This article derives from a presentation from Product Marketing Trailblazers in December 2021. Watch this presentation, and others, via our OnDemand service.
Thank you for reading this article on developer marketing. I hope it helps you build phenomenal developer campaigns and achieve success.
I’m Abhishek Ratna. I’m a mechanical engineer by education, was a professional developer in my early career, and have been a marketer for over a decade. I’ve marketed everything from video games to fashion to shoes, to enterprise software to advertising solutions to APIs.
During this time, I’ve worked with and learned from incredible marketers at Facebook, Microsoft, Zulily, and Databricks. Right now, I’m at Google, where I focus on growth and product marketing efforts for TensorFlow. My audience is our AI and machine learning developers.
In this article, we’ll talk about:
- Why developer marketing matters,
- Why developers hate (traditional) marketing,
- Why you need to establish developer marketing personas and segments,
- How to craft your developer personas,
- How to build content for your developers,
- Where to uncover compelling topics for developers,
- Why running developer campaigns is hard,
- Persona maker: A tool for segmentation, and
- KPIs for marketing and content performance.
Why developer marketing matters
The business of marketing to developers has evolved rapidly over the last few years.
As recently as a decade ago, buying technology was a tightly controlled process. Central IT teams dictated which tools and technologies could be used in their organizations. They oversaw budgets and procurement and had strict policies governing the use of the software.
Times have changed. Mobile technologies appeared, BYOD came along, and the cloud was born. Software development transformed dramatically. Waterfall models gave way to agile models that cleared the way for DevOps.
Businesses started competing on their ability to build and ship continuously. The API economy broke the stranglehold of monolithic service providers and companies started building their own stacks of tools based on open standards.
