How to Successfully Promote and Market an API

by Adrian Machado

What are the best strategies for marketing an API in 2024? Use these techniques for your API product strategy.

If you're reading this, you've decided to embark on the journey of API productization. Congratulations - you have a long but potentially fruitful journey ahead of you. You will not be alone in this endeavor, however, as organizations are rushing to create APIs to generate additional revenue and integrate with enterprise customers. According to Straits Research the global open API market size was valued at USD 3.66 billion in 2023. It is expected to reach USD 25.04 billion in 2032, growing at a CAGR of 23.83%.

As a result of all this projected growth, your competitors are likely investing in building and monetizing APIs right now - which is why you need a guide to gain an edge over them. You've come to the right place. Zuplo's API Management platform is already the fastest way to build and go to market with an API, and now we've compiled years of API marketing and promotion research into this guide so you can go to market smarter.

Table of Contents#

• Why Do I Need To Market My API At All?
  • Benefits of API Adoption
  • API-as-a-Product / API Productization
• How Can I Promote and Market My API?
  • Development Phase: Start Marketing During Development
    • Choose Your Tooling Wisely
    • Create and Release an OpenAPI Spec
    • Create SDKs and Libraries
    • Invest in Your Developer Documentation Experience
  • Launch Phase: Make a Splash
    • Product Hunt
    • Hackathon/Events
    • Online Communities & Social Media
    • Direct Outreach
  • Expansion Phase: Scale your API Product
    • Content Marketing & SEO
    • API Directories
    • API Marketplaces
    • iPaaS Platforms
    • Unified APIs
    • Influencer Marketing
    • Keyword Monitoring
    • Ads
    • Sponsorships
    • Cold Outreach
• How Do I Decide Which Methods to Use?
• Putting it All Together

Why Do I Need To Market My API At All?#

Long gone are the days of "If we build it, they will come" for APIs. This mentality may work at market behemoths that only seek to use an API for partner integrations - but nimble organizations today are using their API as a growth mechanism to land enterprise customers and grow revenue. Despite API usage growing by 63%, success is far from guaranteed as the API market becomes increasingly competitive. With 53% of engineering executives plan on increasing investment into their APIs, and nearly 50% more organizations classifying themselves as "API first" compared to 2022, your organization risks falling behind and losing market share without a well-researched, robust, and easy-to-adopt API. It's time that we started treating APIs like any other kind of software product - and that means you need marketing.

Benefits of API Adoption#

• Generate Revenue: APIs are quickly becoming a source of revenue for organizations large and small. Stripe is an API-first company that generated over $14B in revenue in 2022, primarily from its API. Using monetization platforms (like Zuplo) its simpler than ever to set up plan based or usage based billing for your APIs.
• Deeply Integrate with Enterprise Customers: Customers at enterprise scale are not going to fiddle around with your UI to use your core product at scale. They often build their own tooling and automation to orchestrate usage of your product - and in order to achieve that, they need an API. Imagine if you needed to log into Twilio's website every time you wanted to send a text message? We don't think they could have landed Toyota, Airbnb, or IBM without an API.
• Expand Platform Usage: Even if you do not charge for your API - making your platform accessible via API can drive business growth. Ebay offers a free API for sellers to create listing. 3rd party sellers now use their API extensively to sell products, accounting for nearly 60% of Ebay's revenue.
• Display Technical Leadership: Being known as an industry leader in the technology field comes with many benefits. Increased investor confidence, easier recruiting for technical roles, and consideration from highly technical customers. Originally known as Macrovision, Rovi pivoted their business to offer media metadata via API in 2009, and subsequently gained large tech customers like Facebook.

API-as-a-Product / API Productization#

According to Postman's State of API survey, 60% of developers view their APIs as products. This makes a lot of sense when you consider that APIs are generated revenue for 65% of them. In fact, APIs made up more than a quarter of company revenue for nearly half of respondents. This is money being left on the table if your organization is not investing in building and monetizing APIs. But what does it mean to treat your APIs like products?

The Five D's of API-as-a-Product#

Here's a handy guide to help you build out your API product.

In this guide, we will be primarily focusing on Discovery, but let us know if you'd like guides on the other categories.

