Here’s the thing about: Why You Need To Stop Sleeping On Developer Marketing

After joining Kong Inc, I was met with a brand new term to be added to my business vocabulary, and it occurred to me nearly immediately just how impactful this cog in the marketing machine is.

Developer marketing is a collection of principles, strategies, and tactics that companies use to increase their product’s awareness, adoption, and advocacy across various technical audiences.

Now, why on earth, you ask, should we care about our builders and learn how to best communicate with them?

News flash, my friends: They are the captains now.

An effective developer marketing program will educate technical audiences on your product’s features, and help them solve their problems using your product, with the final effect of increasing product adoption and usage. 📈

A quick caveat: if you are selling a product directly to a consumer, developer marketing may not be at all relevant to you. If you are marketing a product or service tied to a software, then you can bet your bottoms that a developer is part of an evaluation process.

So let’s give developer marketing some love, and let us dig into the importance of caring about our biggest advocates’ needs and how to best deliver your chosen solutions to them.

Here’s the thing:

Why is developer marketing important?

Just as I’ve explained that everyone needs to become more technical, the population of software developers has grown beyond those with Computer Science degrees and expanded into capable individuals of all backgrounds, including the self-taught.

We can expect to reach 28.7 million developers by 2024, an increase of 3.2 million from 2020. At this rate, we can estimate that the population will reach 45 million developers globally in 2030.

According to Stackoverflow’s 2020 Developer Survey of 65,000 developers - a whopping 57% of respondents exert a great deal of influence in the organization’s technology purchasing decision. And more often than not, they not only have budgetary influence but budgetary authority as well.

So let’s summarize:

1. The developer population is rapidly expanding - more and more are entering the field each day.

2. They are our biggest group of advocates.

3. They hold and drive a great portion of purchasing decisions.

4. Your generic flashy clickbait will have very little effect on them.

The other thing is:

What are key drivers for developers?

Another new term that I learned: Developer Advocacy. This is a practice in which we show developers what they will be able to do with our product or service.

Education is, I would say, the key component in a developer marketing strategy.

For traditional consumers such as myself, the visuals, flash sales, and some personalization might be enough for me to make a purchase. Our developer friends are not so easily swayed.

Crafting the right messaging is another essential element to help you earn a developer’s trust. This audience is not here to be sold or marketed to; they are here to learn, improve, and utilize the best tools to solve their problems.

After speaking with some engineering colleagues recently, the drivers for choosing a product or service can be boiled down to three factors.

1. Friction and ease of use

   • Traditionally, you would find the top talent over at FAANG, but today, we’re seeing a shift, and developers are jumping ship to join smaller, more nimble companies where they can exert more control over their future.
     
     In a lean startup, where the pace can be blistering, friction is enemy number one.
     
     I asked one of my friends why he chose one API gateway over another, and his ultimate reason was simple: The amount of effort he has to put in to stand up a new environment.
     
     He is a one-person crew responsible for managing the entirety of his startup’s company development systems and processes. He needed a solution that would allow him to get to work as soon as possible while not having a massive overhead in long-term management.
     
     This is the reality of new technology. Many startups and smaller companies will have a very limited headcount so the easier it is to use your product, the more likely the developer will adopt it.
     

   • Most developers are skeptical of your marketing campaigns - they want to get hands-on experience to see for themselves.
     
     This means while they are going through the free trial, you need to launch an educational onboarding campaign, a feature-retargeting campaign, and a “ICYMI/Did you know” campaign.
     
     You are not trying to sell or market the product to them; you are simply educating them on the various features they could try for themselves.
     
     Some examples of campaigns I mentioned:
     

   • In the onboarding series, we know traditional marketing won’t work for them, so ask them: would they like to continue to receive tips and tricks emails to help them familiarize themselves with the product? Or would they rather receive less communication while they explore the product on their own? This will decrease the likelihood of us annoying them with unwelcome comms and is a great starting point for building that trust between your brand and potential customer.

   • If they have accessed X feature, track and use that event as a trigger event to serve them with an email or in-app message that will help make that feature more beneficial to them.

   • If they are 10 days into their free trial and your data indicates that they have yet to access some of your most valuable features, send an email or in-app message to point them to that feature. “Did you know you could do X with this feature?”

2. Access to resources - lots of it.

   • Developers are wicked good at Googling. If you have ever seen any developer’s browsers, you’d see that they are constantly reading Stackoverflow, Quora, Code Project, and probably Reddit.
     
     So you need to prioritize self-education resources for your product, and, most importantly, be where they are. YouTube videos and Reddit’s many developer subreddits are among the top two locations I would publish my company’s resources.
     
     This is where you can share new technology that will help improve their workflow and skills and perhaps provide an opportunity for them to access online courses and certifications as a reward for completing their training.
     
     Remember: You are not trying to sell to them; you are trying to help your product sell itself by educating them.

