Is Marketing to Software Developers Hard?
Marketing to tech people is the worst. They are skeptical, dismissive, and would rather spend 100 hours of their time building their own app before spending $8/month on yours. They block ads, they have a sixth sense for promotional language, and they’re too smart for their own good.
I should know—I’m a tech person.
One of my clients once told me: “The marketing strategy for software developers is to make them feel rich, cool, and lazy.” And they were right. If your SaaS product can make them wealthier, cooler, and lazier without sounding promotional, then you’re good. But hot damn is that tough to do.
Here are my five tips on how to market to developers and other people, whether it’s B2B, B2C, or even B2D marketing (aka business to developer):
Understand your customer’s pain points
Speak to those pain points in your customer’s language
Prove that you solve those pain points
Remind them that you exist
You just won’t believe number 5… Keep reading while I figure out what it is.
Tip #1: Understand your audience’s technical pain points
Everyone—and I mean everyone, including you—grinds their teeth about something they do at work. This is why we have SaaS providers and open-source software in the first place. Something needs to be done and it sucks to do it manually:
Creating interactive data dashboards for the exec team
Scanning for and remediating software vulnerabilities in containers and VMs
Writing and maintaining documentation for regulatory compliance
Implementing a data marketplace for internal data sharing
Building data movement pipelines to ship data across the org
Auto-updating a documentation repository when new code ships
Provisioning scalable infrastructure that aligns with data governance policies
For some monthly fee, tech people can pay to have these issues resolved in a way that makes them richer, cooler, and/or lazier.
Tip #2: Speak to your target market’s pain points in their language
When you know what your audience’s pain points are, you can speak to them in the language they use and understand. Whereas most SaaS websites talk about features, the best and most successful ones talk primarily about value.
Everyone talks about Apple’s marketing, but I actually think they’re a bad example of this. It’s better to look at amazing companies with strong value-driven content like Fivetran or Shopify. They could say something like, “Get data out of 368 data sources with TLS 1.2+ SSL-encrypted pipelines.” This doesn’t evoke anything cool, lazy, or rich.
Instead, they say, “Fivetran is the automated data movement platform moving data out of, into and across your cloud data platforms. We’ve automated the most time-consuming parts of the ELT process so your data engineers can focus on higher impact projects with total pipeline peace of mind.” They’re communicating:
Data engineers value automation and saving time (cool and lazy)
Fivetran helps them spend their time on valuable work (rich, cool)
They don’t have to worry about stuff breaking (cool, lazy)
When we get hired to help with B2B SaaS messaging, one of the first things we’re always saying is: “Stop talking about features, start talking about value.” Far far far too many companies have this idiotic “if you build it, they will come” mentality.
If that strategy actually worked, we’d all be paying for dozens of pointless SaaS products that don’t serve our daily needs. But guess what: we’re not doing that. We’re always trying to cut our SaaS spending so we’re not paying for what we don’t use.
The hardware and SaaS products I continue to pay for are the ones that help me in my day-to-day work. They help me make money (rich), they help me run a business (cool), and they keep me from working 29 hours a day (lazy).
They solve my problems and continue to speak to my pain points, even after I’ve decided to pay for them. For example, I am always happy to share how much I love my 16” MacBook Pro because it is the best computer I’ve ever bought.
Tip #3: Prove that you solve your customer’s pain points
It’s not enough to say, “I understand what you’re going through and I can fix it by making you rich, cool, and lazy.” You also have to demonstrate that you’re not selling me on vaporware or snake oil. Here’s how:
Product demos, screenshots, and videos
Case studies and white papers
Customer logos on your website
Testimonials and quotes
You wouldn’t believe how many SaaS providers don’t have a single screenshot or demo of their app on their website. It’s like selling a car and having no pictures of the car for someone to look at—and expecting someone to pay $40K for it.
Case studies are another great way to prove that your product does what you say it does. But here’s what most companies don’t understand: A case study is about your customer’s success thanks to your product; it is not about how your product produced results for your customer.
If you want your customers to feel rich, cool, and lazy as a result of your product, then you need to help them envision the types of results they’ll get by using it. Case studies help customers salivate and fantasize and say, “I want that.” They don’t want your product, they want your successful customer’s results.
