Paid Media Services for Developer Tools Companies and Startups

We address the pain points above by giving you access to a technical marketing team consisting of a technical copywriter, a visual designer with training in technical concepts, a project manager, and a marketing strategist. The team walks you through the following process phases:

1. Audit + plan

We audit your existing ad accounts to understand opportunities for improvement. Unlike other agencies, we not only look at the data of past ad performance, but also look deeper into your (technical) customer base and try to identify any mismatches between your existing ads and your ideal customer profile.

This enables us to offer suggestions that are specific to your product or service within the context of the technical audience that you’re trying to reach.

If necessary, we also perform an audit of your analytics and tracking setup to make sure you’re taking advantage of the data available from the ad platforms.

At the end of the audit, we propose a few options for addressing the opportunities and discuss them with you.

2. Audience, messaging, and key phrase research

A key factor for a successful ad campaign is the “ad-audience fit.” This fit works differently in search vs. social media advertising.

In social media ads, the way to achieve fit is to offer a solution for a pain point that the prospects have, yet might not know how to search for, or where the audience might not trust search results sufficiently. Our task is to clarify the pains through audience research and customer interviews, and discover unique angles we can use to get attention and position your solution as an interesting option to consider.

In paid search ads, the way to achieve ad-audience fit is to understand the search intent behind each key phrase and fulfill that intent better than any other results on the search results page, while ensuring that we can drive each visitor to a meaningful outcome — both for the visitor and for you. Our task is to identify search phrases that suggest that the searcher might be an ideal customer, and to identify concrete messaging that will resonate with them for a particular search.

3. Campaign brief(s) and setup

Based on the plan, we start creating individual campaign briefs, including ad budgets and timelines, targeting options, ad creatives, and supporting information. We share the briefs with you for signoff. This has two purposes:

I - so that you and your team have a chance to provide feedback on ads from the subject matter expertise standpoint — adding nuance on phrasing, visual concepts that might resonate better with your customers, etc.

II - to keep you up to date on what exactly is happening with the ad campaigns, in case you need to align other marketing activities with them.

Once we have signoff, we set up the campaigns on Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or other platforms and start running them.

4. Ongoing campaign adjustment, new creatives, and reporting

Once the campaigns are running, we send you regular reports on their performance and correlate ad metrics with relevant activity within your product or service that we’re looking to drive.

Frequently, we see opportunities for improvement on a weekly basis as we learn more about which ads resonate. We then continue iterating on creatives on the cadence that’s required to make continuous progress.

Here are a few examples of companies that we’ve worked with on advertising campaigns.

Efficient content promotion via LinkedIn Ads for Sym — SaaS in the security space

We helped Sym run LinkedIn ad campaigns with CTR around 3x that of their other campaigns, and 60% lower CPC, while reaching a better-fit audience than they did before.

We achieved these results by:

• manually selecting the right job titles to target our ideal audience, rather than only using job seniority and job field filters;
• excluding large companies with lots of employees on LinkedIn, which have historically been extremely unlikely to buy anything from Sym;
• following the content promotion approach where the landing page for the ad is a detailed blog post that expands on the topic of the ad;
• using simple creatives with short text and a small custom illustration specific to the topic.

Sym already had a great website experience and solid brand recognition in the space, which helped get these results quickly.

Examples of ads we created for Sym:

Content promotion and product ads for Depot — SaaS with a self-hosted option in the developer productivity/CI/CD space

We helped Depot get started with LinkedIn ad campaigns, including:

• working with founders to come up with ideas for initial creatives, then narrowing down to a few that we’ll run plus a few potential variations;
• developing specific creatives and messaging;
• defining and implementing targeting based on ideal-fit job titles;
• setting up an additional retargeting campaign;
• reporting on campaign status every few days, implementing tweaks and variations whenever appropriate.

cunoFS — developer tool for interacting with object storage

We helped cunoFS launch their developer tool on multiple platforms, including Hacker News, and then amplified the launch effect through focused ad campaigns.

To achieve this, we did the following:

Google account setup:

• integrating the analytics stack with Google Ads;
• selecting keywords based on specificity of pain points solved by cunoFS, in combination with available landing pages;
• structuring the ad account around specific keywords and landing pages;
• producing ads, setting up targeting, getting the campaign running, making ongoing adjustments to ensure adequate impressions and clicks, and reporting on campaign outcomes.

LinkedIn setup:

• working with founders to come up with ideas for initial creatives, then narrowing down to a few that we’ll run plus a few potential variations based on the contents of the Hacker News launch;
• developing specific creatives and messaging;
• defining and implementing targeting based on ideal-fit job titles;
• tracking campaign performance and aligning changes with other activities on the launch list.

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