When selling B2D (business-to-developer), it's important to build trust directly with the people using your product, Software Engineers. Developers have an outsized impact on buying decisions compared to most individual contributors. Building trust and brand with developers is hard, but it's the most sustainable way to market developer tools.

In this article, we'll talk a bit about what makes marketing to developers tricky, developer advocacy, and our favorite way to market to developers. (Hint: Educating developers is marketing to them)

Table of Contents

Developer Advocacy as Marketing

Many developer tools (devtools) businesses look to developer advocacy to build trust with developers. Developer advocates (sometimes called developer relations or developer evangelists) are responsible for a lot of things, including:

  • Engaging a community of developers online
  • Speaking at conferences
  • Writing blog posts for company announcements
  • Writing documentation on using developer tools
  • Building example projects to educate and inspire potential users (developers)
  • Technical content creation
  • Attending meetups to represent the company

As you can see from the list, a good developer advocate is a developer and educator, which is a hard combination to find. Small companies that need to market to software engineers will have to pick and choose the combination of strategies from developer advocacy that fits them.

A lot of the responsibilities of developer advocates can be summed up as building trust with developers. Evergreen educational content for developers is an underrated and overpowered strategy to build a trusted brand.

Using Programming Tutorials to Educate Developers

Writing programming tutorials brings in high-value organic traffic that you can lean on to build your brand. If a software engineer searches for a problem and you can provide a solution, you've just provided tangible value. Great programming tutorials also rank for keywords that are low-difficulty and high-intent, an SEO specialist's dream.

Producing programming tutorials for this purpose is a very specific form of technical content marketing. As you produce more and more tutorials that are useful and novel, you'll generate backlinks at the same time as you build your brand authority with developers. Some of this writing should be about your business or product, but not all of it.

You can acute solve problems for software engineers with educational content while solving other problems for them with your core product. Making great content for developers takes a lot of time and experience, and writing programming tutorials is the among the hardest to get right.

Why are programming tutorials a good choice for marketing?

  • They provide real value to people, which brings in sustainable organic traffic
  • The people they attract from SEO are often developers
  • Useful tutorials highly-sharable
  • Tutorials are a no-nonsense way to share that your business can be trusted
  • Writing programming tutorials is scalable

Conclusion

Developers are an especially difficult profession to market to but often have a say in the purchasing decisions that affect their work. If you're making tools for developers, there's no shortcut to building your brand as a trusted solution.

Programming tutorials are a great way to educate developers, which helps you bring in traffic over the long term. A dedicated developer advocacy team can do this for your business, but they may be better utilized in building community and creating content that highlights your product. If you're ready to explore creating this kind of content, then a technical content marketing agency might be able to help.

Still, a traditional content marketing agency often doesn't have the expertise to do this content well. The best people to write to software developers are other software developers, so a technical content marketing agency that works with practicing software engineers is a better choice. SyntaxPen writes technical content for developers, and takes pride in perfecting the intersection of writing and software.