advertisingWe want to advertise our product for a special niches. For niche like doctors and similar “ground” occupations, it’s pretty easy to realize how to approach to them.
But how can we best approach to the cloud community like developers? What is the best way to advertise product which has to be seen by a developer community?
For example, websites like StackOverflow would be ideal (if financially affordable) to place ads because this is where millions of programmers come each day.
I think this question is too little to broad, but I'll take my stake at it.
When it comes to advertising, I think of a gazillion possible ways of advertising from getting a booth at a conference (Expect it to be in the thousands of dollars range), from attending local meet up groups and talk about your product/service.
You can also try other stuff like Trade Shows. However, don't jump into trade shows right away because going as a vendor can be rather expensive. Instead, attend as a guest a year before, and explore your options. If you think that a specific trade show gets a good part of your audience, then go ahead and sign up as a vendor next year if you have the budget for it.
If you're talking specifically about digital advertising (ads on websites), you still have a bunch of different options.
In my own experience, when it comes to advertising to "corporate" professionals (developers, digital marketers, analysts, etc...) I've used LinkedIn in the past. The last time I used it, the CPC was really cheap, around $3/click.
You can either start with paid ads on LinkedIn and get very very specific (the more specific the better, it usually yields a higher Click-through rate and conversion rate) or join LinkedIn Groups and engage with fellow members of that group. Don't get too spammy, people hate that and you will get called out for that.
When I talk about specificity in the ads, I'm talking about selecting audiences that are, for example:
You get it, that level of specificity (as long as it's not really niche, like just a few hundred people) will get you the best results.
However, in my experience, it doesn't seem like LinkedIn Ads are optimized for CPC. It looks like once the ad goes live, LinkedIn will burn through your cash fairly quickly, which sucks because not all people are online all the time.
You can also try Facebook or Twitter ads, which you can follow a similar approach as the one in LinkedIn and target very specific audiences.
I can't talk about Twitter ads because I've never used it, but what I like about Facebook ads is that if you signed up for Graph search, you can research your competitors a lot!
For example, say your competitor is called Acme IT Corp and they have 2 million likes on Facebook (side note: Likes are meaningless/useless on Facebook).
You can use graph search to query Facebook this way:
"Interests of People who like Acme IT Corp" and Facebook is going to give you a list of common interests between those guys.
Try this one out: "Groups of people who like StackExchange"
You're going to see a lot of specialty facebook groups for developers like "C/C++ developers community" or "2600 | The Hackery Quarterly", which you can use in your ads to target people who also belong to those groups.
Of course, you can never go wrong with Google ads. Google ads is by far the best and most sophisticated ad platform on the internet. You can do a lot of things, and get really good results, if used correctly.
The thing about Google Ads, is that ideally you should target transactional keywords. For example, if you are selling/promoting performance software for PHP developers. You literally want to advertise for keywords like:
"free trial performance software for web applications", "enterprise web server monitoring tool", etc.
Also, you can use tools like SEMRush to find out what keywords your competitors are using in google ads, and an estimate of how much they're spending.
For example, assume that you are competing against New Relic, you can use SEM Rush to see that new relic advertises for the following keywords:
Also, take in consideration that in Google Ads you're going to see a "Competitiveness" indicator, that only gives you a sense of how many advertisers are targeting that keyword.
As a rule of thumb, you can assume that a high competitiveness score means that you have to pay more money to advertise. (Supply and Demand at its best). To get the most bang of your buck, especially if you have a limited budget, is to find keywords with low competition and medium volume. But being honest, such keywords are going to be very broad and not really good. For example people looking for "performance monitoring software" aren't necessarily looking to buy software, it might as well be a student researching a concept.
Depending on the keyword you're targeting, you can expect to pay anything in between $1 USD per click to $200 USD per click (not kidding, try the financial or insurance market, CPCs are CRAZY HIGH).
Finally, you can try BuySellAds.com. They partner with online communities that sell ads, and I'm sure you'll find one for developers/IT people. You can create your whole campaign in there, and target specifically that community/website only. It's pretty cool if you're going very niche.
That pretty much covers the most common options to advertise online.
You can also get free exposure of your product via guest blogging on technology sites plus if you put a link back to your site, you may get a bump in SEO. Although, be careful with links via guest blogging because Google doesn't like guest posts anymore, since they've been used a lot in the past to artificially inflate sites' trustworthiness.
A good way to find blogs to guest post on, is using a combination of multiple tools. In this case, I'd start with SEMRush to pull a list of keywords your competitors are targeting/positioning for, and then input that list of keywords in BuzzSumo and get a comprehensive list of sites that are relevant to your search query and already have an audience on the internet. BuzzSumo is a new research tool and it's free!
Also, if you have a blog, you should try to write opinionated/controversial blog posts and submit the link the HackerNews and Reddit. You'll get a lot of visitors, and if your post is controversial enough, you can get a lot of traction fairly quickly.
Also on your blog make sure to collect your visitors' emails, an email is arguably 10 times better than a like, or a follow. Don't get fooled by those meaningless and nice-to-have metrics. The lifespan of an email is MUCH higher than the lifespan of a tweet or a status update. Facebook algorithm is specifically designed to show your updates just to a tiny little fraction of your audience; whereas an email goes to ALL your subscribers and it's up to them if they want to know about you or not.
By the way, when I say "controversial", I do not mean "Baby seals are evil and we should beat them to death" controversial, I mean stuff like "Content is 10x better than design" or something relevant to your audience. Don't be afraid of putting a stake in the ground and speak up your mind in a blog, after all, that's what it's for. If I really wanted to read factual statements, I'd read a scientific magazine. A blog is the perfect place to state your opinion without formally backing up your claims. Otherwise, you're going to come off as a yet another boring "me too" blog.
I'm a blogger, and I make a decent amount of money just by blogging. I'm not afraid of saying stuff like:
"Developers who don't use frameworks are money pits. Train them or fire them".
Yeah, that infuriates A WHOLE LOT of people, but who cares? 24% of the developers who loved that specific blog post, also converted as a customer. That's a win in my books; I don't care if Johnny Smith from Smith IT Research Partners got mad at me and told me I was an illiterate bastard (that really happened).
Hope that answer your question!
My suggestion would be to target a niche watering hole that's relevant to your market that supports flags for retargeting.
Assuming you have some budget, you could find a successful product targeting your same niche (e.g. Java devs vs. all devs) and follow their lead. For example, New Relic popped into my mind thinking about this question; I'm a Java developer and see their ads all the time.
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