🍐 #74: TikTok-style LinkedIn video ads, how to promote articles on Reddit, and MUX homepage header

Hey,

Which part of go-to-market pears like the most? Pearformance marketing 🍐 ;)

This week on the agenda:

• TikTok-style LinkedIn video ads

• Great homepage header from MUX

• How to promote your articles on Reddit

• + a few bonus links at the end

Before we start, a word from our sponsor:

Autogenerate Stripe-level SDKs and Docs from OpenAPI.

Fern SDK Generator takes your OpenAPI spec and automatically:

• generates client libraries in Python, Typescript, Java, and other popular languages and keeps them up to date,

• publishes to registries like NPM and PyPI,

• pushes code snippets to your API reference docs.

And it looks fantastic. Check out these docs or other customer showcases like Webflow, Cohere, or Pinecone.

Get a walkthrough and see how it works.

Developer marketing insights

1. TikTok-style ads on LinkedIn

Itamar has been sharing 🔥 content on developer ads lately.

One concept that he goes on about is the importance of creative, especially for the cold ad layer.

It should land the message yes, but if it doesn’t grab attention and stop the scroll it is not going to work.

And those low-production TikTok-style video ads do just that:

• they are different than 99% of your feed so it stops the scroll and gets you to watch

• they are entertaining, catch and keep attention for long enough to land the message

Two examples below (click out to see them on LinkedIn):

2. How to promote your articles on Reddit

This is a very interesting approach from PubNub.

They could have published an article on their blog and posted a link to Reddit.

Instead, they just posted an entire article, 3851 words . That post got 360 upvotes and made it to the top of r/rust. Wow.

Never seen anyone do that before but I like this. It could be great:

• when you want to drive discussion around a topic in the community you care about.

• Or when you want to rank for a keyword you couldn't possibly rank for on your own (Reddit will index it later at their 95 Domain Authority).  

Some things I also liked:

• To the point title, and devs really like a real improvement/debugging story

• The use of emojis in the title grabs attention and stops the scroll. Slightly controversial on Reddit but worth a try.

• In the feed, it looks like a deep (long) technical post. That intro is also fantastic because it does tell you what they did which suggests there will be more juicy details later. Love that.

• Shows a sneak peek of a performance comparison chart that you just want to see

• The post has images, code snippets, sections etc. Like a proper article. Also, you kind of need that at 3851 words ;)

Super interesting approach that I want to test out myself.

See more dev tool pricing examples ->

3. Great homepage header from MUX

This is one of my favorite header patterns for dev tools lately. Layered video visual from MUX.

So that video design pattern in here is this:

• A looped video on the right that...

• Starts by showing code (MUX video): right away I know this is for devs

• Then it shows me a player (MUX player) that shows the result of that code

• Then it goes to show the analytics (MUX data) of people viewing/interacting with that video

• Ends with all parts of the video code/player/analytics layered on top of each other to drive that this is part of one

There are a few bonus learnings here as well:

• "video infrastructure": that framing communicates that there are many tools I can pick and choose from. + it feels like Stripe for video which is a good framing in dev circles.

• "stream billions of minutes of video every day" hints at their benefit and core use case (streaming at scale)

• They show all the products Video/Player/Data right in the header making it clear what this video infrastructure means. And the layered visual explains it further.

btw I really like that branding. Custom font makes it so memorable. It is, isn't it?

See more dev tool Reddit marketing 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 to do a successful Hacker News launch

• 🍊 Benefit Layers: How to avoid sales fluff in devtools | Hacker News 

• 📰 How we write customer stories · Resend 

3. Join our Slack community

1700+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->