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- #9: DigitalOcean content strategy, events, and dev-focused homepages
#9: DigitalOcean content strategy, events, and dev-focused homepages
Hey, how was your month?
Mine looked like this:
Went to a developer marketing meetup. It was great. Talk to Melanie Almeida from Strapi if you want to come next time.
Finally finished writing a new article. And it's a good one. Deep dive into DigitalOcean content strategy. Learned a lot.
Celebrated my daughters first birthday. It was fun. Haven't had this much "birthday fun" since I was like 10.
Here are my insights this month.
10 developer marketing insights
1. Learnings from DigitalOcean content strategy
I went deep into research mode to understand how DigitalOcean does their magic.Here is a tldr:
They create “give-first” content for their target customers. In their case, how-to tutorials that target long-tail keywords about software development and sysadmin stuff.
Every article has a smell of value all over it. Answers the search query very well. Feels more like docs than a blog.
They focus on accumulating what they call “developer love” with every tutorial, and every interaction.
They make it very easy for developers to “binge read” their blog with navigation to other tutorials and tutorial series.
CTAs are very gentle, and non-invasive. They “wait” for you to be ready to convert.
They re-target with ads to get devs to read more content.
When developers finally are in-market to buy, thanks to the accumulated “developer love” they click on those light CTAs expecting a similarly great experience to what they had so far.
They scale this with a writers' program, content acquisition, and media production teams.
They optimize the design for a great reading experience but make sure you know there is a commercial product behind this blog. They do that by having a product-heavy sticky navbar and banner-like sidebar CTA.
2. Newsjacking campaign by GitGuardian
Newsjacking is a great marketing tactic.
Especially when you can connect it nicely to your product.
And GitGuardian, a tool for secrets management does it beautifully here.
They ran a story on how Toyota suffered from a data breach.
Because they didn't manage their GitHub secrets properly.
Brilliant.
3. How to do marketing to developers. A big guide
It is a long guide that goes over everything dev-marketing.
From pricinples and strategies to tactics and channels.
Good stuff.
4. Datree marketing to devs on Linkedin
Thier Linkedin company page is really getting solid engagement.
And what is cool their head of growth Itamar Ben Yair has been sharing how they do it.
5. Developer-focused companies homepages
Adam DuVander and the team at EveryDeveloper did some awesome research on homepages of developer focused companies.
They also shared a gallery of the above-the-folds.
Worth checking.
6. Console.dev blog
They have a bunch of really good articles written by practitioners about developer marketing.
I really liked this one where they go over dev-focused homepage design principles.
7. Jono Bacon
He is an ex community manager at Github and Canonical and he talks about community building and developer marketing.
Recently, he has created two excellent, report-commentary-style videos about devmar:
Jono is also active on Linkedin where he mostly talks about community building.
8. SEO tutorial strategy laid out
This is not developer audience specific but very relevant as a lot of what you write are those how-to guides anyway.
9. How to do events from @swyx
Swyx is one of the most prolific experts in DevRel and DX.
In this article he goes deep into how to succeed at events.
A ton of tactical examples, including photos of booths and swag mixed with strategical insights.
If you are doing developer events please read this.
10. Orbit model laid out
Bryan Robinson, Senior Developer Advocate at Orbit goes deep into:
how modern DevRel should operate:
orbit model mechanics
DevRel-related flywheels
cooperation with marketing
Very actionable tips all over the place.
For example. here is a great community value capture/ value add Airtable.
1 Pear Fact 🍐
Do you know which country produces the most pears?
I bet you didn't guess it.
It is China. Over 70% of the world's pear production. 17mln tonnes every year. Any idea why?
The biggest pear production per person comes from Belgium. 29kg per person a year.
That is a lot of pears.
Thanks for reading, pears!Want more developer marketing insights?
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