How Can I Promote and Market My API?#

Below are a list of strategies that several API-first companies have put into practice in order to grow their API products into market leaders. Several topics have been broken-out into their own articles which expand on specific details. Our API go to market strategy is broken into three phases:

1. Development Phase: Marketing done while developing your API
2. Launch Phase: Promotional techniques used to make your API launch successful
3. Expansion Phase: Tactics to grow usage and adoption of your API after your initial launch

Development Phase: Start Marketing During Development#

Believe it or not but you do not need to wait until your API is complete before you start marketing it. Actually, I would say that if you wait until development is completed to think about marketing, you're doing it wrong!

Like any other products, the product development stages can be considered opportunities for marketing. Many viral products on Kickstarter or Shark Tank are in the middle of product development, but they decide to unveil themselves in order to test the market for a reaction and build hype. Similarly, there are tactics we as developers can employ to help drive attention to our APIs during their development.

Choose Your Tooling Wisely#

We all know that developers have very strong opinions about the tools and technologies they use to build software. You can take advantage of this by building your API using tools that are both currently beloved and well suited for your API design. Consistent posting on social media about your experience using these tools, tips on what to watch out for, and feedback to the tools developers will garner attention from the tool's fanbase. You might even be lucky enough to get retweeted by them or placed in a creator showcase.

Create and Release an OpenAPI Spec#

Creating, maintaining, and releasing an OpenAPI specification for your API is an easy way to cut out a lot of hard parts when it comes to API product experience and promotion. OpenAPI specs unlock excellent tooling around developer documentation, API gateways, SDK generation, and API testing - all of which you will need to have an enterprise-grade API product experience.

Without a high quality developer experience - none of your marketing will matter. Having an OpenAPI spec will also make other promotion methods like Unified API, API Marketplaces, and API directories easier to join.

Create SDKs and Libraries#

Part of product marketing is making your product relevant and easy to consume for your target audience. In this case, you want your API product to be easily usable by developers - so they can seamlessly integrate your API into their code. Although REST and Http network calls as ubiquitous across almost all programming languages - they don't provide the best developer experience. Code snippets are a good first step in helping your users integrate your API into their codebase, and are relatively simple to write or generate.

If you want to take things a step further, we recommend you use your OpenAPI spec to generate a full SDK for your API, targeting programming languages you expect your users to be using. Many API-first companies today autogenerate an SDK for their users to easily integrate into their codebases. Publishing SDKs also has a promotional benefit, as you will get brand awareness and distribution through the various package registries (ex. npm, ruby gems, crates.io, etc.). Furthermore, you can share these SDKs within language specific online communities (ex. reddit's /r/nodejs).

Invest in Your Developer Documentation Experience#

Now that you have your API tooling in place, an OpenAPI spec, and some endpoints written - its time to think about your API's Developer Experience. Investing in a high quality experience is one of the largest differentiators between a regular API and an API product. A good developer experience typically consists of the following:

A Simple and Speedy Onboarding Experience#

It should be dead-easy for users to get onboarded to using your API. This typically consists of having a thorough Getting Started Guide front-and-center in your API developer portal. The guide should cover how a user can subscribe to a plan, authenticate with your API (ex. how to get an API key) and make their first call. This is also a great time to introduce any SDKs you've created to help users get ramped up in their language of choice. Another popular choice for onboarding is a sandbox or testing environment where users can play around with your API using a non-production environment.

We would strongly advise you to make this entire process of onboarding self-serve - having to interact with your team will turn away many developers and cause an unnecessary slowdown for those who do not churn. Ideally, you can use a developer portal that integrates authentication and testing directly into the documentation experience, for a seamless experience.

Accurate and High Coverage Documentation#

It's essential that your API documentation covers all of your API endpoints - which is why we strongly suggested creating an OpenAPI specification. You can drop this OpenAPI specification into various developer documentation platforms (ex. Zuplo's own developer portal, Mintlify, Scalar, etc.) and have a beautiful experience generated for you. Just covering your endpoints is not enough - you need to have guides/tutorials covering common usecases so developers know how to use your API more holistically.

Support & Resources#

Lastly, you need to be able to help developers struggling with your API. The first line of defense is a library of resources and FAQs in your documentation to answer common questions or issues. The next layer is an API status page where API uptime/outages, issues, version changes, and breaking changes are documented. Lastly, you need a human support mechanism - which can consist of live chat (ex. Intercom), social media (ex. twitter handle), forum (ex. Discord), or support email.

