This article is based on Ziwei Chen’s talk at the Developer Engagement Summit. As a DMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard.
Are you looking to grow your developer program but unsure where to start? If so, you’ve come to the right place.
I’m Ziwei Chen, a senior marketing strategist at Catchy, a developer marketing agency. Over the past 14 years, we’ve partnered with tech companies across diverse industries and stages of maturity to build and grow developer programs.
In this article, I’ll share three real-world examples that demonstrate how a strategic approach can drive growth and success. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll have the tools to answer three essential questions for developer marketing:
- What developer content should I create next?
- Which developer audience should I prioritize?
- How should I allocate my developer marketing budget?
Each of these questions will be tackled through three core elements: data, framework, and strategy. By combining these elements, you’ll learn how to transform insights into actionable and impactful strategies.
Let’s dive in.
Question 1: What developer content should I create next?
To kick things off, let's look at content. In the most recent State of Developer Marketing Report, when marketers like you were asked which channels brought the most success, content marketing was the clear leader. This suggests that you’re likely already publishing content, seeing results, and looking to keep that momentum going.
With that in mind, the question becomes, What developer content should I create next?
Data: Your existing content mix
To answer this question, you need to start with data on your existing content mix. Think about all the articles, case studies, and videos you’ve already published – that’s your dataset. This is especially important in larger organizations where each team may be running its own campaigns and creating its own content.
What’s often missing is a holistic view of all this content. What have you created? What’s already out there? Having a comprehensive view of your current content mix is the starting point.
Once you've gathered a comprehensive content inventory, the next step is to make sense of it. How can you identify gaps and opportunities? To do this effectively, you need some tools…
The developer journey map
The first tool is a journey map. Developers go through a journey with six distinct stages:
- Discover
- Evaluate
- Learn
- Build
- Scale
- Advocate
Each stage has its own objectives, needs, and behaviors, shaping how developers interact with your content.
Content types and their roles
The second tool is a list of content types. This can include a range of formats like success stories, landing pages, videos, and tutorials. Each content type plays a unique role at various points along the developer journey.
Framework: Your content audit matrix
With these tools in hand, you can create a matrix, placing the journey stages along one axis and content types along the other. This matrix helps clarify the role each content piece serves throughout the journey.
Once you’ve created this framework, the next step is to conduct a content audit. The goal is to assess whether you have enough quality content to meet developers' needs at each stage of their journey.
Do you have any content? Do you have enough content? Do you have enough effective content? The result is a visual overview showing the strength of your content in each area.
