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Developer newsletters get straight to the inbox of people who are actively interested in a topic. That should make them a great channel for building awareness, but how can you make the most of them?
In this roundtable, we focus on how to make the most of advertising in developer newsletters, as well as getting your content into newsletters organically. With guests Stacey Kruczek from Aerospike, Asrar Khan from Google, and Lisa Sidlow from TLDR.
Matthew Revell:
Hello and welcome to another edition of the DevRel Roundtable. And this time we’re doing it live on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitch. A topic that often comes up is how do we reach developers through newsletters? So increasingly there are lots of daily and weekly newsletters that developers are using to keep up on top of what’s new. Is there a room for us to use them within our DevRel programs? I’m joined by people from Google, TLDR, and Aerospike today, and I’ll bring them all on one by one. And let’s start with Stacy Kreek from Aerospike.
Stacey Kruczek:
Hi, thanks so much. And you got my name right, so that’s really good. Kruczek. That’s hard.
Matthew Revell:
Well, thanks for joining us. So Stacy, developer newsletters are, I guess they’re hard to get right and we’ll dive into that in a bit. But I’d love to know what led you to use newsletters to reach developers?
Stacey Kruczek:
Well, a couple of things. When I walked into my role in dev marketing, dev relations team, many moons ago at my first company, they had established a small community and they had really done it through the newsletters and also through their webinars, but the webinars of course being advertised on the newsletters. So they had sort of started that along very organically. It wasn’t anything, they weren’t tied to any major systems like Eloqua, Marketo or anything like that. It was just done basically a newsletter if you had interest sign up. And that community started at about 2000. And then there was a need for me to come in and help those developer advocates with their writing and to make sure that they were providing the latest technology updates to them, the updates on our STKs, things of that nature. And that newsletter became the tool for us to be able to do that.
But what it also provided, it provided exposure to the external community. And by that I mean we were able to penetrate the market space in terms of, we worked a lot with ISVs. We were primarily on a Google development platform at that point with Android, and we were able to do a further outreach with those communities, working with those teams as well in those external communities. I think developer newsletters at that time were very organic. We were still kind of feeling our way through ’em. But what I tried to do and always still try to do is to make sure that we’re just giving snippets of information to the developers. Because as a developer and just cognizant of my own time, I don’t have a lot of time to read through things. I’m not going to sit through and read through a blog for 30 minutes if I know if it’s not applicable to me.
So I really wanted to make sure that we gave them those bullet of if it applies to you, here’s a great piece on this, or if you want to hear from one of our SMEs, they built this project or this proof of concept. And so that’s what it became. And the nice thing about that is, is that we just kept pushing that with the community and also through our webinars. So we were able to advertise our webinars through there and that community grew. And when I left, it was close to I think 30,000 after about a six or seven year period.
Matthew Revell:
So for you, it’s very much about your own programs newsletter, reaching the developers who mattered to your program, and it was something that you built organically over time. I’d love to dive into that in a bit more detail. That’s a great kind of pracy of where you sought it out. And obviously you’ve been using developer newsletters since then, so we can dive into that as well. I’d like to bring in Khan from Google Cloud ra. You’ve been using paid advertising in newsletters that’s different from Stacy’s experience of that organic growth of a newsletter. So what is it that, what gap were you trying to solve when you decided to take out paid advertising?
Asrar Khan:
First of all, thank you for having me here. Matthew, really at Google, our goal is to reach as many developers as we can. And when we think about paid advertising specifically, we’re really interested, like I said, in capturing the masses and building awareness about our initiatives. Some of the key things that we’re really looking at is how do we get a highly targeted audience? And when I say that, it’s really sometimes we’re targeting specific niche of software within software developers like key personas. At times we’re sort of targeting the broader software engineers or developers and practitioners depending on our key initiatives. The second thing, we’re always interested in how do we reach out to, how do we work with broader communities that have engaged readership, right? And that’s where really that paid advertising comes into effect as well. Along with that, we also work with Lisa here a few months ago with TLDR for example.
