What’s Working in Developer Marketing Today: Insights from Industry Leaders
What’s Working in Developer Marketing Today: Insights from Industry Leaders
Karl Hughes
11 min read
developer-marketing
TL;DR: Developer marketing is shifting toward ROI-focused strategies in 2025. Teams face pressure to prove business value beyond awareness, with content remaining foundational despite lower SEO click-through rates. In-person events are back but changing, while AI tools reshape content creation. Video marketing is essential but challenging, and generic content is being cut in favor of unique, technical depth.
The past two years have been very interesting ones for DevRel and Developer Marketing. High interest rates have slowed startup investing, the emergence of LLMs has changed marketing forever, the receding pandemic has allowed in-person events to return, and economic uncertainty has made organizations of all sizes more cautious in investing in growth.
Naturally, I was curious to understand what this meant for the companies we work with at Draft.dev, so over the past two months, I’ve had dozens of conversations with DevRel and Developer Marketing leaders at software companies. I wanted to talk with the people who are navigating these challenges and evolving their strategies in response to the shifting landscape we’re all living in.
While their input was shared anonymously, in this piece, I’ll share my notes from these conversations. I’ll share a high-level overview of what’s working, what’s not, and where DevRel and Developer Marketing are heading in the rest of 2025 and beyond. Whether you’re doubling down on content or rethinking your event strategy, these insights will help you recalibrate for maximum impact.
NOTE: If you’re looking for help with your developer marketing strategy or content production, be sure to set up a call. We’re happy to share advice based on your situation or offer specific examples beyond this high-level overview.
1. A Renewed Focus on Business Value
One theme that came up again and again in my calls was that developer marketing teams are facing greater pressure to prove value than ever before. Awareness isn’t enough. Budget holders are asking, “How does this help us close deals or drive user adoption?“
As a result, teams are sharpening their focus on:
ROI > Awareness – Campaigns that can’t show a measurable outcome are getting cut. DevRel and DevMarketing functions must tie initiatives to product adoption, pipeline influence, or revenue.
Sales Enablement – Content is moving further down the funnel. Companies are equipping sales teams with case studies, demo environments, comparison content, and technical validation.
Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up – Rather than choosing between C-level buyers and practitioner users, successful teams are doing both. They target leadership with ROI-driven messaging while enabling developers with technical depth.
This focus on ROI is also driving leaner DevRel teams that are more reliant on fractional resources or multi-disciplinary team members. In other words, it’s harder to find a DevRel role that focuses on just content or just speaking at events, but companies want to hire DevRels who can do it all.
Speaking of events…
2. Events Are Back—But They’re Changing
The 2020 pandemic is firmly in the rearview mirror, and companies are bringing tech workers back to the office and subsequently back to in-person events.
But, events are not the same as they were 6 years ago:
Small regional events are hard to justify – Attendance is down because companies don’t have the budget to send employees off to learn things that they could easily pick up on a webinar. So, smaller regional events aren’t as worthwhile to sponsors as they used to be.
Oversaturation is real – Because there’s been such a strong swing back to large in-person events, it’s getting harder for sponsors and brands to stand out. Many teams reported lackluster ROI from traditional booths, but they do find value in one-on-one meetings that they can only set up at these mass gatherings.
DIY events are on the rise – Instead of relying solely on third-party events, more developer tools companies are spinning up small, private meetups, workshops, and virtual user groups. This gives them better control over attendee quality and follow-up, plus it encourages stronger intracustomer relationships.
Finally, companies are universally skeptical of the value of virtual events. With the exception of owned webinars, I didn’t hear a singlecompany mention that they’re interested in sponsoring virtual conferences or meetups in 2025.
3. Channels That Still Work (When Done Right)
Some fundamentals in DevRel and DevMarketing don’t seem to be going anywhere, so it’s worth noting these as they came up in just about every call:
Content remains foundational. Whether it’s for SEO, LLM indexing, or sales support, high-quality technical content is non-negotiable. But the bar is higher: Google and your audience are both rejecting surface-level fluff.
Video (which I’ll get to in the next section) is coming up more often than in prior years, but written content still seems to be a core component of most DevRel/DevMarketing teams’ strategy.
Finally, click-through rates are universally down from SEO as Google emphasizes its AI Summaries, but having accurate, high-quality content to feed the LLMs is increasingly important. So, more emphasis is being placed on documentation, tutorials, product-focused content, and comparing your product to competitors. This kind of written content helps ensure the LLMs can write code that uses your product correctly or recommend your solution in the right situations.
Paid Ads are being used successfully by all the major players with established categories. Retargeting works great in conjunction with content, and many of the teams I spoke to are using ads to drive traffic to high-value gated assets and webinars successfully. Several leaders have mentioned that Google ads are getting less profitable, but that there seems to be more room on LinkedIn to get a positive ROI. I’m sure it depends on the product and your target audience, though.
