Developer messaging can be confusing, as most people think it’s about text messages. In this context, messaging refers to how you present your products to developers or developer communities. It involves the message you pass, how you pass it, the format used, and where and when it is passed.
In this article, we’ll learn about developer messaging, key factors of developer messaging, and basic developer messaging framework and how all these help you in your developer marketing efforts.
Let’s learn!
What is messaging to developers?
Developer messaging is a strategic communication of information to engage, inform, and support a developer community. As a developer marketer, you can message or engage in messaging developers through advertising, tweets, LinkedIn posts, articles, hackathons, or tech events.
Also, there is a messaging concept in the developer experience to improve developers’ interactions with the product. Just understand that whenever a developer interacts with a product, there is messaging involved.
Key Factors of Developer Messaging
Messaging to developers differs from messaging in traditional marketing because they are a tougher shell to crack. Some key factors to note when it comes to developer messaging are:
Ensure It Relates to the Developer Audience
Taking a developer-friendly approach is always more practical because developers hate being marketed to and want to understand quickly if the product fits their needs. When drafting a message for this audience, ensure it answers these questions:
- What product is offered?
- What does the product do?
- How does it improve their workflow?
- Why they should use it?
- Why should they use the offered product over competitors?
Answering these questions would improve the way you craft developer messaging.
Identify Your Right Tone and Voice
It’s important to note that identifying your voice and tone and being consistent with them are important, as they help your audience become conversant. While identifying this, ensure it resonates with your developer persona and that you are comfortable with it.
Research shows developers tend to be comfortable with tones or voices with a personal touch and less of a corporate feel. This should help you craft a better tone and voice. Developers tend to acknowledge messages they feel they connect with or to.
Build Trust
To build trust amongst developers, you need to be open and transparent about your product and company. Most companies launch a beta version first to get feedback from the community. While that is their main goal, they could use this approach to build trust by pushing out a flawed product and reducing expectations rather than launching a product and setting unrealistic expectations, leading to unending issues or bugs and falling short of the product’s claims.
Another way to build Trust is to help developers as they use your product. Suppose a product has a community and a developer relations team ready to help. In that case, developers tend to trust and rely on the product more (and they may decide to advocate within their network). You can decide to help outside the product; for instance, if a developer in the community is having issues using a framework (not related to the product), you can share resources or hop on a call and resolve that with them. This also helps build deeper trust.
The Basic developer messaging framework
Crafting a developer messaging framework is key after understanding the factors of developer messaging and your developer personas. This framework is here to guide or act as a roadmap to ensure the messages do resonate with your target developer.
Consider the following to tailor your messaging to address your target’s challenges and motivation and engage with the product.
- Know who your developers are and identify their expertise and problems.
- Avoid jargon or complex technical terms in your message; it should be clear and brief.
- Provide clear instructions on what developers should do after engaging with your product; make it actionable!
- Actively seek feedback to improve your messaging.
- Be consistent and transparent in your messaging.
- Provide resources or access to assist the developers get the most out of the product.
An example of developer messaging using the framework mentioned above could be, “Easily manage your deployments with X. Start by integrating it with your CI/CD pipeline in just a few steps.” or “Reduce latency on your frontend applications using our library. Get started now with our quick start guide”
These messages identify the product’s target developers and also give an idea of what the product offers using actionable means.
Conclusion
To sum up, developer messaging is important to get the developer audience to understand and use your products. This goes beyond your average marketing efforts as it needs to fit the developer’s tone, answer their questions, and let them decide if they need to use the tool or not. Also, developer messaging can improve the developer experience of a product.