It brings that incredible amount of credibility and trust and really a variety of formats. So newsletters offer flexibility in the ad formats where you have banner ads sponsored content, dedicated email blast, et cetera. So really as we think of the broader marketing makes, we’re thinking about how do you promote through direct communication and how do you drive that content integration. So it’s not like blatant ads to the developers because that’s really what they’re not interested in from a distribution standpoint, really looking at that digital delivery and access to niche communities, as I said, again, from a marketing mix perspective, from a product perspective, it’s such a great sort of reinforcing function because we can clearly communicate our product benefits or the key messages that we’re trying to drive with the audience. And then from a price perspective, we’re always interested in what’s the perceived value of that feature in that respecting newsletter so we can enhance the perceived value of our products and services as well. And really at the end of the day, what we’re trying to drive is that developer engagement across the board.
Matthew Revell:
Great. So for your case, it is been direct access to specific developer personas by placing adverts in newsletters that reach those developers?
Asrar Khan:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if we take a very targeted approach towards developer marketing, so if we know some of the initiatives are very applicable to web developers versus app developers, you want to make sure we meet them where they are. So really then what are the communities, what are the newsletters out there who we can partner and work with together to reach out to those developers? Just so the messaging is very inclusive and targeted towards them and resonates well at the end of the day.
Matthew Revell:
Okay, great. Thanks. So you mentioned Lisa from TLDR. I’ll bring Lisa Sidlow in now. Lisa, thanks for joining us. You work at TLDR, you’ve got quite a bit of experience in working with developer newsletters. What is it specifically from your point of view about developer newsletters that makes them useful to developer marketers and DevRelpeople?
Lisa Sidlow:
Alright, well first of all, thanks for letting me join your round table here and ra, thank you for the shout out. I’ve been in developer newsletter marketing for coming on 20 years now. And some of the things that are great about developer newsletters is you can get a message out in a short amount of time to a wide audience. So one of our newsletters goes out to 1.2 million subscribers and we can send that out in a matter of hours. So there’s a wide reach there, but also you can tell more of a story than you could in a banner. For example, the newsletters as R mentioned, are native. You can have up to a hundred words and really tell a story and articulate the message that you want the developers to have and then get it out to a large audience in a short amount of time. Time. Also, newsletters are great for driving traffic back to your site. You can use content, you can use a call to action. So there’s a lot of different things that you can do with a newsletter that you can’t necessarily do with a banner or other forms of advertising
Matthew Revell:
I guess as well. You mentioned banners. We all know that developers tend to use ad blocking more than the general web population. Are you seeing people turn to newsletter advertising as a way around that issue?
Lisa Sidlow:
Yes, and with all the ad blocking and things, sometimes the banners don’t even get seen by the developers. Most of them have ad blocking turned on. So with the newsletter formats, most of the newsletters have copy and it’s just text, so it’s bypassing some of the ad blocking.
Matthew Revell:
Great. Alright, thanks. So I think one thing that would be helpful to look at is the landscape of developer newsletters. Now obviously there’s several developer newsletters in the TLDR stable and we can cover those, but there are companies like Cooper Press who have JavaScript weekly, front end weekly and a bunch of quite focused newsletters. And then I guess there are others too out there. But Lisa, from your point of view, I guess you have a fairly broad view of what’s out there. What would you say, including the TLDR ones, what are the newsletters that you know of and how are they different from one another?
Lisa Sidlow:
That’s a long list. So I’ll say that the Cooper Press newsletters I’ve heard performed very well, right? And he’s got a few of them smaller distribution. So it just depends on who you’re targeting, the messaging that you want to utilize and the size of the audience you want to reach. So some of these newsletters companies I’ve worked at before, so I’m very familiar with ’em. And like you said, there are a lot of different newsletters out there, some smaller ones like Bite by Go, the pointer are great. Hacker News is one the new Stack DZ zone code project. So it just depends on what your goals are and what newsletters you want to choose based on who you’re trying to reach, pricing, what the format of the ads are. Some of the newsletters use actual banners within the newsletter. I like the native format a little bit better because like I said, it can get, the HTM L isn’t in there, it’s not being blocked. So yeah, there is a wide variety and some JavaScript weekly whatever, very specific. So it just depends on what you’re looking for.
