How to run developer-focused Reddit ads that get upvoted?
Reddit is well known for anti-promotional sentiments.
Just post something along the lines "you can solve that with our dev tool" and see.
So running ads on Reddit feels even more like a no-no.
Especially if you add problems with bot clicks and attribution as most devs will have some sort of blocks.
But you know your audience is on Reddit.
And for some of us, it may very well be the only social platform they are on.
So what do you do?
This is how @Featureform approached it to get almost 100 upvotes on an ad:
If you are going for brand awareness rather than a direct conversion those types of ads can work very well.
I liked it for sure.
Awesome sponsorship ad from Trieve in the Cassidy Williams newsletter.
Not sure who wrote it but it must have been a dev ;) It is just so refreshingly to the point.
๐ What I like:
This ad does it so gracefully and quickly it is just hard not to love. ย
VS competitor ads are hard to pull off with devs. Not impossible though. ๐
So the problem is that:
@Convex does it really nicely here:
And even though this is by a "aggressive" competitor marketing hundreds of devs liked/bookmarked this tweet.
Good job!
Digital Ocean went for an ad for the Hactoberfest in a tricky place.
To keep it in the medium that fits YouTube shorts they:
I think doing YouTube shorts is an interesting opportunity in a yet unsaturated market (as of 2022).
And doing ads that fit that medium so nicely is an art.
Good job DO!
What if you not only posted entire articles on Reddit but also promoted them?
This is what WarpStream did and I like it.
A few weeks back I shared an example of a company posting not a link with a snippet but an entire article on Reddit.
WarpStream is taking it to the next level by promoting it as an in-feed Reddit ad.
I love this trend 100%:
By doing that you assume that if your piece of content gets read by the right people it will lead to business outcomes. People don't need to go to your site to be retargeted by ads and attacked by popup banners.
That is a very fair assumption, especially with devs.
But even generally in B2B SaaS and social channels like here on LinkedIn that concept of zero-click content, coined by Amanda Natividad, is gaining traction and I'm glad that it does.
How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?
Making a memorable brand video is hard.
Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.
Doing that to the developer audience is next level.
Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.
The videos I am talking about are:
So what did they do right?
Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.
And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.
This is a really clever billboard campaign.
Show don't tell they say.
And Segment did exactly that by putting billboards with the wrong location printed on them (LA in SF etc).
The theme/message was "What good is bad data?" which was exactly what they wanted to convey.
What I like about is the alignment between:
This is hard to do imho so big kudos to them ๐!
Downside?
Reportedly many folks who saw billboards didn't get that it was intentional and Tweeted at them about the error.
Or maybe they were next-level jokers...
Pre-roll ads are obviously invasive and annoying, especially to devs. But they are also prime real estate in the ad ecosystem.
You can choose not to do them at all (fair option). Or try and make them more fun and less annoying ;)
I like how Sentry handled it in this 16-second video:
Basically they managed to "buy" 11 seconds of attention with 5 seconds of a pattern-breaking hook. ย In the world of pre-roll YouTube dev-focused ads, I'd say this is a win.
Also, I don't know the results of the "Sentry can't fix that " campaign, but I like how this builds curiosity. Even with that slogan alone.
I really like this Reddit ad from Sentry.
Powerful simplicity.
They don't do:
โข long value-based copy
โข fancy, in-your-face CTAs
โข creative that feels "professional
They go for:
โข focus on the pain
โข creative that speaks to that pain
โข low-key CTA ", get Sentry" rather than "Get Sentry Free!"
โข building rapport with the dev with copy "If seeing this in React makes you ๐คฎ"
And through simplicity and focus they deliver a message:
โข Stack traces in React are not much fun
โข They seem to understand that
โข Sentry helps you solve that
Good format.
Just an awesome billboard/ad format for a dev too company coming from Vercel.
What I like about it is:
Simple and beautiful.
Btw, they actually run similar ads on Reddit and it makes a lot of sense IMHO.
How to do a dev-focused brand video and get 10M+ views?
Making a memorable brand video is hard.
Doing that for a boring tech product is harder.
Doing that to the developer audience is next level.
Postman managed to create not one but three of those brand videos that got from 4M to 10M youtube views.
The videos I am talking about are:
So what did they do right?
Honestly, I am not exactly sure what special sauce they added but those are just great videos that you watch.
And I definitely remember them and the company which is exactly what you want to achieve with brand ads.
How did this super basic ad get so much engagement on Reddit?
First of all, the value prop is succinct, to the point, and says what it is.
No "streamlining", "boosting", or "democratizing" is involved.
No clever tagline or pains, benefits, or values just says what it is.
But what it is, is "free and open-source" which is what many devs, especially on Reddit want to hear.
And Heroku is a known brand so if you know what Heroku does, you know what Kubero does.
I liked that they linked out to the GitHub project too.
Not 100% sure if that would perform better than a landing page or home. ย But I see how it feels more in sync with the channel you are running your ads on.
The screenshot? I don't like it but perhaps it doesn't matter as much here?
What do you think?
Oh, and if you read the comments, you'll see that people actually talked about the project, said that they liked the ad etc.
Good stuff.
Funny and memorable competitive billboard ad from @Statsig ๐
You have a big incumbent, everyone knows them. Use it to anchor your brand.
And tell the story of how you do things differently.
๐ But first, make people see you. And remember you in the next conversation when the big known brand or a category comes up.
And being funny is one of the best ways of getting attention and being remembered.
๐ I love how folks from Statsig did it here. Such a playful pun on the feature flag category incumbent Launch Darkly. Job well done.
