Reaching Developers with Content Marketing I spent the first ten years of my career writing code for a living, and like all developers, I spent a good portion of each day searching for and reading content related to building software. A lot of people outside the industry don’t realize how much time software developers spend reading, but it’s a big part of the job.
Developers are also more skeptical of traditional marketing and advertising than the average consumer. They use ad blockers at a higher rate than others, and many are especially turned off by unsolicited email.
So how can companies that want to reach software developers build awareness for their products and reach this highly engaged yet highly discerning audience?
The short answer is content marketing.
Instead of pushing your product onto developers, make it easy for them to find when they’re considering a purchase decision or have a specific challenge. Creating genuinely helpful content can help your business build trust and credibility with developers and drive demand for your product.
Over the past four years, I’ve helped create more than 3,000 developer-focused blog posts and tutorials for more than 150 clients. These pieces have generated millions of page views and helped our clients gain customers, raise funding, and even exit their startups.
That said, developer content marketing isn’t just about creating a lot of content. It’s about creating the right kind of content and making sure it gets in front of the right audience. In this article, I’ll talk about what works and what doesn’t. When you’ve finished reading, you should understand some of the fundamental content strategies that marketing teams can use to reach a developer audience.
The Challenges of Creating Developer-Focused Content
Creating developer-focused marketing content is different from creating other kinds of B2B marketing content. While there are similarities, there are challenges that make B2D (business to developer) marketing especially tricky.
1. Coming Up with Topics
When you’re marketing an especially technical product, just learning the vocabulary can be a job in itself. To make matters worse, the landscape of tools and terminology is constantly changing, so even marketers with a software development background will have to work to stay on top of the latest trends.
Keyword research is also difficult in this space. Because the developer audience is so niche and often underrepresented in sampling data, mainstream tools miss or underestimate a lot of the best opportunities.
In addition, the adoption cycle of developer tools is complex. Sometimes, a developer is the primary decision-maker, but often, they’re just one stakeholder in a multi-department approval process that can involve IT, security, product development, and executives.
2. Creating Content
Even the best content strategy falls flat if you can’t create technical content that’s accurate, deep, and interesting enough to resonate with developers. It’s tempting to look for low-cost freelancers or lean heavily on AI to generate content, but both of these approaches will fail to reach the level of depth needed for effective developer content marketing.
3. Distributing Content
It’s important to understand how developers find and consume content. Developers are often highly specialized, so content shared on a general-purpose developer blog won’t reach them. Even within specific disciplines, developers belong to different subcultures and ascribe to different approaches.
For example, if you publish data engineering content on a frontend-focused blog, you won’t reach your intended audience, and it’ll be clear that you’re not familiar with how software development works. Similarly, pushing self-promotional content through channels like Reddit or Hacker News rarely works, but other, more appropriate types of content can get a huge boost through these channels.
In the next sections, I’ll share some strategies for addressing each of the above challenges, and I’ll point out some pitfalls to avoid as you embark on your developer content marketing journey. While no two devtools marketing strategies are the same, I’ll share what I’ve seen work most often for our 150-plus clients and the thousands of blog posts we’ve created at my company.
Finding Developer Content Topics
The basic approach to content marketing for developers is to create content that is genuinely helpful, interesting, and technically sound.
More specifically, I’ve identified four approaches that work best.
1. Creating Developer Collateral
When developers are considering a new tool, one of the first things they’ll do is look for documentation and tutorials that show them how the tool works. Ideally, this documentation and the supporting blog posts showcase how the tool works in a wide variety of languages, environments, and situations.
An example of a developer tool with good developer collateral is Codecov, an open-source code coverage visualization tool. They spent a lot of time building a library of tutorials that show developers how to integrate Codecov into various languages and CI/CD tools.
Each combination is subtly different (for example, Python and Github Actions, PHP and CircleCI, Java and Jenkins), so having a step-by-step tutorial for each allows them to point developers to just the right place when they want to get started.
While this content isn’t as good for discovery (developers need to already know your tool exists and want to try it out), it’s a must-have for brands that want to move developers down the adoption path and increase conversions.
