AMA: Splunk Director, Product Marketing, Rinita Datta on Developer Product Marketing

As a solo marketer, I imagine you are constrained on multiple fronts. In my mind, you could prioritize these three high-impact areas: Create. Commit to a steady stream of SEO-optimized content that covers thought leadership, product features, use cases/how-to, and case studies. Try and leverage other SMEs within and without your company, including influencers in your industry to write and create content. Invest. If you have a budget, spend it on performance marketing tactics, including paid soci ...Read More

Have the right foundations. Build basic getting started and 101 content, including easy-to-access documentation. It doesn't have to cover everything you offer right away, but it needs to be good enough for developers to follow and for you to promote. If possible, keep testing the quality and quantity of your documentation and tutorial content with select developer champions. If you are starting fresh, map out your ideal developer journey, map your content gaps, and prioritize what you need to bu ...Read More

I see you have a lot of documentation and developer content on your developer portal. I think you can take the following steps to building an active and engaged developer community Select a channel where your developers can interact with peers and experts—it could be Slack, Discord, Reddit, StackOverflow, X, HackerNews or a custom online forum. Highlight it on this portal and invite developers to sign up. See your channel with some FAQs, foundational content, or product news that can spark discu ...Read More

We are tracking the following key metrics for our developer marketing and developer relations programs: Engagement: Developer NPS, support CSAT, event attendance to registration ratio Reach: Community growth, dev license requests, dev portal site interactions Usage: Product usage metrics, app installs, app marketplace site interactions Ideally, marketing should pay attention to product retention rates, customer lifetime value, feature usage metrics (which can be specific to the feature or produc ...Read More

While developers may not be the buyers in B2B, they are most certainly influencing the purchase decisions. Developers also influence purchase decisions in their personal and professional networks outside their organization. Your executive and buyer audience will care more about ROI, scalability, no. of integrations, and security posture. Whereas the developer and end users will care more about technical details like performance, feasibility of implementation and real use case examples with demos ...Read More

Here are some tips on what you could do differently: Highlight technical value propositions more in your sales enablement collateral Invest time in technical training for your salesforce Ensure your salesforce has easy access to technical information, kudos if you can leverage an internal GPT for this! Think about how you can create self-service demos and sandbox experiences that your sales team also has visibility into Encourage your salesforce to share technical content and resources with cust ...Read More

We are tracking the following key metrics for our developer marketing and developer relations programs: Engagement: Developer NPS, support CSAT, event attendance to registration ratio Reach: Community growth, dev license requests, dev portal site interactions Usage: Product usage metrics, app installs, app marketplace site interactions Ideally, marketing should pay attention to product retention rates, customer lifetime value, feature usage metrics (which can be specific to the feature or produc ...Read More

Developers like a see-try-buy approach. Find ways to make that happen as seamlessly and frictionlessly as possible. Cut through the fluff and get to the ‘how,’ the examples, and the tutorials faster. Be helpful; do not sell. Do not gate content to get leads. Think about what you are offering in return and if it’s substantial enough for developers to share their information with you. Ensure you have the right foundational content, documentation, and tutorials before starting big campaigns and pro ...Read More

Developer Marketing is everything you do to attract, engage, and retain your product’s technical end users. Developers are very vocal, cynical about traditional marketing, and very influential in SaaS purchasing decisions. Not catering to their needs and wants in your messaging, content, and GTM tactics invites churn, low CSAT, and maybe even a bad reputation. Developer Marketing is thus shifting your mindset and approach from demand generation to community building, from selling first to evange ...Read More

Start with researching your developer audience's needs, wants and pain points. In parallel, interview your internal stakeholders and align on common KPIs/OKRs/goals to achieve from your developer marketing program. Use these insights to identify content and/or messaging gaps along the ideal developer journey. Build or leverage your existing community to socialize your message and nurture peer learning and adoption of products/features/SDK/tooling/apps, etc. Scale your efforts with targeted multi ...Read More

The golden rule here is to make your messaging clear and actionable. A good template would be:  Achieve   by using our , which enables you to See how does it in action. Get started now Think of the journey you want your developer to go on. You wouldn’t jump straight to the manual of a particular model if you just decided to purchase your own barbecue grill. Start simple and keep increasing the level of technical detail as your developer audience makes their way from a Google search to your docum ...Read More

Developers like a see-try-buy approach. Find ways to make that happen as seamlessly and frictionlessly as possible. Cut through the fluff and get to the ‘how,’ the examples, and the tutorials faster. Be helpful; do not sell. Do not gate content to get leads. Think about what you are offering in return and if it’s substantial enough for developers to share their information with you. Ensure you have the right foundational content, documentation, and tutorials before starting big campaigns and pro ...Read More

In our experience, the technical audience engages most with emails during the onboarding phase. Once they attain value, email engagement tends to taper off, and they are more likely to look for self-serve resources to serve their needs. Hence, we take a multi-channel approach. While email still gives a high ROI, we invest time in in-product messaging, regular events like technical webinars and virtual AMAs, reminders and recaps on Slack, in-person events and meetups, blogs highlighting new produ ...Read More

As you are just starting out, I think you should prioritize content and demand gen first. Create a steady stream of SEO-optimized content that covers thought leadership, product features, use cases/how-to, and case studies. Amplify these through your demand generation campaigns and reach a sizeable customer base with success stories to share. Once you have built this foundation, I’d hire DevRel to start creating technical content, engaging with developer end users, getting feedback, building com ...Read More