Our State of Developer Marketing 2022 Report offers a bird’s eye view of the landscape, including where developer marketers are spending their budgets (and how big those budgets are in the first place).
Download your free copy of the report for a deep dive into the industry, from the marketing resources used by developer marketing pros around the world to common developer pain points and community insights.
Annual developer marketing budget
While it’s possible for a company to achieve its goals while working with small budgets, it’s fair to say that investing in developer marketing strategies and tactics can greatly enhance the chances of success.
We asked developer marketers how much their org spends annually on developer marketing and found the majority (26.7%) invests anywhere between $101,000 and $250,000, a considerable amount.
The next highest range is $0 – $10,000 at 20%, while 13.3% of respondents have budgets between $10,000 – $25,000, which are both more modest amounts.
But is a huge budget necessary for developer marketers to achieve their desired outcome? We put this question to our experts and this is what they had to say:
“It depends on what your desired outcomes are. A talented developer marketing professional can do a lot with a little, but you’re not going to be able to achieve scale without the budget to support it. Plain and simple.” – Gary Gonzalez
“Not really. If you’re creative with where you advertise and repurpose work your company has already done, you can achieve great results with a small budget. Sponsoring an open source tool your company uses for $200/ month is almost nothing budget wise, but can get you 1000s of page views per month.” – Alex Zdanov
Where are budgets being spent?
Now that we’ve established the average developer marketing budget, let’s look at the areas being prioritized for marketing spend.
Our respondents said most of their budget is spent on paid advertising (56.7%) and events (42.3%), with customer research coming in at a more distant third place (27.4%).
This means that getting intel on the developer audience isn’t as much of a priority, which makes sense as 60% of our respondents hail from a product-first org.
Digital marketing success
We also asked developer marketers to pick the top three digital marketing channels they had the most success with in the last year, with content marketing (56.6%), SEO (50%), and paid advertising (30%) in the lead.
13.3% said ‘None’, the same percentage as the ‘Other’ option (13.3%), which includes podcasting.
Which software and tools are most popular?
We also asked developer marketers about the tools they use regularly in their company, with the clear winner being analytics tools (76.8%), followed by CRM systems (56.5%), online advertising tools (47.2%), and SEO tools (46%).
KPIs are important to developer marketing teams and companies, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that analytics tools are one of the most commonly used tools by marketers.
When asked which three tools developer marketers couldn’t live without, we found a great variety of software and platforms. These include:
And here you go, a breakdown of marketing budgets as told by over 140 respondents from all over the world and in a wide range of roles, from the C-suite (16.6%) to managerial positions (56.6%) and Director-level or above (20%).
Download your FREE copy of the report for more insights like these!