3. Establish a community.

   • Developers are not your leads. While you may belong to a developer marketing team, your main goal should be to advocate and demonstrate that your product is approved by the community of experienced developers.
     
     Establishing a community of developers that will back your product means creating an ecosystem where your company can rely on real users of your product to help answer technical support questions, learn best practices, and discover new use cases.
     
     Not only is this an excellent resource for developers, but this could also be where your organization can hire your next product expert, discover your next evangelist, and ultimately a channel to help you continue to build a relationship with your existing and potential customers alike.

The last thing I will mention today:

How to measure the success of your campaigns?

The technicality of measuring the success of your developer marketing campaigns is not unlike those of your traditional marketing campaigns.

You need access to a few data points, and I’ve rambled about trigger and conversion events time and again, so feel free to pause here, go read up on how to implement these events, come back to me, and we’ll talk a bit about the metrics you should measure.

Like any other marketing campaign, you are measuring the success of your programs based on the different milestones in the customer’s lifecycle. A few key indicators can be broken down into five areas.

1. Awareness

   • This might be self-explanatory to most and maybe a new metric for some. Awareness refers to how many developers your program is reaching. By looking at the number of:

     1. Social media mentions

     2. Social media subscribers

     3. Blog article engagements (Page views, read time, bounce rates)

     4. Hackathon submissions

     5. Developer event attendees

     6. Developer webinar registrations

     7. Developer newsletter subscribers

   You should be able to get an idea of how much awareness you have in the developer community. It will typically take multiple touchpoints after the user has reached this stage before progressing.

   So, determine what kind of content your potential customers are engaging with the most, and you can nurture those active groups with more similar content to nudge them in the right direction.

2. Adoption

   1. The next stage to gauge your performance is how many developers are adopting your product. Now, adoption does not necessarily mean they are “converted” per se. This indicator just simply tells us how many developers were curious enough to sign up to start exploring your product. For this stage, you could look at:

      • Number of new trial accounts WoW / MoM

      • Number of users added to the same account

      • Depending on your product or service, you could look at a specific feature, such as how many documents are sent, how many new templates are created, how many applications are being built or have been built, or how many 3rd party integrations have been implemented.

   By measuring these activities, you will be able to tell how much of your awareness campaign efforts are actually driving results. At this stage, you will also be able to see if the developers are enjoying your product.

3. Engagement

   1. The engagement rate is important for understanding how many of your “adopters” are likely to move on to the next step, which is converting to a paid subscriber. The metrics to look at are:

      • Number of sessions within your product during the trial period

      • How often are different features accessed

      • Average number of session count per user (not account)

      Engagement rate is a crucial metric to understand if your product is satisfying the developers and if they would use it in their daily workflows. It is important to analyze your net-new signups as well as engagement rate of your existing users over time.

4. Community

   1. As previously mentioned, developers want to learn your product first hand. The pillar of developer marketing is built on trusted community of users. A strong community of like-minded professionals and thought-leaders will add tremendous value to your product and organization. You should consider the following metrics to get a view into the effectiveness of your community building:

      • MoM growth rate of your developer community across all channels

      • Number of developers per group and number of total developers

      • Number of developer meetings per month

      • Number of developer groups and number of new groups added per month

      Engage with your community as often as possible. Run developer-focused webinars based on the most talked-about topics within the community. Answer questions regarding the many use cases of your product.
      
      Remember, this audience group is very skeptical of our marketing tactics, so do not come off as a marketer. Be there to genuinely help them succeed in solving problems they are facing.

5. Developer Satisfaction

   1. Now that you have attracted, converted, and curated a trusted group of valuable users, it’s time to consider how satisfied they are with your product. Determining this can be done by looking at:

      • NPS or Net Promoter Score

        1. This is a metric used in customer experience programs. NPS measures the loyalty of customers to a company or brand.

      • Analyzing your app store reviews across both iOS and Android (if you have a mobile app)

      • Analyzing your support tickets

      • Analyzing your CSAT or customer satisfaction scores

      • G2, Gartner, and Trustpilot are among a few websites to keep an eye on as users often post written reviews about a product or software, which could significantly influence potential buyers one way or another.

In short (HA), what I am trying to drive home here is that developers hold a lot of the purchasing power, and you cannot try to sell to these users. Show them that you are here to help them be successful.

Have documents on documents on documents. Build a strong community in which they can hear directly from other users and let the product do the selling.

By monitoring the metrics mentioned, you will have a really good view of what parts of your product developers are learning most about. What parts of your products are they ignoring? and what parts of the product are developers talking most about?

You will understand their needs, wants, and must-haves, and ultimately you will be able to improve the product that will gain you that long-term retention you are after in the end.

We’ve only just touched the very tip of the iceberg. As I myself, am still learning more about developer marketing and what works.

Perhaps next time we could talk about some campaign ideas? Or can you share with me what you have done that worked out well for you?

Let’s 🌮 about it

• Jello