Matthew Revell:
Well I suppose then if we just stick with advertising for the moment, Ezra, what was it that led you to choose TLDR specifically, but also when you’re considering which newsletters to advertise in? I’d love to know what criteria you use. You did mention developer personas, but it’d be great to drill down a little bit.
Asrar Khan:
Yeah, absolutely. So from our perspective, some of the key criteria that we’re looking at, I think the biggest thing we’re looking at is a highly targeted audience. But when we say targeting or when I think about targeted audience, what that really means is are we surfacing the right offers for this audience? Are we surfacing the right benefits for this audience, the ones that resonate with them? Because if you’re targeting app developers and we’re marketing to security professionals, it just would not resonate. And there are two key things that leads to. Number one is we want to be very thoughtful of the organizations that we work with. So we want to make sure we highly value and respect the developers that are part of their community. So we want to make sure the ads that we’re placing or the messaging, the initiatives that we’re driving through them really resonate with the developers because again, it leads to that credibility and trust not only for Google Cloud, but also for the newsletter like in this case TLDR as well and developers.
It sort of leads to that stickiness for the developers because the messaging resonates and relates to ’em. The second thing, what I would say is as an outcome of that, the chances, the tendency of developers to take certain action, learn more about certain initiatives, programs, upcoming launches, technology, whatever you are trying to promote or join a community, that tends to increase significantly because again, at the end of the day, everything relates to what I’m trying to do myself. The third thing I would also say is compared to broader advertising channels that we can use, developer newsletter ads actually tend to be quite affordable. And especially as you think about affordability from a perspective of the return on investment for reaching specialized audiences, and you can also play around with your ad placement. Of course, all the ads that we place, they clearly tagged as sponsor developers know that this is an ad versus this is something that was organically put in the newsletter.
But at the same time, it provides us that flexibility to have a primary ad, a secondary ad, sort of primary being at the top of the newsletter, secondary being somewhere in between or the tertiary sort of being towards the end of the newsletter. And what we can also do is understand what drives what kind of behavior, meaning there are developers who just basically scroll through really quickly without even reading the first sentence. So in that case, maybe we place our ads more on the secondary placement versus the primary placement. But then there are also, depending on the developer persona, there are developers based on our research who tend to read everything like ai ml. It just happens to be a really hot topic topic like a primary ad placement there makes a lot more sense versus web developers where I would personally just given the learnings and the data that I’ve seen go for a secondary placement in that newsletter. And like I said, what I also appreciate about the newsletter is the flexibility in the variety of formats format. I know Lisa talked about banner ads while they can be blocked, but you also have then the sponsored content. You can even always do a dedicated email boss or really integrate your product into a relevant article for more of a native field through that newsletter as well. So there are definitely tactics we can go about as we think about advertising and marketing through the developer newsletter.
Matthew Revell:
Let’s dive into some of those details because there’s a lot to unpack there. I think the first thing that everyone’s going to be thinking, or certainly I am is you mentioned budget, so what do we need to and return on investment? And specifically you said about it being potentially more effective and more efficient with budget than other methods. So what are we talking about when it comes to paying for advertising and newsletters? Are there certain formulas for how much you should pay to reach a certain number of developers or how does this work?
Lisa Sidlow:
There’s that term you get what you pay for. So there’s a lot of newsletters out there that are inexpensive. However, what you want to look at and ask about before working with them is what is the performance metrics? Do you have average click-through rates? What do those look like? What are my guarantees? So for example, at TLDR we have and our average performance metrics to the day, right? The past 90 days, looking back, what is our average performance, which I can share with. And then we also make sure that we hit those goals. So when you work with somebody like us, we say, this is your average performance. And if we don’t come within range of the average performance, we always throw in an extra newsletter to make sure that at the end of the day what they think their CPC is going to be is what we deliver.