Events are back (see above) as people are hungrier than ever for in-person connections.
4. Experimentation & Emerging Trends
Meanwhile, almost everyone is figuring out where AI will fit into their developer marketing strategy in 2025 and beyond.
AI content tooling is becoming increasingly ubiquitous for parts of the content creation and promotion process. Ideation, summarization, and light editing are common use cases, but nobody I spoke with has figured out how to use AI to fully generate high-quality technical content without a human in the loop.
The kind of content that AI can generate consistently well is high-level, low-depth content that is easily replaced by AI Summaries, so there’s very little incentive to write this sort of content, and it’s increasingly difficult to rank for anyway. Google also seems to be penalizing low-quality, AI-generated bulk content, so while using AI tools to generate content isn’t bad on its face, it’s not going to get you far without a subject matter expert in the loop.
That said, a lot of teams are relying heavily on AI for short-form copy (ads, subject lines, titles, etc.). They still use a human to review and finalize it, but it saves a lot of time iterating on ideas and testing.
LLM visibility is the new SEO frontier. Everyone I talked to is thinking about how they can ensure their tools are recommended by ChatGPT or Perplexity, but given that these tools index and rank content in much the same way as traditional search engines, it’s hard to tell if there are fundamental differences in how you should create content for LLMs yet. That said, having the right metadata can help.
And of course, the hard part about LLM visibility is tracking. Because the user interaction happens outside your website, it’s nearly impossible to tell how the content you have on your site impacted your traffic or adoption.
Video is hard to do well, but it’s becoming necessary. The next generation of developers will be video-first, and everyone is trying to figure out what this means for their marketing efforts. That said, there are a lot of challenges when implementing a video marketing strategy:
Short-form video is great for reach, but poor at relevance and attribution
Long-form technical video is expensive and resource-heavy
Video makes a huge impact on SEO and YouTube visibility, but attribution from third-party players is imperfect
Finding talent who understands the technology and video as a medium is very hard
Related to video, influencer collaborations are gaining traction. Some companies I heard from are building internal communities of influencers, while others are leaning on influencers with existing audiences, simply paying for exposure.
Developer Influencer Marketing works best when your product is excellent and serves a unique need better than anything else on the market, so I don’t think this is the best channel for most early-stage companies. It also doesn’t make sense if you’re pursuing a more top-down approach, but if you have a lot of individual users already talking about your product online, make the most of it by engaging them and amplifying their voices.
5. What’s Getting Cut
As I mentioned at the top, there’s increasing pressure on developer marketing teams to focus on results, staying lean, and being flexible.
The leaders I spoke to who are re-evaluating their budgets mentioned a few things worth highlighting:
Generic SEO content with no original perspective is dead. It’s super important to provide unique value with each piece.
Cold outreach is oversaturated and has never worked that well for a developer audience. Nobody I spoke to mentioned that cold email/LinkedIn is a significant driver for growth.
Brand marketing and old-school PR are not targeted and hard to justify when budgets get tight.
Finally, agency engagements are down right now.
While we’ve done okay because we have such a specific niche in technical content, more of the leaders I spoke with are cutting or downsizing their reliance on outside providers and “general purpose” marketing agencies.
We’ve also seen several of our direct competitors shut down over the past two years because they couldn’t right-size their teams and offerings fast enough to respond to this shift, and I suspect many developer marketing agencies will continue to see pricing pressure as long as economic uncertainty remains high.
6. Final Takeaways
If there’s one thing I took away from all these conversations, it’s this: developer marketing is in a new world.
The definition of who is a developer is changing again as AI tools provide higher-level abstractions and increased productivity to product teams. Companies are getting pickier, core categories in developer tools are maturing, and developer relations and marketing is getting more focused and accountable than ever before.
Many teams are wrestling with the same core frustrations:
Time-consuming internal alignment – Too many stakeholders, not enough clarity on goals
Attribution is hard and getting harder, Especially with AI search in the mix
Doing more with less – Teams are leaner than ever
Uncertainty everywhere – From global politics to hiring freezes, risk-aversion is growing
But the high-performing organizations seem to be aligning on a few key things:
They measure impact, even if it’s not perfect.
They blend top-down and bottom-up motions.
They don’t waste content budget on filler or branding.
They’re experimenting with video and AI, but not blindly.
And most of all, they’re staying close to their audience, even as the playbook evolves.
Where Can We Help?
I’m excited to enter into this new age of developer relations and marketing, but I realize it can also be scary. There are a lot of teams that are treading water or struggling to justify their efforts right now. That said, with the right expertise and guidance, content is still a fundamental strength of all the high-performing DevRel and Dev Marketing teams I spoke to.
If you’re reevaluating your content strategy or production needs in 2025, we’d love to help. My team at Draft.dev specializes in content that supports technical decision-making across the funnel. Grab time with us here or email me at karl@draft.dev if you have any questions.