2. Community Input
Another approach that developer marketing teams take is soliciting community content. Many developer tools companies have paid community writing programs that allow community contributions on a freelance basis.
Both Strapi and LogRocket have been taking this approach for a long time, and both have sizable blogs with strong inbound search traffic.
There are several advantages to this approach. You don’t have to constantly come up with new ideas for content, as you’re letting the developer community around your product tell you what they want to learn and build. Finding writers is also not a problem, as the developers pitch their own topics and then do the writing for you. Finally, the writers might even help promote the content, so you won’t have to work as hard to spread the word on each piece.
That said, this approach has drawbacks. One is that not many developers are great writers, so you’ll need to invest in editors and technical reviewers. We spend about as much money on editing as we do on writing at Draft.dev.
My biggest problem with this approach, though, is that it’s not very strategic.
You might get content ideas that effectively showcase your product and convert customers, but you might just get a bunch of junior-level tutorials from freelancers hoping to make a quick buck. The community-driven approach is also harder when you’re just starting out, as not many people know what they can do with your product, so it works best in combination with other strategies on this list.
3. Keyword-Based Content (SEO)
The most consistent approach to developer content strategy is keyword-based content. With this approach, you use software tools like Positional to estimate search volume for specific keywords, and then write content that targets those keywords.
The nice thing about this approach is that it’s predictable, it works consistently, and it’s a well-known process, so anyone in digital marketing can do it. That said, developer content is a bit trickier than consumer content. Search volume estimation tools use data from browser extensions and similar software, but developers tend to be undersampled in these tools. These tools also tend to miss some valuable and relevant long-tail keywords. And you still need to understand the complex terminology that software developers use in their day-to-day work to apply this strategy effectively. It’s very hard for a non-technical marketer to understand the nuance of some of these search queries.
Because keyword-based content is the most predictable strategy for building traffic to a developer-facing blog, we’ve helped many of our clients use it effectively. Earthly.dev started from zero with us a couple of years ago, and they’re now generating millions of visitors per year with their blog. No tricks, just consistency over time.
4. Your Worldview
I call this last strategy “Sharing Your Worldview,” but many refer to it as “Thought Leadership.” The idea is that by having leaders in your company share their positions on issues and make compelling arguments, you can rally people to support your product and become advocates and users.
This strategy works great for early-stage startups where grass-roots efforts can pay off big. In that case, the author will likely need to be a founder or very early hire who has strong opinions and lots of personal experience, as well as the skills to write about them in a compelling way. I love this strategy because it’s almost impossible to replicate, but it’s also extremely hard to pull off.
Getting busy executives to write things down is tough. Getting them to do it consistently so that you can predictably build traffic is nearly impossible. Additionally, the response to this kind of article can vary wildly. Some articles take off and go viral (at least within their topic space); others languish with only a few views. In my experience, about 10% of these articles take off and generate a lot of traffic).
The Fly.io blog does a really good job of this. It doesn’t publish with the frequency that some developer blogs do, but each of their pieces is unique and thought-provoking, and each draws from a wealth of personal experience. Most of the authors are internal engineering or DevRel leaders, so they have a lot of insight into how their product works and its use cases.
While doing this kind of content well is hard, there are several other examples in this piece I wrote a couple years back, so check that out if you’re taking this path.
How Do You Pick?
As you might imagine, the next question people ask me when I point out these four ways to ideate technical content is “How do we know which tactic is right for us?”
Typically, a blend of all four strategies is best, but for the best results, you need to understand which types of content work best for each stage of your company’s journey.
If you create only keyword-focused content, it’ll take a long time and a lot of content to generate traffic, and you’ll miss out on bottom-of-funnel content that helps convert readers. If you create only thought-leadership content, you may get occasional viral hits, but the audience won’t necessarily be focused enough to convert.
It’s a tricky balance to strike, and the balance will change as your company and content efforts mature. The important things are understanding where your gaps in the marketing funnel are and knowing how you can create content and calls to action that fill in those gaps.
Developer Content Creation
Now that you understand the viable strategies for coming up with content ideas that resonate with software developers, the next step is to figure out how you’re actually going to create it.
