a critical tool for driving organic traffic to your site. While search algorithms are evolving and Google is increasingly displaying AI-generated previews instead of links, we're also seeing ChatGPT and other AI search tools becoming a notable source of signups.
Although site traffic might decrease as AI-generated results become more prevalent, this shift presents an interesting challenge for marketers. In the past, content marketers often fixated on rankings, but in the age of AI, it's becoming increasingly crucial to focus on distribution and community engagement to maintain visibility. Sites like Reddit (which has an agreement with Google for AI training data) are excellent platforms for sharing content and actively participating in discussions.

4. Supporting Open-Source and Community

Supporting open-source projects is not only a core part of our ethos at Stream (fun fact, our Feeds API started as an OSS project), but if done right, it can also increase your visibility in the community and show your support for indie developers. Sponsoring the right open-source projects can be a powerful lead magnet for your product.

If you're sceptical, try thinking about it from the customer's perspective. Imagine you're working at a company and tasked with researching and building a new feature. Where would you first look for examples? You'd likely head to GitHub or search the web for examples of similar features.

Clerk.com provides a good example of this approach through their sponsorship of Auth.js. Clerk is a SaaS solution that helps companies manage and control user authentication for their applications. By strategically placing their link under Auth.js, they can reach developers who are actively seeking an authentication solution.

Example of Clerk.com link placement on AuthJS.

Example of Clerk.com link placement on AuthJS.

Staying in the community space, sponsoring or hosting local meetups related to your API or language is another excellent way to stay connected with developers and increase your visibility within the community. This can even help with recruiting efforts! While large conferences can be hit-or-miss, smaller to mid-sized meetups offer the best return on investment in terms of visibility and ROI. One of the first Flutter campaigns we did at Stream in the meetup space ran in parallel to the “Flutter Vikings” events and featured lots of example of people building awesome vikings themed integrations with our Flutter SDK and sharing to social -- not only did it drive a lot of visibility and sign ups but the apps were also very creative and fun to review.

Sponsoring food, contributing to swag, or having a member of your technical team speak at a meetup are all easy ways to build relationships with developers who are using (or could be using!) your product. These events provide a relaxed environment that's perfect for 1:1 conversations. I can't count how many times I've been at a conference and had someone approach me to share their experience integrating our SDKs.

Meeting developers where they are, either getting coffee or hosting meet-ups.

Meeting developers where they are, either getting coffee or hosting meet-ups.

Experiment, Measure, Iterate

Above all, don't be afraid to think outside the box and try something new. It's okay if it doesn't work out, as long as you can identify it quickly and move on. Whether you're experimenting with a new distribution channel or partnering with a new influencer, always set clear goals and track the results. A simple spreadsheet can work wonders here, allowing you to quickly see what's resonating with your audience and what's not.

Simple spreadsheet to track sponsorship performance and ROI.

Simple spreadsheet to track sponsorship performance and ROI.


Remember that what works for one company may not work for another. Some companies may have a lot of success with influencers and content marketing while others might be better suited to more traditional marketing approaches such as ABM. Set clear goals for each initiative early on and ensure everyone on your team has visibility and understands them. Budgets and time are limited, so it's always better to catch and correct underperforming campaigns early rather than at the end of the quarter or after you notice that metrics aren't great.


When deciding on things such as influencers, newsletters, or even topics, don't hesitate to reach out to the developers in your company for feedback. You'd be surprised at how eager they may be to get involved and contribute. At the end of the day, good marketing is a combination of both good product execution and good design—it's a team game. Some of our best campaigns at Stream started as a direct result of taking something engineering had built and turning that into an open-source project or guide. Projects like our 10-week Go Onboarding quickly rose to the top of the r/golang subreddit, while others like our "Build your own Twitter" series served as the gateway to what would later become large, recognizable customers. Both of these projects focused on teaching developers vs. selling, in the case of our GO onboarding program, we took the internal documentation from our engineering team, removed the private references and then made it public on Notion while the Build your own Twitter series was a collaboration with three other developer tools, released around the time Twitter was in the news heavily during the Elon acquisition.

Resources

If you’re new to the developer marketing space and would like some resources to get started, I highly recommend checking out the following. They all create excellent content:


If you enjoyed reading this, please share it or say hello on X and LinkedIn. I'm always excited to discuss all things developers and devtools.

Special thanks to Jack Bridger for reviewing early drafts of this post and being a wonderful contributor to the space.