Fundamentally, the marketing pages are designed reason with the website visitors. Best marketers weave their pen to put out their best variant to reason with the visitor. Usually to convince or convert.
Developers don't scan the marketing pages purposefully. They come to your website, incase you offer a technical product, they look for "Documentation" hyperlink on your website and delve right into it. That means your marketing pages don't get a chance to convince them.
It's worthwhile to retrospect the reason for them to go to the docs without even going through the web pages.
Hypothesis, discussed with 20+ devs and devrels:
Once developers land on your website, they are guessing. They are craving to find out how will your company's offering fits, not to their tech stack or architecture, but to their existing knowledge.
Now, someone who is doing this painful guessing to somehow fit your company's offering to their existing knowlege; likewise in their day-to-day life, hundreds of companies show them benefits, features, problems, and solutions. Most of them are so irrelevant that they have become indifferent to these pages. All of them were successful enough to drive developers behaviour search for "Docs" item right-away.
Now we know why they click docs right away.
They are looking to add something to their existing knowledge. Neither do we know about their existing knowledge nor are they ready to agree your solution is the "something" they need, yet.
So what's the best bet to take?
The best bet is to share knowledge on these pages, so they figure it out quickly. Less guesswork, just enough to trigger curiosity in them.
Developer Advocate is not the best Marketer anyway, but can most definitely help put out the best variant. Team up with your best Marketer and give them your research in reviews, comments, drafts or anywhere that works for your marketing partner. Wait until they do the Magic and come back to you. Make sure your direction of thinking is part of the narrative.
Make assumptions (evolves over time as you speak to more and more developers) wearing the developer's shoes, and keep adding to existing knowledge. Because if you do not, developers will be indifferent to your marketing pages. As you work with your marketer, you should shift your marketing page from being reasoning centric to education garnished.
It's worthwhile to retrospect the reason for them to go to the docs without even going through the web pages.
Hypothesis, discussed with 20+ devs and devrels:
Once developers land on your website, they are guessing. They are craving to find out how will your company's offering fits, not to their tech stack or architecture, but to their existing knowledge.
Now, someone who is doing this painful guessing to somehow fit your company's offering to their existing knowlege; likewise in their day-to-day life, hundreds of companies show them benefits, features, problems, and solutions. Most of them are so irrelevant that they have become indifferent to these pages. All of them were successful enough to drive developers behaviour search for "Docs" item right-away.
Now we know why they click docs right away.
They are looking to add something to their existing knowledge. Neither do we know about their existing knowledge nor are they ready to agree your solution is the "something" they need, yet.
So what's the best bet to take?
The best bet is to share knowledge on these pages, so they figure it out quickly. Less guesswork, just enough to trigger curiosity in them.
Developer Advocate is not the best Marketer anyway, but can most definitely help put out the best variant. Team up with your best Marketer and give them your research in reviews, comments, drafts or anywhere that works for your marketing partner. Wait until they do the Magic and come back to you. Make sure your direction of thinking is part of the narrative.
Make assumptions (evolves over time as you speak to more and more developers) wearing the developer's shoes, and keep adding to existing knowledge. Because if you do not, developers will be indifferent to your marketing pages. As you work with your marketer, you should shift your marketing page from being reasoning centric to education garnished.
Visuals play a 10x role in this process. But that's for another post.