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 social and paid search. Also any automation tools that can optimize your customer onboarding and CRM workflows. * Engage. Host webinars, hang out in your audience’s usual watering holes, and talk to at least 1 customer every week to keep a pulse on your community, get regular feedback, and keep iterating on your content and initiatives roadmap.

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 discussions and peer-to-peer engagement. * Identify your most active developers and invite them to an in-person or virtual meetup to formally launch your community and recognize them as champions or advocates. * Continue these meetups and empower your community members to organize their own user meetups in their local regions globally. * Incentivize and recognize community members with badges for different activities. Developer Evangelists can help foster technical discussions, offer live support, and moderate your community channels as you scale and grow your community. Coming from deep technical backgrounds, developer evangelists can become the perfect bridge between your product teams and customers, help build trust and credibility, and ultimately accelerate community growth.

1. 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 build before spreading the word. 2. Be authentic. Developers will cut through marketing noise really fast. Start with the 'why' but never forget the 'how'—spend more time on the 'how.' Get subject matter experts to write and present content, e.g., getting your engineers to talk through how they built and tested a particular feature live on a webinar. Don't worry about writing the perfect copy and making picture-perfect slides; developers know that the 'demo gods' are not always in our favor, and things can go haywire anytime. They will appreciate your honesty and authenticity in every communication you orchestrate. 3. Engage the community. They say every movie has an audience - I believe every product has its community. Find it, grow it, and nurture it. Get your developers to learn from each other and experts at your company - whether this is on your proprietary developer portal, Slack, Discord, or other channels. Identify and recognize your customer developer advocates and encourage them to mentor new developers. This will help build trust and improve product adoption.

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 and sandboxes. These audience segments are not always mutually exclusive, and developers today could be buyers and executives tomorrow. Hence you are right in needing to balance the messaging. Three ways that have worked for us are: 1. Create separate messaging and assets highlighting product benefits for both technical and non-technical audiences. Tie both to overall business outcomes like saving cost/time/resources, improving efficiency, or speeding up innovation that everyone will relate to. 2. Map your buyer/customer journey content to assess whether you have enough coverage across all stages of the lifecycle. A lack of good onboarding and adoption-focused content, such as technical webinars and use case guidance, can create customer retention problems. 3. Test your messaging and personas regularly, yearly if possible, to ensure your understanding of the customer pain points is current, and your messaging is still relevant to both buyers and developers.

Developers look for easy and seamless onboarding, fast time to value, honest and authentic content and messaging with clear technical value propositions, street-cred about the product among their network of peer developers, and an existing thriving community of the product’s users. They don’t want to talk to a sales rep and would much rather see-try-buy the product themselves.

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 evangelizing technical benefits first. Developers like giving feedback and appreciate it when their input is valued and acted upon. Developer Marketing is about creating these feedback channels, making sure that developers’ voice is heard, and that it is influencing the product roadmap.

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 product in question), and any leading indicators of possible expansions or churn in the future.

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 product announcements, dev tooling, case studies, and tutorials.

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 community, and accelerating your platform extensibility story.

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 product in question), and any leading indicators of possible expansions or churn in the future.

* 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 promotions. * Be authentic and humble in everything you do; it is easy to lose trust and credibility with this audience and hard to earn it back. * Align on KPIs/OKRs with all cross-functional stakeholder teams. Tie KPIs to NPS, adoption, and retention.

1. 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. 2. 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. 3. Scale your efforts with targeted multi-channel marketing campaigns, hire dedicated developer evangelists, recognize and reward champion developers 4. Finally, don’t forget to get continuous feedback, test, iterate, and optimize your efforts!

* 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 promotions. * Be authentic and humble in everything you do; it is easy to lose trust and credibility with this audience and hard to earn it back. * Align on KPIs/OKRs with all cross-functional stakeholder teams. Tie KPIs to NPS, adoption, and retention.

The golden rule here is to make your messaging clear and actionable. A good template would be: Achieve <business outcome> by using our <tool/feature/SDK/API>, which enables you to <overcome specific pain point.> See how <link to customer story> does it in action. Get started now <link to docs/tutorials> 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 documentation.

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 customers