Solved: Recommends digital marketing agency

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🚀 Executive Summary

TL;DR: Low adoption of technical projects is often a Developer Experience (DX) issue, not a marketing problem. Instead of hiring an external agency, IT professionals should leverage DevOps-centric solutions like Docs-as-Code, automated community metrics, and InnerSource advocacy to drive visibility and usage.

🎯 Key Takeaways

Implement a Docs-as-Code pipeline using static site generators (e.g., MkDocs, Hugo) and CI/CD to ensure documentation is always in sync with code, building trust and reducing the barrier to entry for users.
Automate the collection of developer-centric metrics (e.g., API call volume, issue rates, documentation analytics) using tools like GitHub API, Prometheus, or self-hosted analytics to diagnose adoption issues with actionable data.
Foster internal advocacy through an InnerSource platform (e.g., Backstage.io) by providing standardized project templates, showcasing contributions, and hosting tech talks to build a community of practice and empower champions.

Before hiring a digital marketing agency to promote your technical project, consider these DevOps-centric solutions to drive adoption. This guide shows IT professionals how to boost visibility and usage through documentation-as-code pipelines, automated community metrics, and internal advocacy platforms.

Symptoms: “We Need to Hire a Marketing Agency”

You’ve likely heard it in a planning meeting. A new internal platform, a powerful API, or an open-source tool has been launched. The engineering work is solid, the architecture is sound, but adoption is flat. The dashboards that were supposed to show exponential growth are collecting digital dust. Suddenly, someone suggests the problem isn’t the product, but its “marketing.”

The common symptoms that lead to this conversation include:

Low API call volume on a newly released service.
An empty Slack or Discord channel for your open-source project.
Few questions, issues, or pull requests in the project’s repository.
Pressure from management to demonstrate the ROI of the engineering effort.
Feedback from other teams that they “didn’t know this tool existed” or “couldn’t figure out how to get started.”

While the instinct to seek marketing help is understandable, hiring an external agency is often a premature and ineffective solution for a technical product. The root cause is rarely a lack of flashy landing pages; it’s almost always a failure in Developer Experience (DX). As DevOps professionals, we are uniquely equipped to diagnose and solve this with engineering principles, not marketing campaigns.

Solution 1: Treat Your Docs Like Code (Docs-as-Code)

The single most effective “marketing” tool for any technical product is its documentation. When developers can’t find, understand, or use your docs, your project is dead on arrival. A Docs-as-Code approach integrates documentation into the development lifecycle, ensuring it is as reliable and up-to-date as the code itself.

The Problem with Traditional Docs

Traditional documentation workflows (e.g., Confluence pages managed manually, Word documents) fail because they are disconnected from the source code. They become outdated the moment a new feature is merged, creating a trust gap with your users.

Implementing a Docs-as-Code Pipeline

By storing documentation in the same Git repository as your project’s code, you enable a powerful workflow. Engineers update the relevant docs in the same pull request where they change the code.

Choose a Static Site Generator: Tools like MkDocs (Python), Hugo (Go), or Docusaurus (React) are excellent choices. They convert Markdown files into a professional, searchable documentation website.
Co-locate Docs with Code: Create a /docs directory in your project’s repository and write your documentation in Markdown.
Automate with CI/CD: Use a CI/CD pipeline (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) to automatically build and deploy the documentation site whenever a change is merged into the main branch.

Here is an example of a GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/docs.yml) that builds and deploys a MkDocs site to GitHub Pages:

name: Deploy Docs to GitHub Pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Set up Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: 3.x

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: |
          pip install mkdocs mkdocs-material

      - name: Build the site
        run: mkdocs build

      - name: Setup Pages
        uses: actions/configure-pages@v4

      - name: Upload artifact
        uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v3
        with:
          path: ./site

      - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
        id: deployment
        uses: actions/deploy-pages@v4

This pipeline ensures that your documentation is always in sync with your production code, building trust and reducing the barrier to entry for new users.

Solution 2: Automate Community and Adoption Metrics

A marketing agency will track metrics like “brand awareness” or “social media engagement.” We need to track actionable engineering metrics that measure the health of our project’s ecosystem. You cannot improve what you do not measure, and guesswork leads to wasted effort.

Building a DX Metrics Dashboard

Instead of guessing why adoption is low, collect data. Create a dashboard (using Grafana, Kibana, or even a simple internal webpage) that tracks key developer-centric indicators.