Don’t say: “Our product helped Company X see a 50% increase in revenue.” Say, “Company X increased revenue by 50% using our product.” Simple change, profoundly different meaning.
Tip #4: Remind them that you exist
Most SaaS founders are nerds who believe engineering practices and principles apply to their daily life. In college, I learned how to write in an axiom-driven programming language called Prolog and I thought, “I should live my life by understanding my axioms and making all my decisions by evaluating them against the axioms, just like a Prolog app.” Then I quickly realized that life doesn’t work that way.
Same thing goes for “deduplication” and “modularity” and “pointer references.” Engineering-minded SaaS leaders hate saying things twice. They see it like data duplication in the SQL results of their brain.
They literally ask me, “Why would you write that second article? We already said that same stuff 9 months ago in this other article.”
People—even technical audiences—need to be reminded over and over and over again that your product exists. They literally don’t care that your product exists because they don’t even remember.
That ad you ran? They blocked it. That social media post you paid for? It was too promotional so they scrolled by.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s and Coca Cola and Apple and Microsoft are still running traditional marketing ads all over the world as if no one has ever heard of them. A marketing plan for software companies needs to take the same tack: continue reminding your target audience that you exist.
Humans are forgetful. We think that we think, but we don’t. We think we’re rational, but we’re not. I’ll quote neuroscientist Antonio Damasio here: “We aren’t thinking machines. We’re feeling machines that think.”
If you want someone to buy your thing, you have to remind them that it exists, that it solves their problems, and that you understand what their problems are.
Otherwise, you’re just another random company they heard about one time while scrolling Twitter on the toilet.
Tip #5: Make them care about your product
I finally figured out tip #5. Aren’t you proud of me? Anyway…
How do we make someone care about a SaaS product? Well, that’s hard to do, but we know what doesn’t work: prioritizing features, jargon, and technology over value, relatable language, and demonstrable understanding of pain points. Here are some ways you can make potential customers care about your SaaS or product/service:
Do everything we’ve already talked about, and do it frequently. Stay top of mind for them when they’re ready to buy.
Talk about your product in a value-driven way.
Provide value with additional content that enriches their lives (e.g. podcasts, social media engagement, email marketing, newsletters). The developer community is online to be informed, educated, and entertained. Find a way to do at least one of those really well and they’ll care about you.
Swag and merch. People love cool merch and will buy it. They might even wear something with your logo on it if it’s cool (and makes them look rich).
Memes. Oh the memes. People love ‘em. It’s part of being entertaining, but also part of being relatable.
Be an active member in your customer’s community. This can be by way of meetups, sponsorships (e.g. podcasts, meetups), promoting things your customers care about, or championing for relevant issues.
Provide a free offering that’s really appealing and valuable. It could be an open-source thing, it could be your full product with certain limitations—there are a million ways of doing this.
People care about things that bring them value. It’s a bit morbid, but roll with this idea: we don’t mourn the losses of celebrities because we knew them, but because we have a caring, one-way relationship with them.
For example, I’ll be sad when Christopher Walken dies. I’ve never met him, I have no tie to him, but we’ve all tried to do a good Walken impression. We’ve all laughed at him in the SNL cowbell sketch. We’ve all seen him in interesting movies.
So, maybe try to be the Christopher Walken for your customer community. Even if they never buy from you, they might still be rooting for you and get sad if you don’t succeed. That’s called “caring” and it’s within reach, even for a software company.
Software marketing strategies are just tough
Marketing for software companies is just plain tough. It’s a saturated market, we’re all after the same customers (if I had a dime for every time I heard “we’re targeting mid-market and enterprise,” I’d be rich), and there are a lot of great products out there.
Value-driven marketing isn’t a guaranteed path to success, but it significantly increases your chances of survival and growth.
There’s not much a SaaS can do about a bad boss, coworker, or team culture, but there’s plenty that software can do to solve day-to-day technical problems for engineers. Every company out there is trying to figure this out and the signal-to-noise ratio is getting better. So, if you’re going to pursue this, you gotta work hard at it.
If you want help putting together a content marketing strategy for your software company, check out a bit more about what we do. We devise marketing strategy for software development companies on the regular, we’re easygoing, and we like helping people succeed.