Why DevX Matters for Marketing#

You might be wondering what having a good developer experience has to do with promoting and marketing your API. You can consider investing in your DevX as an indirect marketing channel. As discussed earlier, developers have very strong opinions about the tech that they use - and if you deliver a high quality experience and thoughtful support, they will sing your praises on social media. This champion marketing is extremely effective as developers look to eachother for recommendations all the time and are generally allergic to being advertised to.

Launch Phase: Make a Splash#

If you've made it this far - you should have an API experience that you are proud of - with cool tech, an OpenAPI specification, SDKs, and a killer documentation experience. Now its time to employ some traditional marketing tactics to help promote your API's big launch.

Product Hunt#

This is one tactic that I am sure everyone is already aware of. We have seen varying degrees of success launching Zuplo products on Product Hunt - much of it comes down to luck and timing. There is plenty of content on the internet on how to prepare and launch on PH - here's a thorough guide from our friends at Nordic APIs that covers everything you need to know.

Hackathon/Events#

This is a very expensive tactic, but hackathons or live events can be very effective in launching your API. Getting the API in users hands and getting live feedback as they use it is invaluable. If you already have an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and feel like you can attract developers from those companies to an event, its worth trying. Typically the best way to get developers to attend is through incentives and prizes. This goes without saying, but you also should provide a copious amount of free API credits to hackathon users.

We would caution against purely virtual hackathons, as there is a high rate of spammers/scammers on these platforms, and also a very low turnout/submission rate due to low commitment. If budget is tight, you can consider sponsoring a pre-existing hackathon and offering a special sponsor prize.

Online Communities & Social Media#

Similar to Product Hunt, there are various other communities around the web where your potential buyers hang out. The approach you take and platforms you target will primarily depend on who will be the decision maker in the purchase of your API product. Some APIs can be decided upon almost entirely by a single engineer or engineering team (ex. Using Resend for emails) whereas other API products are mission critical for a business' operations or have many stakeholders (ex. Payments APIs) and require an engineering executive to buy-in. Even if you fall into this second camp, do not write off targeting developer communities as engineering executives often ask engineers to evaluate and run POCs on different options, and having a brand touch with that engineer can tip the scales in your favor.

Online Communities for Developers#

• Hacker News: Keep your content highly technical and low on advertising. Engineering blogs and tutorials perform best here
• Reddit: Similar to Hacker News, find subreddits tailored to developers like /r/programming
• Twitter/X: Enticing, bite sized content that expands to a full blog or video works well. Again, tutorials and helpful content does best.

Online Communities for Engineering Executives#

• LinkedIn: This is the primary arena for most business professionals. Getting attention on LinkedIn can be difficult if you are starting from scratch. For startups, its more fruitful to make posts under your personal account (which has connections) and then share that post under your company's account. Once you have a sizeable following, consider posting LinkedIn-native content like articles, videos, webinars, and gif system diagrams as these perform much better than posts that just link back to your website.

Direct Outreach#

We will dive deeper into outreach in later sections, but this is the perfect time to dip your toes into spreading the work in a manual method. You likely already have a network of contacts across your socials, so consider reaching out en-masse to anyone who could be a potential buyer. This includes LinkedIn messages, Twitter DMs, texts - whatever it takes to reach your buyer. This is quite hard to scale so you can consider using automation tools (ex. Drippi for Twitter/X) to make your life easier.

Expansion Phase: Scale your API Product#

Congratulations, you've (hopefully) successfully launched your API and have an initial set of users. Now what? Well this is where the hard part begins as your try and grow usage and adoption of your API product once the launch-frenzy has died away. This is where marketing will make or break the success of your API - and below are the best tactics for promoting your API post-launch.

Content Marketing & SEO#

The most impactful investment you can likely make into your API product is content marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This has the potential to bring in thousands of high-intent leads into your platform at a very low cost. This can be very frustrating to invest time and energy into as the reality is that the majority of the content you produce will not get you any traction - content marketing is very "head-heavy". However, we've seen that time and time again, the companies that succeed are those that crack SEO and content marketing - you only need to go viral once to make it all worth it. Here's a general guideline on how organizations create a content flywheel to efficiently produce content across multiple channels.

