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I think podcast sponsorships are also a pretty useful area to market/reach out to these "untapped" developers! A lot of folks I talk to don't consume active content in written/video form, but are much more likely to passively listen to a podcast and absorb some information that way.
Popular podcasts that I know reach out to tech and entrepeneurial folks: SyntaxFM, ReCode, Changelog, How I Built This, Masters of Scale, Software Engineering Unlocked, Programming Throwdown, etc. etc.
Interesting read, Shawn! 👏
Some folks have commented that this article "leaves them hanging" - this is somewhat intentional but also just an honest reflection that I don't have this fully solved yet.
Some suggestions for the impatient:
- SEO. Check out this podcast with Steph Smith: “Most companies focus too much on social channels... People like following people, not companies. The underrated area is that people punt until later is SEO. If you’re doing a company publication, focus on building up your domain authority and keywords."
- Says Raman Sharma: "Fair to say more than 75% of developers search? If so, organic content that provides high-quality solutions to relevant technical problems can be more powerful and wide-reaching than optimizing for popular channels"
- Digital Ocean famously pursued this strategy , building 6000 tutorials and 28000 Q&A's to generate 3.5m uniques/mo to its properties.
- Commissioning art pieces (opera? comics?) twitter.com/GalaxyKate/status/153466049457…
- Paid Ads developermarkepear.com/blog/paid-advertisi…
- Out Of Home (OOH) Advertising. That's the marketing industry term for, basically, billboards and posters. Yes, many people ignore these. But if you figure out how to get CAC/LTV right in OOH, you are suddenly playing in a pool that very few tech companies compete in (outside of SF).
- Says Lewis Liu: "If I learned anything about marketing at Brex, it's that billboards are still an amazing channel for building brand awareness, and unintuitively cost effective compared to most digital channels that developers tend to tunnel vision onto."
(great response from ClickUp CCO)
Hey, swyx, great post, and thanks for the shout-out (wrote that paid ads article)!
I've been actually thinking about this exact thing a ton lately.
The same observation, a ton of more senior devs just don't spend their day on twitter/reddit or anywhere.
You do your work and after work go spend time with your family, do hobbies etc.
Yeah, you google, you StackOverflow.
But as a marketer is that all the channels I can use to reach you?
And then I started thinking about connecting it to the idea from Purple Cow by Seth Godin.
tldr: market to talkers -> then talkers will talk to doers.
So the first thought is to go talkers -> the actual talkers at conferences, socials etc.
I think this is partially true and works to an extent.
But the only talkers you should actually care about when thinking about those dark matter devs are people who actually talk to the dark matter devs.
Who are they?
So I think funnily enough those are devs they work with and talk to daily.
Now some of them are also dark matter devs.
But some are not.
Who?
My feeling is that those are junior devs or career/focus switchers (going from back-end to ML Ops for example).
As this is the moment when devs have a lot of incentive to "be out there" build a network, and learn new things.
So then paradoxically when marketing to senior devs you may want to explicitly create content/ads/talks all the stuff for juniors.
As juniors will later talk to seniors at work.
So maybe solving the "dark matter devs dilemma" is similar to how you can see a black hole :)
By looking at things around it.
That was long, figured I'd just "think in public" as it has been on my mind for a bit now but didn't know of anyone thinking about it as well :)
Again thanks for posting swyx!