Developers, what marketing strategies work on you? (opens in new tab)

I wish marketers realized that as a developer, and a senior one at that, I have no say in what software my company pays for. I have a daily flood of messages from salespeople on email, linkedin, even text and calls asking me to "try out <hot SaaS product> for your team", and I get frustrated trying to explain that no, that's now how things work at corporations beyond a certain size. A simple software license or subscription that will make me significantly more productive in my daily works takes several rounds of approval from different departments maybe lasting months, and is more often than not denied. And this is for something that costs $10. I am not going to get them to switch to your CRM.

Some trends in the responses for developers self reporting what influences their buying decisions:

- Trusted peers using a product

- Being able to test the product for free

- DevRel with genuine developer chops and mindset

- Good documentation

- Guides and tutorials

- No marketing fluff

Also a lot of developers report that they think marketing doesn't affect their behaviour

It's doubtful that people are conscious of what "works on them", so the question is unlikely to be answered accurately.

The software that I've seen advertised and then introduced myself to corporate environments is software that I can play with at home first. I'm not going to go through hassle of the purchasing department if I don't have extremely high confidence it'll be solve real problems and be worth the effort.

I have multiple cases where there's software I know works, but I don't know if it works for my situation. Not being able to test it means that we're going with the default "safe" option, which is almost always someone else.

This is an example of where you can't simply ask the users what works (or what they want). People don't know. People lie. People will tell you what they would like to work.

The truth lies in results, not simply asking "how can I make you buy my product or service?" You will need to try many things. You will need to measure their effectiveness with a fairly standard funnel (eg [1]).

If you ask people, they will tell you that advertising doesn't work on them and they simply skip all ads. This just isn't true. Not that I'm defending attention theft but even if you have a good product that solves a problem potential users actually care about, you need to make those potential users aware of it somehow and you will need a metrics-based approach to finding it.

Technical people in particularly tend to take a dim view of sales and marketing. The reality is that these fields tend to be very results-focused (eg you sold something or you didn't vs "we shipped something nobody used but we learned a lot") and way more methodical than most product planning.

[1]: https://planful.com/blog/how-to-calculate-your-marketing-fun...

Make your website look like this: https://curl.se/ And not like this: https://www.databricks.com/

One of the biggest things that attacts me to a particular product (besides a lot of the good answers here already) is if it's open source and self hostable or not. Maybe not a marketing strategy per-se but it's something for marketers to be loud about.

More, and more companies are open sourcing their core product, and those are usually the ones I'll recommend my employer use.

Besides that having a nice UI that's easy to use and prominently displayed in the marketing material, or available via a demo goes a long way, too.

One thing I like is having a one line pitch, in clear terms, that explains what your product does on the front page. Second is easy accessibility to documentation so I can validate whether the product will meet our needs.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked to evaluate some new software which required me to wade through pages of marketing speak and buzzwords before I could even find a explanation of what the product does.

Marketing works on me when trusted and intelligent individuals passionately suggest tooling and confidently answer my questions.

Sales people that use words incorrectly and don’t have a deep understanding of the product or the problem being solved cause me to distrust the product and brand indefinitely. I’m looking at you Databricks, Datadog, and Snowflake.

First, be upfront about pricing and make it simple.

Second, have good documentation and make it easily accessible.

Third, either in your interactive demo or in your video, make it extremely obvious what problem you’re trying to solve. You don’t need to be clever about it.

Fourth, if you use more than two buzzwords, I am just going to laugh and leave your site or delete your email and forever think you’re a grifter.

Marketing works on everyone, but many people have been trained to hate certain things due to repeated bad experiences. Things with arcane pricing, tons of NIH terms and/or buzzwords, poor documentation, and hype driven not solution driven marketing is all at the top of that “repeated bad experiences” list.

The replies to the tweet that say some variation of ‘no marketing strategies work on me’ crack me up. If you think you’re too clever, it suggests to me that you could stand to be more introspective.

Let me talk to your engineers, not salesperson.

I've never had good experience with salesperson. Almost every time I ask them "can your product do X?" I get answers like "yes" or "no but our engineers can make it happen", which is baseless promise. Last time I signed up with a vendor was when their engineer told me "No, we can't do that. And here's why that may not be what you want".

A free tier/trial that opens with an end to end "hello world" of your product that's easy to modify with my own data/system to test out the happy path.

Many products with a lot of config options open up with a totally blank slate. Just to see what it might feel like you have to go away from their system to go google for examples which may or may not be current best practice.

well, anything involving Xitter doesn't work because I can't go there

Why would a developer know or even care about marketing strategies?

I have adblockers and do not trust marketing at all. Is this close enough for an answer?

The single most important thing impacting developers is hype.

We may not fall for basic marketing tricks, but oh boy do we run behind hype trains.

Direct Response Copywriting works very well. So well that I even quit developing and started doing it full time. Launched a product and then another. Moved out of software development and into health. Like most successful marketers, I started by reading the great Gary Halbert Letter.

Not turning purchasing / procurement into an obstacle course.

A company burns a lot of goodwill by not being direct (which makes me even more suspicious of their offering): if what you have to offer is so great, then SHOW IT.

If you’re a dev and you find that you have no vocabulary for answering or even thinking about this question, then you win! Smile and go back to work.

Content I want to search for my pain point and find solutions.

Also some quick (30 seconds) videos showing the value.

And no “book a call” let try and I will buy if I like.

Seeing a good demo, and a credible influencer actually trying the product

Four words:

show me the thing

1. Prominence of documentation. I will infer from the absence of a prominent documentation link that the product is not meant to appeal to the kind of people who read documentation, and is thus awful (but probably comes with nice kickbacks for shotcallers).

2. Prominence of pricing. If the product does not have public, easily findable pricing, I will assume that the company is going to try to fleece me. Either now, or when I'm invested enough that I can't afford to switch. Hard pass.

3. I want the marketing to tell me what the product actually does, not what they think it will do for my company. I.e. tell me the stupid thing does object storage with an S3-compatible API, don't give me this "It accelerates your synergies and decelerates your incompatibilities" drivel. I'm perfectly capable of deciding whether an S3-compatible object store is going to be useful or not. Don't make me try to guess what it does, because I won't.

4. Do not ask for my phone number. Seriously, don't do it. I would rather give you a credit card number and pay for my trial than give you the means to cold call me for the next 3 months.

5. Do not cold call me. I will ask what product you're selling, hang up, add the product to my "do not buy" list, then spamlist your entire domain and block your number. If I'm interested, I'll reach out to you.

6. I like to see at least some open source code in a well-maintained repo, to give me some confidence that the closed source portions are well-maintained as well. It doesn't have to be something fancy or secret; just putting the HTTP calls that anyone could reverse engineer into a client library on Github that has unit tests and coverage and releases and what not is fine by me. I prefer entirely open source projects, but I know that's not realistic for many businesses.

7. If your business is a SaaS, I want a real status page. Not this red/yellow/green current status non-sense, but a graph of the SLI's over at least the past year with the SLA marked as a line on the graph, and annotations for the outages. That tells me that providing reliable service to customers is important to you. The red/yellow/green one tells me "reliability" is important to you, where "reliability" means "not having to pay out SLA penalties".

Be as up-front and bullshit-free as it's possible to be, and then more. Make your website simple, fast, and accessible.

The blog/website/whatever says what the hell are you trying to sell and why.

Clearly.

"pro"