1. Choose a Topic: This is likely the hardest step out of them all. Deciding what you want to produce content around can be difficult, but there are various methods to help you decide. When in doubt, use SEO tools like Semrush or Google Search Trends to find topics related to your API that have a low keyword difficult (ie. there isn't a lot of existing related content). You can also take customer feedback or support questions and make content around that as well. Lastly, you can try and leverage the "hype" method from before and try and create integration tutorials between your API and a much larger product (ex. Hubspot) that has customers you want.
2. Create a Video: We suggest investing in a video-first approach for content. There is likely much more competition in the textual space (ex. blogs) than video space for your content. These videos can be features within your documentation as another way to improve your DevX. Posting high quality videos consistently to Youtube also helps build a following you wouldn't have otherwise.
3. Remix the Video: Now comes the "flywheel" part - you need to maximize the value of the content you just produces by converting it into as many other formats as possible. Take a livestream/long-form video and cut it into clips. Post those clips when you are working on your next content piece. Resize those clips and push them across Youtube Shorts. Take the video transcripts and use them to create accompanying blogs. Use AI to summarize those blogs into social media posts. I think you get it now. Make sure your run the written content through SEO analyzers to ensure you have the right keywords and metadata on the page to rank highly.
4. Share across Socials & Communities: Next, you have to blast all of this content you created across the web (with backlinks back to your website for SEO). In addition to your own social media accounts and communities like Hacker News there are other places to post. If your topic is a tutorial to solve a problem, search Stack Overflow or Reddit to see if anyone else had this problem and link your blog as a solution. If you wrote an integration doc, see if you can get the integrated platform to share your posts.
5. Get Feedback & Address/Document: You might be lucky enough to get feedback or comments on your videos or posts. Be sure to address this feedback promptly so the feedback giver is thoroughly impressed and provides even more feedback and engagement in the future. This is also a good time to go through your content and update any relevant documentation, with questions you were asked added to an FAQ section.

API Directories#

API directories (also known as API indexes) are essentially lists of APIs that developers will find useful when solving certain problems. Imagine you needed an API for sending emails. Sure, you could just type that into Google - and you'll find options like SendGrid and Mailgun - but you might miss out on other APIs like Resend that are potentially more affordable or easier to use. These days, most established APIs have the resources to invest heavily in ads and SEO, while many startups or new API teams do not - essentially leaving you with fewer options. API directories act as (sometimes) neutral platforms where all APIs get indexed, are discoverable, and are presented similarly.

API Marketplaces#

An API Marketplace is a platform where you can discover, purchase, and integrate with APIs. This differs from API Directories, which only facilitate the discovery of APIs. For users looking to find an API to solve their problems, API Marketplaces provide an easy interface to learn about different APIs, test them out, subscribe, and view analytics about usage across multiple subscribed APIs. For API developers, API Marketplaces provide a method of getting your API in front of potential customers, and they often handle hard problems like user/subscription management, displaying analytics, quotas/rate-limits, billing, and more. For this service, API Marketplaces typically charge a percentage of subscription revenue.

iPaaS Platforms#

Integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is a set of automated tools that integrate software applications that are deployed in different environments. Large businesses that run enterprise-level systems often use iPaaS to integrate applications and data that live on premises and in both public and private clouds. These services talk to eachother through APIs, which are featured within the integration marketplaces of the iPaaS platforms. By becoming an integration platform with an iPaaS, you can get in front of less technical users and expose them to your API's services - potentially winning over customers you wouldn't have otherwise.

Unified APIs#

A Unified API, also known as a universal API, is a single application programming interface (API) that combines multiple APIs from the same software category. This can include APIs for accounting, HR, CRM, or e-commerce. Unified APIs can simplify integration by providing a standard endpoint, authentication, and normalized data. If your API is in a category with a lot of competitors (ex. Accounting, CRM, etc.) and works best when integrated with/used alongside other platforms, then you should consider putting your API in a Unified API. If your ICP is already using a unified API - even better, they can seamlessly switch from your competitor to you.

Influencer Marketing#

Influencer marketing can be both tricky and expensive - especially for API products. We would recommend sticking to videos as thats where many developers are introduced to new tools and they can watch the video to see your API in action. There are generally two approaches to influencer marketing - you can either invest heavily into a handful of high-reach but expensive creators (high risk, high reward) through a sponsored segment or you can do dedicated tutorial videos with several smaller creators to showcase your API. Both approaches can work but trial and error can be quite expensive, with dedicated videos costing thousands of dollars.