So those are important things to ask upfront before working with somebody because not everybody is going to stand behind their product and make sure that the vendors perform according to their expectations. In terms of newsletters, typically we can only track the clicks on our end and the vendors are allowed to use tracking URLs so they can track the performance on their end as well. They need deeper metrics like conversions and things like that. But in terms of performance, newsletters are about clicks, driving traffic and conversions and things like that are tracked on the vendor side.
Matthew Revell:
Right, okay, thanks. So Stacy, you’ve got a budget for your budget developer relations program at Aerospike. How do you make these decisions as to whether a newsletter is the right way to go or if your dollars could be spent better elsewhere?
Stacey Kruczek:
Well, that’s a loaded question. So it’s who, who’s holding the budget, who holds the tin cup? So the way that I look at it, because I came from a larger company now in a smaller company and stuff talking about where I am at Aerospike, we have a highly technical audience, very targeted database vector graph. These are people that they need that type of content directed to them. I think advertising in a newsletter where it can generally target to that specific developer type persona is really important for us as a company. I think I would say a couple of different things on the budget end. First of all, who is managing the budget is really important and where does that lay? I’ve been in companies where it’s been in engineering, it’s been in marketing. And so I think that in my opinion, humble opinion, the budget needs to sit with Derel because Derel is going to have a better understanding of those developer personas of where it should go.
Just my 2 cents worth coming from two different environments on this and observing many others. The other thing I would say is budget also includes time and people power. How many experts can you bring to the table to write and to generate content that’s relevant to your and your developer persona? And I think you can do lots of this internally. And I know for Aerospike, because our technology is complex and stuff, we want to ensure that our developers understand it really is easy to use. There really are tools and resources out there that can help and walk you through that. So that becomes a very important piece of it. And so I would say budget has to sort of encompass all of that. It has to look at not only the dollars, it has to look at the time that needs to be spent, the experts you need to pull in and do you need to go externally and look for some of those experts that maybe have the database, in our case, the database knowledge and expertise, but maybe they can bring something fresh to the table and give it a different perspective.
I’m going to learn about Aerospike, I’m going to give you my fresh perspective as a new user so they can bring new targeted content for your audience. And I think with our newsletter, which full transparency we haven’t been doing because of a lot of people power type things, our developer advocates are going in 15 different directions, but we have a lot of content to share. So we try and do that other ways as well. I think of delivering content as a multi action plan. You’ve got webinars, you’ve got live streams, you’ve got newsletters, all of these have to work together. But I would also say that it’s really important that you share with the developers ease of use tools and resources. So all of that has to kind of come into play when you’re targeting this.
Matthew Revell:
So you mentioned the marketing mix there, you touched on that earlier. If you come from a traditional marketing background, you’ll know the four Ps of the product price placement and the other one, sorry, what was it? I’ve gone blank, but as ra, when you’re planning out campaigns, do you think of it through the four Ps framework?
Asrar Khan:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like sometimes the best kind of marketing is getting your basics and while there are all these advanced tools, et cetera that you can use, but fundamentally there’s a reason that the four piece of marketing work effectively. Again, as you think of the broader marketing mix of product, place, price and promotion, while I may not necessarily intentionally think of it, just having a marketing background organically is a great starting point to put a framework together and put the pieces together before you go into more of the advanced marketing and you dive deeper. For example, on the digital side, there’s a lot more flexibility and wiggle room that you can do. It also helps us stay grounded in terms of ensuring that you are looking at the spectrum holistically versus thinking primarily about the distribution channel. So again, when we think about promotion, what I would say the two key things there are really that direct communication.
Again, we think of communication from a promotion standpoint, but then also how do we integrate the content where essentially it’s not out of place, but it is very relevant to the newsletter, to the story that’s being shared in that newsletter and it actually creates much more value for the developer. So how do we weave our brand into the newsletter’s content through some of the articles, sometimes thought leadership pieces or even like case studies providing developers a more softer and at the end of the day, I would say a more informative approach. So really that’s when we think about promotion, I talked about distribution quite a bit around digital delivery, but from a four P standpoint, when we think about the product as well, what I would say is if your product is relevant to developers, the newsletter, the content in the newsletter can reinforce your product’s benefit and position it as a solution to the challenges that are being discussed or other key articles that are being published in that newsletter.
