How does developer marketing fit into product and brand marketing?
Knowing the relationship of different marketing fields can help with strategic alignment and tactical coordination.
Marketing is such a broad discipline that encompasses different sub-disciplines and overlapping areas.
Let’s start with product marketing which is a broad discipline that covers everything from positioning products for mass market appeal, to positioning them for more specific audiences. It’s about communicating the value of your product and how it will help people.
Developer marketing is also a broad discipline that covers everything from user education to developer relations and growth strategy. What follows is a brief overview of each area, so you can see how they align with one another.
Educating the market
Developer marketing is a subset of product marketing. Product marketing is meant to educate the market on the features and value of your product, while developer marketing is intended to educate developers on how they can use your products. Although these two functions overlap, it’s important not to confuse them. Developer marketing is focused on helping developers understand how to use your product or technology — not what makes it valuable for customers in general.
Product marketers might spend time thinking about how people will use their products, but this isn’t part of their job description because those decisions have already been made by the engineering team at that point in time (or earlier). The developer experience (DX) team typically focuses on how users interact with an app or website after clicking through from ads or landing pages; however, they’re not always responsible for building an ad campaign or creating content that would help others get started using a platform like Facebook Ads Manager or Google Analytics right away either (which would fall under “how” rather than “why”).
Developer marketing and developer relations
Developer marketing is a broad term that encompasses many different activities. If you don’t have a dedicated developer marketing team yet, it can be hard to understand how all these activities fit together.
When thinking about your developer marketing strategy, it’s important to remember that there are three main areas of focus: user education, developer relations and growth/customer success.
Developer marketing is also a broad discipline that covers everything from user education to developer relations and growth strategy.
User Education
The goal of user education is to get developers interested in using your product or service so they can build great things with it. This might mean publishing tutorials and documentation on your website or blogging about new features you’ve launched or open source projects built on top of the technology stack you offer. It could also mean hosting hackathons to get developers excited about what’s possible with your platform.
Brand marketing
Brand marketing is defined as the creation of a brand and its association with the product. In other words, brand marketing is about getting people to know your company, its products, and the values they represent.
Brand loyalty is what happens when people prefer your company over others, then purchase from them again and again. This can be achieved through building an emotional connection with consumers or by having a better product than competitors do — the latter being more important for luxury goods than for your average consumer good.
Brand value is how much people are willing to pay for something because of its quality or popularity (in this case: you). If you have great customer service or superior quality products that people love, then customers will pay more for them; but if all you have going on is a catchy logo or clever advertising campaign that doesn’t actually benefit anyone’s lives at all — well then good luck selling anything! The key here lies in providing real value through unique features only available through your brand; otherwise don’t expect many sales anytime soon!
Product and developer marketing
There are three classes of developer needs that product marketing addresses: technical information needs, usage scenario needs, and product positioning needs.
Technical information includes how to use API documentation, code samples and libraries. Product teams often create and publish these resources as part of their products’ launch or in response to customer requests. This kind of support helps developers use the products correctly so they can get value out of them faster.
Usage scenario requirements are more complex than just technical details like “how do I integrate with your API?” They require knowledge about which products/features to use for real-world problems that software engineers face every day.
For example, if you’re building an application that uses machine learning models trained on data from connected devices (like smart home appliances), it’s important for your developers to know how those devices work so they can make sure all their devices work together seamlessly. You may also have specific business goals you want your customers/developers achieve with your technology — ecommerce companies may want customers who buy through their app store purchase additional items at checkout; travel sites might want users who book through their website return using the same interface after vacationing abroad, etc..
Technical communications
Now, let’s talk about technical information. Technical information needs include how to use API documentation, code samples and libraries.
API documentation is important for developers to learn how to use the API. They can also be used by product managers or marketers who have limited technical training in order to understand what their developer audience needs from them. Code samples are typically written as part of unit tests that demonstrate use cases of an API feature.
They can be extremely useful for developers because they show them exactly how an API should be used, which makes it easier for them to get started with your platform or product.
Libraries are reusable code snippets which help speed up development time when building applications on top of APIs. For example, if you have a library that handles sending emails through SendGrid’s email service (a popular choice among developers), then all I need do is pass some parameters into this library’s functions instead of having to write my own code from scratch every time I want an email sent with SendGrid’s system
Addressing real-world problems
As you build your product, it’s important to know how developers will use it in real-world applications. If a developer doesn’t know how to use your product for their needs, they won’t buy it.
You need to make sure that the usage scenario needs require knowledge about which products/features to use for real-world problems that software engineers face. For example, if a programmer wants to build an app for a restaurant where customers can order food online and pick up their order at the front desk when ready, then they need more than just an API access point — they also need an app builder platform with pre-built templates that include everything necessary for building this particular type of application (such as menus, point of sale systems, etc.).
Overlaps
Product positioning is a key area for overlap between product marketing and brand marketing because it requires a narrative that ties together everything about the company’s identity. As such, the designer or product manager will work with the brand team to develop a story that explains how their product fits into its place in people’s lives.
What does this mean for developers? It means that if you’re thinking of building an app based on your own ideas (or someone else’s), make sure you think through what kind of value proposition it can provide users. If your app helps people discover new music, then it should reflect this in its name and design elements like color palette and typography choices.
The developer marketer
As a developer marketer, you’re likely to find yourself working across a broad set of different types of information that developers may be looking for at any given stage in their journey with your company’s APIs and products. You may be involved in activities like:
- User education, which could include things like writing documentation or blog posts about the value proposition or use cases for your product.
- Developer relations and partnerships, meaning establishing relationships with industry groups or other companies whose developers are using your product. This might include sponsoring events, providing financial support for community development efforts (like conferences or hackathons), maintaining relationships with influencers who have influence over developer adoption decisions, etc.
- Growth & customer success initiatives focused on increasing usage of your platform by driving awareness among potential customers about specific use cases/features/benefits that are relevant for them (e.g., “If you’re interested in building a chatbot app powered by our conversational AI platform, check out these five real-world examples.”)
I hope this has helped you to better understand how developer marketing fits into broader disciplines of product and brand marketing. If you want to learn more about the different types of developer needs that product marketers address, check out our blog post on “What is Developer Marketing?”
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