With the accelerated integration of technology into the world of marketing, APIs have become crucial for doing business online. If you’re not that tech-savvy, you might be wondering: what is an API anyway? Application Programming Interfaces, or in short APIs, basically serve as middlemen connecting two pieces of software that enables them to exchange data. In general, there are two types of APIs: public and private ones.

The private ones are exclusively used by the companies that made them and the public ones are available for anyone who wants to implement them in their software. Developers mostly use APIs for mapping, weather, and online payment. In order to make the most out of the technology, marketers are now starting to come up with specific strategies for advertising their APIs to developers community.

Today, we’re going to show you how to design your own B2d marketing strategy…

Coming up With an API Strategy

After the development stage is done, the company needs to come up with a strategy that will increase the API user base and get them closer to their business goals. Nowadays, the competition is pretty strong, so the developers and their employers need to think about how to stay a few steps ahead of others. Naturally, if their API becomes , the chances of building their ecosystem are increased. That ecosystem is going to get built by gaining access to a bigger number of consumers.

What Exactly is the Business-2-Developers Category?

Business 2 Developers (B2D) is a relatively new marketing category. Two main categories – B2C and B2B – have been around for more than a century at this point, so naturally, B2D draws some inspiration from them. B2D came to be in part because of an influence of technology on the world of marketing. Of course, we talked earlier that the merging of those two worlds is in its prime now, so it makes sense that people are coming up with new ways to market new products and services.

order to make a successful B2D marketing strategy, there are two things that you should have in mind: your product and your target demographic. The main goal of B2D is to expose your product to a large user demographic. Just like the main two marketing categories, B2D can be very effective to market with content strategies. You can easily create user guides and tutorials that explain how to implement your software using new API tools. You can do this through written and video content.

But that sounds pretty traditional, right? Well, there are some alternative ways you can go about your B2D strategy. For example, instead of targeting as many people as you can, you can target around a hundred potential partners and focus all your resources on those relationships. Targeting specific companies can result in a partnership that can be beneficial for both side. But you have to be very careful when catering to specific organizations or influencers.

You have to know what they want out of their software and in what direction they plan on taking their organization in the future. With that in mind, let’s go over some key rules of B2D marketing…

Key Rules for Marketing an API

When trying out something new, you have to be aware that you probably won’t get it from the first try. While standard strategies like content marketing and social media marketing will do a part of your job, some unconventional marketing strategies will require some trial and error. What works with one group of people won’t necessarily work with another group.

Nonetheless, even though it’s still pretty new, the world of B2D marketing has some clearly established rules. So here are a couple of rules for marketing an API to developers you need to follow if you want your B2D strategy to succeed:

• Your API needs to be easily-accessible by all developers
• See whether the company you’re working with is interested in partnerships or not
• Be open with your future users, talk about the on-going development process
• Make sure that the API you’re marketing is easy to find online and subsequently, use
• Talk with developers about creating some plug-ins, tools, and add-ons
• Try to create as much tutorials and “how to” guides as possible

Adapting to the New Marketing World

In the last two decades, technology has affected almost every faucet of our lives and marketing is no exception. Its influence on the marketing is so big that those two worlds cannot work properly without each other. If you want to market your API, you can use some traditional marketing strategies, but you still have to adapt to the niche if you want to do the job right.

Developers are a specific demographic – they have their own world – and if you want to target them with your marketing efforts, you need to familiarize yourself with their world as much as possible. only then, you’ll be able to expose your product to sufficient number of people and see some success. Start learning about B2D marketing right now, and you’ll be able to see success sooner than you think.

Thank you for reading our article. We hope you enjoyed it and that it will be helpful for your future endeavors. If you have some question or just something you would like to add, feel free to leave a comment down below and we will respond on short notice.