🍐 #63: How to create a good comparison page, dev ads breakdowns, and a memorable vs competitor billboard

Hey,

Two pears had a kid, but they were struggling. What did they do? Found an au-pear 🍐 ;)

This week on the agenda:

• Developer ads breakdowns

• Memorable vs competitor billboard

• How to create a good dev tool comparison page

• + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s dive in!

Developer marketing insights

1. Dev ads breakdowns from Zachary Short

Zachary Short is a practitioner running demand gen for a dev tool product Gravitee.

He is also posting awesome ad breakdowns (many of them dev tools or PLG), memes, and haikus. Sometimes all combined ;)

Here is a good example:

Agreed. Specific dev ads, that have diagrams (that are unreasonably effective) have a better chance of getting a click.

I’d add that doing comparison campaigns is so underrated yet so helpful to the devs who are struggling with the problem/considering switching.

Which brings me to my second point today.

2. How to create a good dev tool comparison page

You vs competitor comparison pages. For some reason, this is a controversial subject. In dev tools especially. Here is my “controversial” opinion: 

You vs Competitor comparison pages are valuable. Both for you and your users.

Figured I’d put together my thoughts on it. For a few days, I looked around dev tool vs pages. Found many “not-so-great” examples and a few really good ones. Combined it with my experiences and wrote a guide on how to do it right.

How to create a good dev tool comparison page ->

You’ll get:

• Why create comparison pages (and when you shouldn’t)

• What makes a good comparison page

• My baseline for you vs competitor page

• Examples of dev tool comparison pages

This is my baseline, by the way, if you are wondering.

3. Funny and memorable competitive billboard ad from Statsig

You have a big incumbent, everyone knows them. Use it to anchor your brand.

And tell the story of how you do things differently.

But first, make people see you. And remember you in the next conversation when the big known brand or a category comes up.

And being funny is one of the best ways of getting attention and being remembered.

I love how folks from Statsig did it here.

Such a playful pun on the feature flag category incumbent Launch Darkly. Job well done.

Btw, this was shared by Oleksii Klochai in the Developer Marketing Community (you joined yet?).

See more dev tool billboard examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

Every week I have a few slots for Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage/messaging/ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

See how it works ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 🎧️ Developer onboarding with Kilian from Polypane 

• 👓️ Enterprise is Dead (from Sentry CEO)

• 🗒️ GitHub - scraly/developers-conferences-agenda: This repository list of tech conferences's date and CFP

3. Join our Slack community

1600+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->