The Developer Marketing Tool Report 2023

It's not just about having the best tool but understanding how to position it. Successfully marketing your tool to developers remains a challenge. Developers respond poorly to traditional marketing methods and follow a different buying journey. With this in mind, we sought to uncover what tools developer marketers are using to reach them. This is the first report of its kind, offering a data-driven view into the world of developer marketing tools.

151 respondents replied to our survey. The average respondent was a US-based (36%) founder (52%) of an open source company (64%) with 11-20 employees (30%). Therefore, the report gives us a unique insight, especially into the early stage developer marketing landscape.

Why did we make this report?

• The developer tool sector is fragmented. Traditional marketing tools are designed with a non-developer audience in mind, leaving a gap in the market.
• Developers play a pivotal role in enterprise purchasing decisions.
• Developers have a distinctive buying journey. They prioritize technical capability, rely heavily on peer recommendations, and use documentation to onboard themselves.

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5 key insights from the Developer Marketing Tool Report 2023

• In 6 out of 15 tool categories, the most common answer was “I don’t use any tool”. This could indicate that existing SaaS fails to fulfill the needs of developer-first companies. The 6 tool categories include Customer data platforms (CDPs), Data enrichment, Social media management and listening, Automation, Event management, and Community management.
• crowd.dev ranks in the top 3 of 4 categories: CDPs, Data enrichment, Social media management & listening, and Community management.
• Hubspot is the industry’s favorite tool for customer relationship management (CRM) and email marketing.
• Slack is the most popular platform for building community (66%), followed by Discord (60%), and GitHub Discussions (45%).
• Despite controversial discussions and many challenger platforms, 94% of respondents publish content on X/Twitter, with LinkedIn trailing at 76%.

In essence, while certain tools have gained widespread adoption, there's a distinct void when it comes to tools aimed at social media management, community management, automation, and data enrichment. Addressing these gaps could lead to better developer engagement and more effective outcomes. Download the full report to get an in-depth view of how developer marketers leverage tools to grow.

>> Download the Developer Marketing Tool Report 2023 <<

If you find this report helpful, please feel free to share it on X/Twitter or other social media platforms.

Thank you!

We would like to extend our thanks to the respondents who took part in our survey and to the Developer Marketing Community for sharing it with their community. Companies that participated and agreed to be named, include Adadot, Alphadoc, Code Intelligence, Codesphere, Corbado, crowd.dev, Deepset, Edgeless Systems, Flagsmith, Grit, Inlang, Joyfill, KernAI, Mergent, Mergify, Nango, Orbital, PowerSync, Qdrant, Refact, Requestly, Savepad, Tolgee, Trigger.dev, Uno Platform, Watermelon, Widgetbook, and Zephyr.