Source Control Metrics: Use the GitHub or GitLab API to track stars, forks, contributors, issue open/close rates, and pull request cycle times.
Usage Metrics: For an internal platform or API, instrument your application. Use Prometheus to expose metrics like API calls per team, error rates, and latency. This tells you who is using your tool and where they are struggling.
Documentation Analytics: Add a simple analytics tool (like a self-hosted Plausible or GoatCounter) to your docs site to see which pages are most visited and what users are searching for.

Here’s a simple Python script using the requests library to pull basic stats from the GitHub API for a public repository:

import requests
import os

# Set your GitHub token for higher rate limits
# GITHUB_TOKEN = os.getenv("GITHUB_TOKEN")
# headers = {"Authorization": f"token {GITHUB_TOKEN}"}

REPO_OWNER = "prometheus"
REPO_NAME = "prometheus"
URL = f"https://api.github.com/repos/{REPO_OWNER}/{REPO_NAME}"

try:
    response = requests.get(URL) # add headers=headers for authenticated requests
    response.raise_for_status()
    data = response.json()

    print(f"Stats for {data['full_name']}:")
    print(f"- Stars: {data['stargazers_count']}")
    print(f"- Forks: {data['forks_count']}")
    print(f"- Open Issues: {data['open_issues_count']}")
    print(f"- Watchers: {data['subscribers_count']}")

except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
    print(f"Error fetching data: {e}")

This data helps you move from “I think people are confused by the auth setup” to “I see 40% of API calls from new teams are failing with a 401 Unauthorized error, and our auth documentation page has a high bounce rate.”

Solution 3: Build an Internal “InnerSource” Advocacy Platform

External marketing is about broadcasting a message to a wide, unknown audience. Internal advocacy is about fostering a community of practice and empowering champions within your organization. This is the core of InnerSource: applying open-source best practices to internal software development.

Creating an InnerSource Hub

Instead of relying on top-down mandates, create a centralized place for developers to discover, learn about, and contribute to internal projects. This can be achieved with tools like Backstage.io, or even a well-maintained Confluence space.

Standardized Project Templates: Use tools like Cookiecutter to create project templates. When a team wants to start a new microservice, they can use a template that includes your platform’s client library, CI/CD configuration, and monitoring setup by default. This drives adoption through convenience.
Showcase and Recognition: Run a “Project of the Month” blog post or a short video demo on the internal portal. Recognize individuals from other teams who make valuable contributions (e.g., bug fixes, documentation improvements).
Host Tech Talks and Workshops: Schedule regular, recorded sessions showing developers how to use your tool to solve a real-world problem. Make these recordings easily discoverable.

Here is a simple cookiecutter.json file to template a new Python microservice that includes your team’s standard libraries:

{
    "project_name": "My Awesome Microservice",
    "project_slug": "{{ cookiecutter.project_name.lower().replace(' ', '-') }}",
    "project_description": "A brief description of the service.",
    "python_version": "3.11",
    "include_custom_metrics_library": ["yes", "no"],
    "include_custom_logging_library": ["yes", "no"]
}

This approach transforms adoption from a “sales” problem into a community-building and enablement effort, which aligns perfectly with DevOps culture.

Comparison: DevOps Advocacy vs. External Marketing Agency

To put it all together, here is a direct comparison between the two approaches for solving the problem of low technical project adoption.


Metric	DevOps/InnerSource Approach	External Marketing Agency Approach
Target Audience	Internal or external developers who will directly use the tool.	Business decision-makers, tech influencers, a broad, less-technical audience.
Key Metrics	Time-to-first-API-call, contributor count, issue resolution time, API error rates.	Website traffic, social media impressions, lead generation, brand sentiment.
Feedback Loop	Direct, fast, and technical. Comes from GitHub issues, PR comments, and usage data.	Indirect and slow. Comes from market surveys, focus groups, and campaign reports.
Cost Model	Investment of engineering time and existing tooling (CI/CD, monitoring).	High monthly retainers, campaign fees, and ad spend.
Core Skills Required	CI/CD, automation scripting, API design, technical writing, system observability.	SEO, content marketing, public relations, graphic design, social media management.

Conclusion: Market Your Project the DevOps Way

The next time you hear “we need to hire a marketing agency” for a technical project, reframe the conversation. The problem is likely not one of marketing, but of developer experience, discoverability, and community engagement. By applying the DevOps principles of automation, measurement, and iterative improvement, you can build a self-sustaining ecosystem around your project. Focus on creating excellent, accessible documentation, measuring what matters, and empowering your users. This is not only more effective but also builds a stronger, more resilient product in the long run.