Because this content requires such specialized knowledge, you aren’t going to have much luck with 10-cent-per-word writers from Upwork. One of the hardest parts about technical content marketing is maintaining the drumbeat of regular content when you can’t rely on “typical” freelance writers.
Here are a few options that I’ve seen work, depending on your budget, timeline, and in-house resources, as well as the type of content you want to create.
1. In-House Writers
In some companies, content writing is assigned to engineers, marketers, DevRels, and even the C-suite (often founders). I’ve even met a couple of teams who have hired full-time writers to create technical content by interviewing engineers or actually learning to code themselves.
The upside to this is that you can maintain a high level of control and standardization around your content. The downside is that it’s expensive and hard to scale. You might get your CEO to write an article or two per quarter, but they probably shouldn’t be spending hours every week creating content. It’s just not the highest-value way for them to spend their time.
2. Freelance Engineers as Writers
Another popular option is to hire freelance engineers as writers. I did this on the side before starting my agency, and I still help maintain an open-source list of paid writing programs for software developers. This method allows you to fractionalize the work and hire different writers to contribute in subject areas they know best.
The upside to this option is that it’s relatively inexpensive (typically $300 to $500 per article) to hire writers, and if you’re looking for junior-level engineers, there are lots of people out there who do this type of work.
Unfortunately, doing this at scale is a lot of work. Engineers need a lot of help with writing (we spend as much or more on editing and reviewing content as we do having it written), so you’ll need an experienced editorial and tech review team to support these writers. You’ll also find that the bulk of applications you get are from engineers who are new to the field, so it’ll be hard to get deep, specialized insights this way.
In addition, you have to guard against AI-generated content if you start taking external contributions. A tool like Positional can help, but, we find writers trying to sneak in low-quality AI-generated content all the time.
3. Specialized Content Agencies
A third option is content agencies that work exclusively with developer content. We typically help clients build a content strategy and determine which pieces should be written externally and which should be developed in-house. In addition to having more than 300 engineers who write for us, we have an internal team of engineers and editors to manage quality control and recruit writers for specific projects.
Obviously, I’m biased toward this approach, but it’s not right for everyone. Being an agency, we have more overhead, and because of the high demand in this industry, our minimum commitment is pretty high (typically $20,000 or more per quarter).
For early-stage startups that are changing their product and positioning a lot, agencies tend to be a bad fit. They tend to work best with larger, more established companies that know their ROI for content and just need help scaling it up in a cost-effective way.
Developer Content Distribution Strategies
Once you’ve figured out how to create content, you’re just getting started. The next step is to get it in front of a relevant technical audience and see how they respond.
Here are a few places that work for promoting developer content, each with its own strengths and shortcomings:
1. Newsletters
There are hundreds of high-quality, popular developer newsletters out there, and they’re all looking for good content every week. So if you’re taking time to produce high-quality content for a technical audience, you should be able to pitch some pieces to the appropriate newsletters for extra reach.
Source: DevOps Weekly Newsletter: ContainIQ pitched its blog post about eBPF to the newsletter, which included it for free.
I’ll say that some newsletters require that brands pay to submit, but for the most part, if your content isn’t overly self-promotional, this strategy works. You can also try combining it with advertising in relevant newsletters to gain even more reach.
2. Syndication
A number of publications allow you to syndicate developer content. Dev.to, Medium, and HackerNoon, for example, all allow you to re-publish content from your company blog with canonical links back to the source.
This allows you to take advantage of their organic distribution network, while retaining ownership and search engine rankings for the content.
3. Social Media
Reddit, Hacker News, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn seem to be the most commonly used social platforms for developer tools companies, but where to post depends on your target audience and the type of content you’re sharing.
For example, the Reddit and Hacker News communities typically don’t allow self-promotion, so you’ll have to be careful with plugging your product. LinkedIn tends to be more useful for reaching leaders, but it also tends to de-prioritize links, especially from company pages. X also prefers content that is native to the platform.