So we do take a very thoughtful approach to ensuring that the content that we put out there is actually, like I said, adds to the value, but is also weaved into that story. So really sort of driving that reinforcement there. And then price, we tend to think little differently because budget is really important for us. I know Stacy mentioned budget to sit within dre. I feel like budget should sit within developer marketing because we get to execute that much more seamlessly, and we do work closely with our developer relations and developer advocate friends as well. But I guess being in developer market always helps deploy that budget. But frankly speaking from a price or a budget perspective, at the end of the day what we’re really looking at is that perceived value. While we may not directly think about price per se, but being featured in respected newsletters can really well and truly enhance that perceived value of the product that we’re promoting, an event and a service, a launch thought leadership piece, et cetera, potentially justifying that price. But at the end of the day, we always go back to that value proposition and ensuring that we have the right messaging for the developers. I would say that is the fundamental thing that we’re really diving deeper into.
Stacey Kruczek:
I just want to say quickly, I agree with you on developer marketing. I’m making the assumption that we’re all sitting under the derel umbrella, so developer marketing, developer experience, community, we all work together. So just wanted to put that out there.
Matthew Revell:
So I want to get onto organic content placement in developer newsletters because I suspect most developers sign up to newsletters to get that content rather than the adverts. And I think if we can get in that way, that’s great as well. But one thing I’d love to talk about is we’ve spoken about what you should do and that sort of things, but what mistakes do people make? Stacy, you touched on the idea that budget is more than just the dollar amount of the advertising, but Lisa, you’ve seen so much of this. What are people doing wrong when they place adverts in newsletters?
Lisa Sidlow:
I had written a few blogs on this a while back, but some of the things that they do is the ad not matching the landing page. That’s a big mistake, right? Because when you are giving an ad to a developer and they click on that ad and then they don’t see on the landing page what your ad says or it doesn’t line up, they’re going to bounce off your page. So if you are running newsletter ads and you have a huge bounce rate, you might want to look at what are you doing wrong? Some of the things I’ve seen is basic as offering a free trial and then you get on the landing page and the free trial button isn’t there, or you have to scroll down three times to get to it, right? If they don’t see exactly what the offer is, they’re just going to leave.
Developers are not going to put in the work to find what you’re offering on the newsletter. I’ve seen things like people putting a registration page up and asking for phone numbers. Developers aren’t going to give you their phone number anyway, so don’t get that stuff on the backend. Nurture the account. If you want a developer to register, just ask for their email address and you need to do the work on the other side. Other things to think about is you need to be giving them something of value to build trust with the developers because they’re critical by nature. Nothing against developers. I love them, been in this space for a long time, but they’re going to be critical. So if you are using hyperbolic words, this is the fastest, this is the best, this is the greatest right? Over their heads, I think developer ads should really be written by several people, or not ASRA included because he’s very technical, but if you have the marketing people writing the developer ads, you might be missing the point, right?
Because that peer-to-peer content is what’s really important. That’s what resonates with them, not like developers are the one audience that if you say this is the fastest, they’re going to drop what they’re doing and actually compare it to other people to see if that trait statement is true. And if it’s not, they might write a blog about it. So you need to be really careful in your messaging to developers. It needs to be authentic, it needs to be credible, it needs to be provable, and it should just be factual and something written towards helping them, not selling something to them, educational versus transactional. I’m sure Ezra and Stacy can add a lot to that, but those are some of the things that when I’m working with a vendor that I coach them on, right? This needs to resonate with. The developer audience is slightly different than consumers. The messaging needs to be different. Developers are looking for an aspirin, not a vitamin, right? How does this solve my problem right now? Not what’s this going to do for me six months out? They want to know I have an immediate problem. How is your product going to fix it?