Keyword Monitoring#

Getting to your ICP when they are starting their buying journey is essential, wouldn't it be great if you could know exactly when they started talking about solutions like yours? Well you actually can attempt this by making good use of the search features across social media and developer communities. Here's a checklist of what you should be doing weekly to find people that might be ready to buy:

• Sign up for F5Bot and set up keyword monitoring for your problem space across Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters. For example, if you're building a payments API, setup monitoring on "Payments API", "Stripe", "payments via API", "API for Payments", and anything else your buyer might be searching for. Don't be overly pushy when replying to these threads.
• Search for the same terms as the previous step in LinkedIn and leave comments on popular posts from the past week, complementing the author and slyly mentioning your API product
• Same approach as above for Twitter/X
• Search through Quora and Stack Overflow for questions that contain your keyword. Google's forums tab on search makes this easy

Ads#

APIs aren't exactly the easiest thing to sell to ads users. If you invested heavily into your developer experience and made the experience self-serve as we recommended earlier, you might be able to convert some users to signing up - but typically its hard to get low intent users to actually start using your API - especially if they click in while scrolling Facebook on their phones.

Effective targeting is crucial, so consider the following advertising networks for your API:

• Google: Set up search ads based on some of the keywords you made in the previous section, and then set up re-targeting based on who visits your API's website and takes actions. Make sure to filter down to countries and other demographics you care about.
• Carbon Ads / Ethical Ads: These are developer-oriented ads networks that allow you to display ads on very popular developer resource sites like dev.to and Mozilla Developer Network. They can get quite expensive and don't quite have the most robust tooling so invest with caution
• Reddit/Twitter: Both of these social networks have large developer communities that you can target. Although their platforms aren't as powerful or refined as Google's - you are still exposing millions of developers to your API, which helps your brand
• LinkedIn: If you are in the executive engineering buyer camp - then LinkedIn ads are likely a better avenue for you. You can refine targeting down to essentially your sales ICP.

Sponsorships#

Very similar to ads - sponsorships are more enduring relationships for advertisement-like placement somewhere. If you are primarily targeting developers I would recommend sponsoring developer newsletters and relevant open source projects. The latter will help build you good-will within the community.

If you are targeting executives, its a bit trickier - certain podcasts are beloved by engineering execs in Silicon Valley (ex. Acquired). You'll have to do some research to see what is relevant to your ICP. You should also consider sponsoring API conferences (ex. Gartner, Nordic API Summit, API World) as this is a great way to meet your buyers face-to-face. Many of these conferences are less effective and poorly attended post-pandemic so this is not a silver bullet.

Cold Outreach#

This is bordering on sales so I will keep this brief. Do not send cold emails to developers. Developers dislike being sold to more than they dislike blatant advertising. They will mark you as spam and tank your email domain reputation. Instead send emails to higher level executives at your ICP companies and they will pass down the task of starting a POC to their developer team.

How Do I Decide Which Methods to Use?#

We get it - you have a limited monetary and engineering budget for this API product and can't follow all of our API promotion recommendations. We recommend at least trying the self-serve digital-based methods mentioned above (ex. all the dev-time recommendations, ads, keyword monitoring, content, sponsorships). Ensure you have robust tracking (ex. UTM links) on all of these methods as well as your signup funnel (ex. Google Tag Manager or Posthog) so you can track your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) per promotion method. Cut the methods that aren't working and reallocate budget to the ones that are, or consider some of the pricier or more labor intensive options (ex. conferences or partnerships). What's a good CAC? Well that depends on the LTV (LifeTime Value) of your customers - compare the amount of API revenue you expect to bring in from them and ensure your CAC is well below that.

Another way of deciding between marketing tactics is the "Burger King method". McDonald's spends millions on studying the ideal locations to open up their restaurants. Burger King open up new restaurants next to new McDonald's locations. Take a look at which methods your competition is currently using to promote their APIs and copy on the ones that might be working. For example, check out your competitor in LinkedIn's Ads Library and see what messaging they have stuck with vs what they have dropped. Likewise, snoop around you competition's API docs and support forums to see what they are doing well and what can be improved.

Putting it All Together#

You should approach your API marketing as a scientist - come up with ideas, form hypotheses, ensure you can track results, run promotions in isolation, and then analyze results to see what you learned. The combination of development stage promotion, effective launch-day marketing, and intensive expansion phase campaigns will put you much further ahead on API product marketing than the majority of organizations today. Good Luck Luck is for the uninformed - take what we've taught you, go forth and promote!