For a heavily dev-centric product, how do you approach the balance between classic content/SEO, product marketing, and sales enablement - and how do you find the right channels to reach out to developers vs. commercial audiences?

Great question, I get in arguments about this all the time! Heh. You ask the question the right way - it’s about balance.

Starting with my least favorite topic – SEO! The benefits of SEO isn’t lost on me, but for technical products, authenticity trumps all IMHO. I always cringe when I come across a bland, “what is [tech topic]?” blog post. I would much rather land on a “how to do [tech thing]?” blog post. But the best lesson I ever got in marketing was, “if you don’t cringe just a little, you’re not doing it right.”

For those two examples specifically, the “what is” posts should be targeted towards the high value keywords that fill the top of the funnel, and the “how to” posts should be targeted on the long tail examples that get people through the funnel. Now at volume, though, those long tail posts become both SEO winners and useful examples in one. That’s the dream, it just takes time.

Balancing internal enablement/external facing content is another tricky one. Personally, I get pulled in the enablement direction more than anything else, but there’s so much outbound content I’d rather be working on. I’ve tried to knock ‘em both down with a single piece, but that hasn’t really panned out the way I hoped it would – content really needs to be written specifically for the audience. Because this really comes down to priorities on both ends, I do my best to create content that hits as much of a “one to many” as possible. That’s especially important with enablement – my field organization is well over 1,000 people so I have to be extra diligent to not get pulled into a personal “one to one” training scenario.

Which gets to channels – “one to many” is pretty important here, too, but in a focused way. I look for communities over anything else – tech publications are okay in the commercial sense, but all too often I feel like I’m just throwing content over the wall.

So that’s a long answer that basically restates your question that it’s about balance – but I hope some of those examples were helpful!

The most important thing here is to ensure there is consistency and alignment across the entire company on the GTM motion, and the metrics that matter. While a large number of dev-centric companies deploy a bottoms-up PLG type of motion, it is not the exclusive model. Many also deploy top-down motions for enterprise customers, or use some combination of both. For bottoms-up, the north star metric might actually be active customers, and for top-down it's revenue. Your marketing strategy should then follow. For bottoms-up / PLG, prioritize an evangelism function, nurturing an active community, content/SEO, because that will drive more organic traffic, translating to user growth and building up the long tail pipeline. For top-down, there's a larger emphasis on pitch decks, sales enablement, beacuse that will create more short term pipeline. If it's both... then there needs to be alignment between sales and marketing on: where's the line drawn on which customers (typically enterprise) will this motion be deployed against, and given a limited budget, how should resources be split between the top and bottom motion to achieve the metric targets?

In terms of the right channel, typically speaking developers don't like to be "marketed to", they like to learn. So instead of a webinar, host a hands-on workshop. Give them access to your product and teach them something, and then reward them for their efforts. Never make them sit through a 30 min slide deck presentation. The tone/voice of the content is important too: in a blog post, resist the urge to oversell your product as they are a skepetical audience. Have a SE or developer within the company proof read it before it goes live.

I think this is one of those situations where we’ve been led to believe there’s a difference between marketing that’s valuable for developers and marketing that valuable to the business.

“What is..” or “how do you..” or “what’s the difference between..” content still works for SEO because even advanced buyers appreciate gut checks. They want to know what they believe is still in line with what market leading companies believe. We see time and time again that even our most sophisticated prospects who are deep into bake-offs and evaluations with other companies will read a “what is an internal developer portal” blog on our website.

By focusing on marketing that educates (not just content but events, roundtables, webinars, etc) you’ll cover all points in the funnel as well as audience maturity—beginner developers who want to skill up and use your brand as a trusted guide, an advanced buyer who wants to make sure they’re staying ahead of the latest definitions, and your own business by building organic search and brand awareness.