Asrar Khan:
What we also care deeply about is that customer journey and doing their customer journey mapping, in this case, the developer journey mapping, and how do we ensure we absolutely reduce the friction and have absolutely no friction in the process where you click on a certain post and then it takes you exactly where you click another thing, and then you have access, you unlock some benefit, you sign off for X, Y, Z, et cetera, whatever it may be. So that is something that user experience is something we really think through very deeply. So as Za mentioned, yeah, developers are not going to go ahead and stroll through your webpage trying to find that information or sign up for that free trial or for that free or freemium offer, et cetera. So Virgo resonate with that. The second piece that Lisa mentioned equally really critical, which is developers are not in interested in innovative, flexible, scalable, all of those words are really geared towards that ITDM audience.
So for developers, you have to tell them in a very simplistic manner, one that makes sense, one that’s also very clear, yet at the same time very concise because essentially the way I’ve understood developer marketing is tell me what are the key steps that take me from point A to point B? Meaning solves my problem and gets me going so I can build my application, my solution cetera, and I can do that from a very, with an ease of use. I know that’s something that Stacy mentioned as well. So that’s something we think very deeply as well. And working with, for example, Lisa, like all the promotions or the ads that we had, again, that was something we worked within Google to make sure that the language is something that we’re very thoughtful about because that wise and tone enriching developers is really critical.
Matthew Revell:
One thing I would say just quickly before Stacy you come in is I think, I mean use the word simplistic there. I wonder if factual is perhaps another word we could use, because I think you can be sophisticated and you can be very technical in what you say, but it is got to be based in fact. So anyone who’s worked in the database space has been always had the jepson tests in the back of their mind whenever you make a claim about data storage and speed and things like that. So I think facts are the key. Would you agree, Stacy?
Stacey Kruczek:
Absolutely. Developers take the perspective of how are you going to help me solve my problem? That’s all I want to know. I have an issue, I have a question, I have problem to solve. How are you going to help me solve it? What tools, resources are you going to give me and what expert pieces are and knowledge are you going to give me from your SMEs? I would say our intent is really to, with the developers, is to drive awareness and adoption and to engage with us. I think in years past when I originally got into the DevRel space and stuff, a lot of it was a lot of dere, dev, marketing, all those kind of key buzzwords and stuff. But at the base of all of that is community. So ultimately we’re all here to build a community. We’re all here to engage with our community and to help ’em.
One thing that we really emphasize at Aerospike, and it’s really, really important is we want their feedback. So newsletters can also become a tool to gather that feedback and listen and learn from them. That could ultimately change some of our product roadmap. It could change how we’re delivering our messaging to the developers. And it’s really, really crucial that you give them an avenue even through the newsletter like you would a webinar like you would on a Discord channel or a Slack channel, give me a place where I can provide you feedback, give me a place where I can talk with your dev rail or dev advocates and try and figure out this problem.
Matthew Revell:
We’ve spoken a lot about paying for placement. What is your advice? All three of you on getting content into newsletters organically. Stacy, you ran from zero to 30,000 a newsletter where you were running the newsletter. So I guess you have the perspective of the editor, but I’m guessing you’ve also placed content in other people’s newsletter organically. So how do you do that is a very simple way of asking.
Stacey Kruczek:
Well, it wasn’t an easy road. It was a lot of learning on my part too. I had the great advantage of sitting in literally the engineering department as the sole marketeer. I like to say I was battling the boat in the middle of the engineer pool, and that for me was a quick learning and a quick way to learn what they needed to communicate. So from that perspective, I was able to kind of immerse myself into that messaging and that audience I was and still am sort of that editor in chief because I want to make sure that we’re doing a couple of different things, even when you get to a blog or anything like that, what is the intent of this? What message are you trying to deliver to them? What resources, what solutions are you trying to offer them to help them solve their issues or get them started?
But more importantly, how is it going to benefit them? What are the key takeaways? And I always say that for all of the content that we do, you need to tell me what I’m going to get out of it and what I’m going to walk out of the room with. So in the case of the TLDR newsletter, which I love by the way, because I don’t have a lot of time, and then I subscribe to five of ’em, which is crazy, but each one of ’em have a specific audience that they’re targeting. So I’m not going to put a brand campaign in an AI newsletter. You have to be very careful about your content and where you intend to put it too as well. And I would also say that when you’re talking about the advantages in the world of database, Matthew and I can relate together on this, is the flexibility, the scalability, these are all great words, but tell me how it does that.