Btw, this was shared by Oleksii Klochai in the Developer Marketing Community (you joined yet?).
Ideating how to do dev tool billboards?
I like these from Snowflake.
Especially the customer showcase ones as the format can almost be copy-pasted ;)
One more interesting thing about those billboards though:
By doing that they seem to have billboards everywhere, fight ad fatigue, and stay top of mind.
Love it.
Testimonial ads are a format that helps you move people from "I know what you are doing" to "I trust you enough to do business with you".
Video testimonials are even better.
You see the person who has a similar role that you do saying things about the product you are considering.
CircleCI did a solid job here.
And so if you are running remarketing to people who went to pricing but didn't sign up, or signed up to a free trial but haven't converted yet this is a good format candidate.
Classic remarketing ad. But things are classic because they work ๐
Youtube remarketing is one of the most popular ways to stay top of mind with devs who visit your site.
Lots of devs spend time on Youtube so it is a solid match.
But, "buy now" style ads rarely work because if they wanted to try/buy they would have already.
They need something more.
That "more" is often trust.
They simply don't trust you, your product, and your company.
They don't think you are the real deal and will solve their problems.
But you can build that trust. And to do that you can use testimonial-style ads:
That is it.
Show enough of these and % of people will trust you and convert.
Showing code and UI in an explainer video is always a dance and rarely ends well.
You want to show the code to make it devy.
But you don't want to show everything not to overwhelm.
The same goes for UI which should look like your UI.
But show only what is necessary.
It's a struggle but CircleCI does it really nicely in this explainer:
They do the same for the UI later in the video.Just a really clean way of explaining things. Nice!
I love this video ad format from Hygraph.
They are reading and reacting to bad reviews.
I saw this in B2C but not in the dev tool B2B. Love it!
So basically how they did that campaign is:
Through all that, you get entertained and learn something about their product. This is such a fun format to test out!
๐๐๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐ฑ ๐ฐ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐๐ถ๐๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ฎ๐ป ๐ถ๐ป๐ณ๐ฟ๐ฎ ๐ฝ๐ฟ๐ผ๐ฑ๐๐ฐ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐ฟ๐๐ป๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฎ ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐บ๐ถ๐ป๐ฎ๐น?
Hard, but Run.ai did that.
Infra products are not "obviously cool".
There is no shiny UI, no happy people wearing your sneakers,
So what do you show on your ads?
First off, the rules still apply:
โข Catch your audience's attention
โข Say what you do in their language
โข Better yet, show how it actually does it
And Run.ai ai and MLOps infra tool managed to create a beautiful Linkedin ad IMHO:
โข They catch attention with the code visual
โข They say what they do quickly with "Dynamic Fractional GPU using One Command"
โข They extend on that in the post copy with an action-driven "Open Terminal -> Run Command -> Boom"
โข The code shows what it feels like to use the tool
โข And it shows you the result -> fractional GPUs
Job well done!
Developer-focused Reddit ad. 33 upvotes, 30 comments.
So @Zesty is a company that targets devops folks and helps with cloud cost optimization.
And they decided to run Reddit ads.
So they:
And they got 33 upvotes and 30 comments.
Some of the comments were technical.
One comment that got 67 upvotes was actually
"Okay, this ad is pretty funny"
And I agree, this is a pretty funny ad that I am sure brought them some brand awareness and clicks.
Dorky joke right?
But it does two very important things beautifully.
It gets a smirk (from some people) and when it does you know you just moved someone closer to your brand.
It has a clear CTA which is hard to do with joke-format ads.
This subtle call to conversation/check us out does the job.
Love it!
A great example of a quote-style ad.
I like it because:
Great stuff.
This is such a fantastic ad creative because it is just so different.
So basically what Kinde it does is:
๐ That timer is such a great way of catching attention and keeping it while landing your product message. It seems raw and "whatever" but I think it is very intentional in its dev-friendly delivery.
So if you have a dev tool that has awesome devex and can get people to that aha moment quickly then give it a go (and tell me how it went ;)). ย
Just wanted to share this classic dev tool branding campaign.
There is even a book about this from Jeff Lawson at Twilio.
But I recently saw someone share on HN that it got changed to "How can I reduce acquisition costs by 65%". Made me a bit sad.
But perhaps after years and years of working it stopped delivering any additional brand awareness/affinity.
Could they have come up with another flavor of "Ask your developer."?
Maybe. But maybe at their levels of mind share you are playing a different game.
The good thing is, you are not at that stage ;)
And f you pull off something that is 1% of the success of that famous Twilio campaign you can make your brand noticed and remembered.
I know we are in the year of doing what brings results right now. And branding campaigns may not make the cut.
But maybe we can (and should) afford to do something that helps us deliver that pipeline next year or a year after that?
Nice Reddit ad from kftray.
This is a simple ad format but lands the message:
An interesting fact is that there is no call to action?!
They say "Kftray is an open-source" which is enough for those interested to google "kftray github" or just go to GitHub and find it. And makes the ad less pushy which is a nice touch on Reddit.
But the most important takeaway is this. If the problem is real to the dev audience you target you don't need to go fancy. Just show how you solve it.
Fantastic all-text Reddit ad from Latitude.
Dev ads are hard. Promotion on Reddit is harder. ย Running a dev ad on Reddit that gets 50 comments and 90 likes is expert-level hard.
But folks from Latitude managed ๐ฅ
They used one of my favorite Reddit ad formats: all text.
Here is what I liked:
Great execution. Chapeau bas Latitude.