Marketing to Developers

And lessons learned from the field

Back in 2015 I stepped out of consulting and went to work for an email deliverability company called Message Systems. It was on-premises software to help you reach the inbox.

Email deliverability, while it sounds like it would appeal to marketers because they are the ones who send the emails, is actually very technical and requires a developer for implementation.

A couple of months after I started we launched our cloud product, SparkPost. We ultimately decided to change the name of the company to SparkPost because we decided to go ‘all-in’ on cloud.

As a marketer, I learned pretty quickly what developers liked and didn’t like when it came to marketing. We had a development team internally who was not shy at all about telling myself and the marketing team how stupid our ideas or blog posts were.

In summary, they don’t like to be marketed or sold to. No surprise there. But also, your entire marketing playbook as you knew it needs to be thrown out the window because it will not work.

Here’s what I learned about developers and marketing:

1. Digital ads don’t work because most use ad blockers. Kiss that ad budget goodbye.

2. They will only pay if they think it’s worth it. If they don’t want to pay for your services, they will most definitely find a way to not pay for it, even if it requires them to sign up under 10 different email addresses. My advice: don’t sweat the small stuff and just let them.

3. They do not like form fills, so if you ask them for their email address you can expect a fake one or a junk one.

4. They do not want to meet with your sales people — ever.

5. They only care about building awesome things, being able to do them quickly, and going home.

6. Do not betray their trust. Piss them off and you’ll go viral on social media and in all of the forums quicker than you can make a PBJ sandwich.

7. DevRel is a necessity, because community is EVERYTHING. (And, admittedly, this lesson I learned the hard way with a lot of hard conversations with our DevRel person)

What they want from you as a software provider

1. They want your software to save them time

2. They want your solution to work and make it easier on their day to day

3. And they want your software to be stable and secure

Are Devs on social?

Back in the day there were many on X (Twitter) and Reddit. But now they hang out on Stack Overflow, Dev.to, Reddit, and even some are on BlueSky.

When I was at CA Technologies some exec suggested we run ads on Reddit because one of their competitors was on it. But we didn’t even have a presence on Reddit as company. We could have launched ads, but their competitor at the time they were comparing themselves to (VMWare) had at least 12 engineers hanging out daily on Reddit to answer questions. We didn’t have any engineers who wanted to sign up to maintain Reddit so we nixed the idea.

One thing we did that stood out

As a marketer, in order to be a super communicator with your audience you need to speak their language. So when our DevRel person went to our graphic designer to ask for a laptop sticker that involved a campfire and our logo for a developer conference, it gave me an idea.

Are You a C-Suite Super Communicator?

Why don’t we create a laptop sticker for every programming language we support? So we did. Developers loved the laptop stickers for some reason (I like to think because they were cool looking).

(h/t Lynn Murphy is the creator of the SparkPost logo and the mastermind behind these creative designs)

We also took the logo on the road and created stickers for every conference, and even made billboards. Had we more budget, I would have created t-shirts for each event with these logos because they were so cool, but maintaining the inventory back then was not feasible.

We spoke their language, and it resonated.

Marketing ‘freemium’

Our product had a freemium component to it because all email deliverability platforms were offering the same thing. You could send x amount of emails per month for free, forever. All you needed to do was sign up with your email address, which was a huge problem for marketing.

How were we supposed to figure out who these folks were and nurture them if we didn’t really know who they were?

Further, in the beginning we had a lot of people sign up for the product but not use it. Product was perplexed by this so I suggested a 3 question survey and in exchange, I’d enter them to win one of five $100 gift cards. What we found was over 2/3 of them were curious but didn’t have a project to use SparkPost on just yet. The other third said they had various trouble getting started, so we modified the onboarding as a result.

But still, ongoing, we continued to have the problem of not knowing who these cohorts were who signed up every week.

How we solved for it (to figure out who they were)

Enrichment tools weren’t around back then like they are today. We started to host hackathons, meetups, and contests to celebrate their achievements. We even created our own lucite award.

We provided helpful API converting guides, which devs totally appreciated and were willing to give their real email addresses for.

We snail mailed a lot of t-shirts and laptop stickers to devs we engaged with on social media. We added in-app messaging which encouraged them to fill out their full profile. And we launched a Dev Hub, just for them.

Another smart idea, but from our competitor

SendGrid was our number one competitor. It was so competitive our lawyers had each other on speed dial for when they’d put up an ad saying something like “don’t let your email go up in flames with SparkPost.” Or when I would put up a billboard behind theirs on the freeway. 😇

But one thing SendGrid did early on that I thought was smart was they only gave out high quality t-shirts at conferences with their brand on them. They wanted as many people as possible walking around with their logo on their backs. And Devs love super soft high quality t-shirts.

The smartest developer marketing — ever

The most genius thing I’ve ever seen was when Twilio rented the billboard space on the 101 freeway as you enter into downtown San Francisco which spouted three little words on it with their logo: Ask Your Developer (it’s still there 8 years later!)

I remember meeting with Twilio prior to them acquiring SendGrid, as they were in talks with both SparkPost and SendGrid at the same time about acquisition. At SparkPost, part of my brand awareness play was out of home advertising (OOH) - bus stops, billboards, train stations, railways, radio, etc. Twilio told us during that meeting they were considering taking down the billboard because they didn’t know how to measure the impact of the billboard.

I showed them how we were measuring it and applauded the greatest billboard ever, and advised not to get rid of it. They doubled down on this messaging after they acquired SendGrid, and it is perhaps one of the smartest billboards I’ve ever seen.

Three words, geared toward their core ICP, peaking curiosity amongst not only developers, but everyone else. Because no one wants to be asked by their boss something they should already know about. GENIUS!

One of my nerdier moments

I hate to pigeonhole people into specific categories. For example, perhaps devs do like Legos and StarWars, but do they all love Legos and StarWars? I’m a bit of a word nerd and I love Scrabble and had a thing for chemistry too.

For my nerdy Scrabble moment, I created this .gif and used it in our outreach (email/social/blog), it was a tiny brand play but people liked it:

For my nerdy chemistry moment I wanted to design a t-shirt that was a periodic table element representing SparkPost. I brainstormed with Lynn on my idea and we brought it to life with this t-shirt.

Getting Devs to respect marketing

At Intellimize (now Webflow Optimize) our head AI developer wanted to meet with me before I left and he told me I had really changed his mind about marketers. When I dove deeper he said it was something I had previously said in an all-hands meeting when they were demonstrating how they had developed something for the ‘non-technical’ marketer.

I remember it vividly because their comments struck a nerve with me. I remember saying in a nice way, “please stop referring to us as non-technical,” because I not only consider myself a very technical marketer, but it also sounded innocently condescending.

I told him and the rest of the company marketing departments are quite technical these days. Marketers are expected to understand how the technology they use works and also figure out how to use it. Intellimize was not special or any different in this manner.

He said in that moment a lightbulb went off for him because he then started to question if they were even coding for the right audience. My team and I continued to provide regular feedback to make the product better over time and it turned into a beautiful collaborative relationship.

Bottom line: As long as you are authentically helpful, developers are grateful, both internally and externally.

Send this post to someone who needs this. You will make their day!

p.s. this week in my LinkedIn #failurefriday posts I talked about a SparkPost campaign that led to $1.2M in revenue. Follow me or my LinkedIn newsletter #FailureFriday