Good Saturday! A crash course on IT marketing, because apparently very few people understand developers. We are gentle creatures mostly, and products should be advertised to us in a completely different way.
1. No hyperboles. Developers spot bullshit much more easily than the other audience. If your software is the fastest, the most scalable, the simpler to operate, the bullshit antenna will activate immediately. Your strengths sound real if you can also talk about weaknesses.
2. Software is about human stories. Let the people that *created* the software you are advertising talk about their stories creating a feature, fixing a bug. Or let the developers that used the product to fix a problem speak, tell the details.
2B. Basically nobody cares about the CEO or CTO saying "all our problems vanished after using XYZ. We can't recommend it more". This is BS. Instead the developer that applied it need to recount the whole story and why it in the end worked well.
3. Don't try to make X popular by saying how much better it is compared to Y. People will think you are lame. If your competitors lack something that you do very well, just recount how you do well this thing. They'll understand because this area it's a Y pain-point for them.
4. Don't try to advertise your product continuously mentioning another product just in order to capture the interest associated with the keywords/audience of the other product. Developers will see you are lame and will extend the feeling to your product.
5. Details. Nobody needs release notes or success stories where there are no details. Everything is otherwise trivialized. How you exactly did something? What were the solutions that failed along the way? What other tools are you using? How? Otherwise is empty content.
6. Don't do lame jokes. If you have a product Twitter/FB/... account and people follow you, you should be very thankful. Dont' waste people's attention by doing lame jokes about programming that you don't even understand very well. They are fucking lame.
7. Be honest. A product solid following audience is made out of years of work. If you are honest and transparent the audience will understand this, appreciate it, and this good quality will be transferred to what you do. It's how humans work and behave.
8. Do things that don't scale, like @paulg says. It works for marketing to. Take your top dev to reply a question on Stack Overflow because there is an user having an issue, and other things like that. This will leave a big mark.
9. Tell your developers team that they can't stay under a keyboard just coding, without having a blog, a Twitter account, reading HN, and so forth. If two products X and Y are the same, the team that will be more open and communicative will win hands down.
10. Good documentation is a form of marketing. Try to have the best documentation possible, that says all the things that normally you otherwise have to look at the source code. Instead uselessly verbose doc written by people not understand the details is not great.
11. Don't use users or communities telling good things as a slogan message, even if you'll manage to have permission from them. They'll feel somewhat violated. They want to change idea and not being associated with your product ADV.
