HOWTO Go About Marketing to Developers?

byrnereese asks: "My company has finally realized that one of the keys to our success will be to create a strong developer program (IBM's Developer Works, and Palm's PalmSource come to mind as examples). It just so happens that I have been appointed to lead this program. Now I have a lot of my own ideas, but I wanted to ask a large developer community directly the one question I know I am going to have to articulate a coherent answer to at some point: 'What is the most effective way to market a toolset, or development platform, to a developer in order to encourage them to build products using your product, without turning them off at the same time?'"

Comments

Relevance, Integration, Samples

[brio-dude]

Relevance

Show how your product solves problems that developers face when implementing their solutions. Describe how the product works in terms of how a developer sees it. At the same time, describe how it works in terms of the business benefit it provides since the developers will probably influence their manager to purchase the product. Perhaps issue an evaluation guide for developers, and one for their managers.

Integration

Show how your product integrates with programming languages, dev tools, and platforms. Focusing on productivity gains, for example, that result from using the product can help developers and their managers make more informed choices - it also gives your product a tangible result (cost savings) that just about anyone can appreciate.

Samples

Provide lots and lots of samples - Samples for really simple things and samples of complete, working systems. A lot of a developers' product's success lies in its samples since the samples can be easily modified and integrated into an application, or in some cases, used as the basis of a new application.

Re:Don't lock them in

[2Bits]

2) If there are file formats, document them.
3) If there are APIs, expose them.


This is especially important. Good documentation is the best you can offer to developpers. Ok, most of them won't read, but eventually they will, and they expect good docs to be available, when they need it.

Also, publish examples, a lot of examples, and nice examples too. Publish advanced tricks to do things with your tools. The worst thing I hate about some vendors is, they try to keep everything secret, and hope that you will pay $3K for a 2-day introduction /concept training, then another $3K for first level training, another $3K for second level training, and so on.

As soon as I find out this, I don't use their products, period.

Last, and not the least, make your knowledge database searchable on the web, and accessible to everyone, including people who have not paid for the license (yet).