Should you follow the marketing recipe?

My good friend was on a cooking show and somehow taught me something about developer marketing.

My friend Chef Oz runs San Diego’s De Nada Kitchen and Market. Recently he was on the TV show Chopped. You would think it’s strange to watch someone you know on a reality show.

But Chez Oz is always himself.

A couple rounds in, he started making corn cakes without a recipe. The judges marveled, because the ratios are important. His cakes could end up light and fluffy or hard and inedible.

Oz has earned the right to cook like that and pulls it off, like he did on Chopped. The rest of us should follow the recipe, unless we’re really confident with the ingredients.

In developer marketing, you first want to make sure it’s the right recipe. The cookbook from another audience is unlikely to be appetizing to developers.

Another common mistake is to throw random technical topics into your dish, hoping to hit the right flavor. Often, this comes from too few writers who understand the tech behind the product.

Sometimes it’s the right people with the wrong topics. When you have a subject matter expert ready to write, you take whatever content you can get. But non-strategic content will fall as flat as inauthentic content.

In Chef Oz terms, the corn cakes have the wrong consistency.

All EveryDeveloper clients start with a Developer Content Action Plan. Over a month or so, we work together to co-create your unique recipe. We identify what’s needed to attract the right developers and exactly the content with the most promise.

With specific developer themes, backed by strategy, you will begin to uncover your most promising recipes. Only then can you confidently improvise like Chef Oz.