So you can share content that links to your site on all these platforms, but you might get better results creating native content, based on your on-site content, for each social platform. This takes more work but improves reach, so it’s worth experimenting with both approaches.
4. Paid Promotion
There are many publications that allow you to pay to promote content. Publications like DZone and The New Stack, as well as the aforementioned newsletters, allow advertisers to link to content on their site to drive page views or downloads.
Retargeting ads are also a good complement to developer content marketing because you can use them to inexpensively push readers down the funnel and improve repeat site visits.
Keep in mind that while search engines will eventually index your content, if you promote it to relevant audiences, it is likelier to attract backlinks and rank quickly. This means that even SEO-focused content strategies benefit from promotion, especially if you’re targeting competitive keywords.
5. Optimize for Organic Search (SEO)
If you’re creating content to serve specific keywords, organic search can become a fantastic distribution channel over time. But you’ll want to take steps to optimize your content for its best chances of ranking in organic search.
ContainIQ, a startup that was in the Kubernetes observability space, built what became one of the largest K8s blogs by focusing on organic search as the primary distribution channel for its content.
If you’re creating content with organic search in mind, you’ll want to make sure that you choose strong primary keywords; optimize your content for those keywords, including long-tail keywords; and incorporate those keywords in the important elements of your webpages, such as your H1s, title tags, and URL slugs.
Common Mistakes
I’ve spent most of this article focusing on what works in developer content marketing, but I’d also like to touch on some of the common mistakes people make when they’re new to this space. While the industry is constantly evolving, there are some problems that come up over and over again, so I’d like to help you avoid them as you go down this road.
1. Low-Quality, Shallow Content
Be wary of AI-generated content and the low-cost freelancers that use it.
While AI has its place (I love it for fact-checking, introductory information, and outlining), it’s trained from existing content. When you’re in an industry that’s changing quickly and technically nuanced, AI models have a tendency to present subtly incorrect “facts” without hesitation.
The problem is that discerning software engineers reading your content will pick up on these errors, and you’ll lose credibility. Even if you can trick search engines (for a while), building trust with real people is more important than gaming page views.
2. Inappropriate CTAs
When most clients come to us, their blog has a single, generic call to action (CTA) under every blog post. Typically, it’s something like “Book a Demo” or “Sign Up for a Free Trial.”
The problem is that a reader who just found your site through a search for “getting started with Kubernetes and Jenkins” is not looking to switch to a new CI/CD tool today. They’re looking for you to help them solve their immediate problem of using Kubernetes with Jenkins.
So the CTA in that piece of content needs to be higher in the funnel than “Book a Demo.” Something like “Join Our Community of Kubernetes Experts” or “Download the Kubernetes CI/CD Handbook” would make much more sense and allow you to generate more meaningful conversions.
3. Failure to Refresh
Search engines tend to give freshness a lot of weight when it comes to technical topics like software development, because the field is changing so fast. This is good for new entrants to the field, as it allows them to build traction quickly, but it’s a double-edged sword. If you let content hang around on your site without an update, the traffic will typically fall off dramatically after a couple of years.
Build a content refresh process into your regular workflow, and keep a close eye on any drops in organic traffic, as that might indicate that you’re falling behind.
4. Failure to Promote
Unfortunately, a lot of developer marketing teams fail to promote their content at all. I’ve seen clients spend tens of thousands of dollars on content that gets published and then never attracts any visitors because they failed to spend any time or money promoting it.
The best developer blogs create content with an eye to how it will be promoted, and many spend two to three hours on each piece, pushing it out to their various audiences. Because this content is typically evergreen, you can do this multiple times, so it’s not too late to go back and promote your back catalog.
Final Thoughts
Developer content marketing is one of the more challenging flavors of B2B marketing, but it’s gotten a lot more approachable as more companies have leaned into it in the past decade. The key for marketing and content teams is to build a cohesive strategy that makes sense based on your company’s place in the market, and then to find a way to consistently execute high-quality content creation and distribution.
Having the right tools can help as well. We rely on Positional and many other tools to facilitate our developer content strategy and content creation for clients, so be sure to leverage software to get the most out of your content efforts.
