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  • 🍐#21: Content tactic, blog sidebar design, and a great pricing page header

🍐#21: Content tactic, blog sidebar design, and a great pricing page header

Hey,

Let me guess, you wanted to pear-use something this beautiful Saturday. Good!

This week I:

  • Had lunch with a colleague who normally lives 8k kilometers away.

  • Went to a party together with my partner for the first time in like forever.

Here are my insights this week.

Developer marketing insights

1. "Current solution based content"

John Ozuysal is a B2B content consultant that talks about SEO a lot.

While his advice is around general B2B this tactic is very applicable to the dev audience.

It goes like this:

  • Pick a "job to be done” (X) that your product solves (managing configs, monitoring, automating workflows)

  • Through user research, find out what are the solutions in current setups (Y) that people are using to solve it (Github, Kubernetes, Postgres)

  • Create an article explaining how to solve that problem in a current setup: "How to do X in Y"

  • Throughout the article mention why doing "X in Y is suboptimal"

  • Hint at a better way of solving the problem with your product

Since it is the dev audience we are talking about you need to:

  • make sure to be helpful and actually solve their jtbd without your product

  • don't be in your face with showcasing your product.

But other than that this is a great tactic.

2. Auth0 blog sidebar design

I like those sidebar CTAs from Auth0.

They go with a sticky Table of Contents which gives a better reading experience.

They put two CTAs below that TOC:

  • "See docs" presented in a very subtle, very developer-friendly way

  • They put a more aggressive banner but it is still on the tasteful side.

Solid job.

3. Pricing page header from Mux

Many dev tools have complex pricing and packaging.

Say your dev tool/platform has many product offerings.

And you offer usage-based pricing but also enterprise plans but also per-product options, and additional customizations.

But you want to present it in a way that is manageable for the developer reading your pricing page.

Mux solves it this way

  • they direct people to the proper parts of the page in the header

  • they give self-served prospects a link to the calculator and metering

  • they give enterprise/high volume people a "talk to us" CTA

  • they give people who want just a single tool (not the whole platform) a CTA to a dedicated pricing page

  • they squeeze in a "start free" CTA + info about free credits

  • they give navigation to FAQ, features table, and the calculator

Extended headers on pricing pages are not common as they add friction.

But sometimes adding friction is exactly what you need to do.

Mux managed to make this page (and their offering) easy to navigate by adding some friction at the beginning.

Maybe you don't browse plans right away but at least you don't waste energy (and attention) on the parts of the page that doesn't matter to you.

Good stuff.

Something about pears 🍐

Everyone knows that Pears and Apples are closely related.

But their closest relatives (subfamily) are also Quince and Medlar!

And their next-level relatives (family) are Plums, Peaches, and Strawberries!!!

That is crazy.

I hope you learned something new.

Talk to you next week, Pears!

Need more developer marketing insights?

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We can talk strategy, tactics, ideas, whatever you need right now.

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