Effectively Marketing Devtools with Educational Content

This was originally published as a resource on SyntaxPen's website.

Building awareness for developer tools and other B2B products for technical audiences is a notoriously hard marketing niche. One of the most effective strategies for devtools marketing is technical content marketing, where a business writes high-quality content for technical audiences to attract their attention.

Technical content marketing has many goals and strategies in common with traditional content marketing. In all content marketing, you must focus on building trust with your audience. As you do that, you signal to Google that your audience trusts you with helpful content and backlinks. When Google begins to recognize you as a trusted source of information, it sends more and more searchers your way.

Companies invest in technical content marketing to build a sustainable magnet for developer attention that pays dividends over time.

Some Devtools Marketing Challenges

Marketing anything to a technical audience requires considerable overlap of marketing skills and technicals skill. All technical audiences have a high bar for technical products and are more interested in how a product directly solves their problem than an expensive marketing campaign.

Technical leadership leans on individual contributors for purchasing decisions of technical products, which leads to developers having a good deal of influence in buying decisions. Marketing devtools requires marketing directly to the end user, not just executives.

Technical content marketing is especially hard to execute for this reason. Great content marketers can succeed in a lot of industries, but technical audiences respond best to content written by subject matter experts. Convincing a reader that their team would benefit from a CI/CD pipeline requires that the writer understand the pain that such a tool solves. Many teams have found this content best written by software developers who happen to be incredible writers, which are hard to find.

Writing Educational Content for Technical Audiences

So how can we effectively market devtools with content marketing?

The strategy we've seen best work for clients at SyntaxPen is consistently publishing unique educational content.

If you're writing for developers, educational content often looks like this:

• Programming tutorials
• Library walkthroughs
• Introductions to new frameworks
• Guides on interesting software engineering concepts

If you're writing for engineering leadership, educational content often looks like this:

• Thought leadership around real problems they face
• Industry news and trends
• Product comparisons

Writing great educational content is a direct way to show developers that your brand is trustworthy, because it's immediately verifiable.

1. You put in the effort to make a piece of educational material that's genuinely helpful
2. Some people in your audience read it and get something valuable out of it
3. Some of those readers enter the top of your funnel and turn into customers
4. The time spent on your site signals to Google that your brand is trustworthy
5. Your content is shown to even more searchers

While it's time-consuming to start, this strategy quickly builds into a flywheel that sends incredible amounts of attention to your site.

Conclusion

Investing in high-quality technical content is challenging but highly effective for marketing devtools and other B2B products to technical audiences. A specialized technical content marketing agency, like SyntaxPen, can significantly streamline this process. Our writers have consistently created trusted educational content that has been featured in prominent newsletters such as Ruby Weekly and DevOps Weekly.

For more details, see our comprehensive guide on how a technical content marketing agency can enhance your strategy.