🍐 #67: Scaling social proof, great YouTube ad format, and why devs evaluate whatever your GTM is

Hey,

I went to a Spanish wedding last week and saw this:

This is a pear cousin, quince (I think). Quince jam, “membrillo”, is very popular in Spain and goes very well with cheese and crackers.

This week on the agenda:

• Scaling organic social proof with ads from gravitee.io

• "bad reviews" YouTube short ad from Hygraph

• Devs evaluate, whatever your go-to-market motion is (from yours truly)

• + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Developer marketing insights

1. Scaling organic social proof with ads

This is great because:

• You take an actual authentic user/customer post (success story)

• You add context to it with copy, CTA, and other elements like underscore/arrows, to make it easier to grasp.

• Those stories don’t happen often so you better get the most of it when they do.

• Bonus points if you link out not to your site but to the original post or a G2 review if you do that.

What I liked about this particular one is sharing enough to show interest but not enough to tell the entire story.

Read post and comments on Linkedin ->

2. Devs evaluate, whatever your go-to-market motion is

Whatever you go to market motion is, at some point, some dev will be comparing you to other options.

It will happen whether your GTM is top-down, bottom-up, middle-out, PLG, community-first, founder-led, or whatever led it is. When people buy software they evaluate and compare.

The process may start from the bottom up (end-user dev) or the top down (buyer CTO). But it will happen. Don’t neglect that evaluation stage.

Whatever you do elsewhere may not matter if you don’t have this nailed. People will “evaluate you out”. So make sure your website materials, your community work on Reddit or Discords, and your profiles on review sites support that evaluation.

The dev evaluation phase will happen with or without you in it.

Read my whole article here ->

3. "bad reviews" YouTube short ad from Hygraph

I love this video ad format from Hygraph.

They are reading and reacting to bad reviews.

I saw this in B2C but not in the dev tool B2B. Love it!

So basically how they did that campaign is:

• The marketing team finds bad product reviews.

• Most of the reviews are technical and speak about some features.

• Their employees (at least some devs in there) read them out loud on their phones.

• They react to the reviews, typically explaining what the product does and why.

• They serve it as YouTube short ads and link to the whole 5-minute video on their channel.

Through all that, you get entertained and learn something about their product. This is such a fun format to test out!

See more dev tool ads 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

• ✍️ How Notion Does Marketing: A Deep-Dive Into its Community, Influencers & Growth Playbooks

• ✍️ Educate Technical Audiences With Template Marketing | Heavybit

• 🎧️ Taking a hard look at what community means and if every OSS company needs one with Deepak Prabhakara | The Business of Open Source Podcast  

3. Join our Slack community

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

Check out marketingto.dev ->