🍐 #59 Comparison table ads, interactive feature tiles, and an awesome conference booth idea

Author

Jakub Czakon
March 31, 2024

Hey,

Do you know how pears look in the spring? They are beautiful 🍐 

This week on the agenda:

  • Comparison table ads

  • Interactive feature tiles from Clerk

  • Speed Tetris at the booth from Storyblok

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Developer marketing insights

1. Comparison table ads

So the idea is simple:

  • Run you vs competitor ads to your audience

  • Choose a few dimensions where you are different

  • Make sure that those dimensions tell your core “why us” story

  • Present it in a simple table creative

I think in his article on comparison ads Itamar shared that creative:

Simple but effective. People learn by comparing and contrasting vs what they know. And this style of ads helps them do that.

Bonus points if you explicitly say what you are not. It builds credibility and trust and almost nobody does it.

Otherwise, you risk becoming a Frog watch vs Rolex meme:

2. Interactive feature tiles from Clerk

Sometimes your dev tool has many features/products that you want to show. How to present many features at once?

Showing all of them as separate sections doesn't work with more than 3. It just gets too long very quickly.

You can go with the tabs pattern where each tab has copy+visual for a feature. But there is another option that makes a ton of sense when you have many features to show.

Interactive tiles of different sizes.

I like the implementation of that pattern coming from Clerk:

  • Each tile is a combo of feature name + one-liner description + an interactive visual

  • When you hover over each tile it starts playing the visualization explaining the feature even more

  • Some of the tiles are bigger which makes the entire section more interesting. It could be one (core feature or differentiator) or a few if you present many.

That pattern can work really well on blogs or learning centers too but I think we're going to see more of it on dev tool websites.

3. Speed Tetris at the booth from Storyblok

It is hard to get devs to your booth if all you offer is a "do you want to see a quick demo" spiel.

You need to get a bit more creative than that.

The team at Storyblok ran a Tetris competition:

  • Playing station at the booth to make sure people come by

  • Live leaderboard for when people were not playing + to get folks to play again

  • Branding around the playing station for those who take photos to share it on socials

  • A cool devy prize (mechanical keyboard) to build some additional reason to play talk about it

Afaik it was a big hit and I can definitely see why.

A few more notes:

  • make it live at the booth, not available online -> you'll get no buzz for it otherwise (made this mistake)

  • try to get organizers to give you a few minutes of the schedule to give away prizes

  • if you can connect the game to your product in a memorable way do that.  

btw, I read about it on DX Tips. You want to check out that article on dev conferences from DX Tips

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