Tell me specifically what makes it that way. And that’s sort of where we have to make sure that we’re delivering our messaging. And I’m seeing a lot of different varying viewpoints on, well, developer marketing has a different messaging than developer relations. In the end game, we all have the same audience. It’s developers. We might all have different tasks, responsibilities and goals, OKRs, if you will or anything like that in developer marketing versus developer relations. But in the end, we’re all delivering the same messaging to the same audience. So we have to collaborate, work together to ensure that they are receiving that.
Asrar Khan:
Yeah, I actually would like to add one thing to what Stacy mentioned there towards the end, at the end of the day, the developers in our case or not don’t necessarily care whether they’re hearing from developer marketing or dre. What they think about is this is what Google is communicating to us. Google Cloud is communicating to us. So if you’re not aligned internally, there’s no way developers are getting a consistent message and it is confusing for them. So some of the key ins and some of the key things, if I think about the five essentials of talking to developers, really using the technical language correctly, you have to be specific and provide the right level of detail with this audience along those technical concepts. You also want to make sure you explain those technical concepts concisely just so it is super clear to them because developers are busy and they don’t have time to spend reading long rambling sentences.
So you want to make sure you get your point across to them as quickly and concisely as possible. Fundamentally, for any communication to any audience, you have to be with this audience. You have to be very honest, but also at the same time, you have to be direct. So developers really value truth and transparent language and that consistency that I was talking about. So you don’t necessarily have to sugarcoat think because it may actually be a big problem. And then fundamentally, at the end of the day, finally what I would say is you need to talk a human to developers. I mean they’re humans, and that is really what, and I’m seeing all the expressions here, but that is really what resonates with them. So if you are in developer marketing, dev, et cetera, why using unnecessary or irrelevant jargon or buzzwords, because Lisa mentioned those all just fly right over their head and do not resonate with them. So those are sort of my five essentials for developer messaging.
Matthew Revell:
Yeah, Lisa, I’d love to comment to you, but I’d like to make one very small comment. I think one of the greatest miss, I don’t know if it’s a mistake, but ideas that have perhaps out outside their welcome is that developers hate marketing and they don’t. It’s just that developers hate really cringey marketing that by people who don’t understand the problems they face and don’t understand the solutions to those problems. We all hate bad marketing, whether we’re developers or not. So Lisa, how do we get into your newsletters without paying? That’s the question.
Lisa Sidlow:
And I’m going to talk about across the board, not just TLDR, but starting with TLDR, because that’s, that’s my stomping grounds here. You can simply email submissions at TLDR Tech and submit content. There’s no guarantee they’re going to pick it up, but one of the things that I always tell people is subscribe to the newsletter, see what kind of content they’re picking up, and then you can submit similar content. Each of the newsletters at the bottom of the newsletters tells you who’s curated that newsletter. Their names are right there, not hard to find on LinkedIn, right? Establish relationships, ask them what are they looking for, what do they need? TLDR has 10 newsletters, obviously the big one is 1.25 million subscribers, so you want to get in that one regardless. But we also have the specifics. We have a DevOps newsletter, we have a security newsletter.
So look at who’s curating those newsletters. When you have a security message, maybe reach out to those guys. If you have an ai, we have a large AI newsletter. If you’re reaching out, if that’s your target audience, look at who’s writing that. There are other newsletters out there in the space. If you’re trying to reach junior developers, the new stack actually might pick up that if that’s your target audience. So find the newsletters that match the audience that you want to go to. Find out who’s writing them or who’s curating them. I will say that we haven’t talked about this a lot, but the technical content, the hands on how to technical content, that’s what developers really are looking for. And even when you do a really good ad and you offer a free trial in your ad, developers will often go straight to your content to see how the content is written.
What does the code look like? If the code is bad in your content, they’re going to assume the code and the product is bad. So content is really important, and getting that content into the newsletters like TLDR will pick up content and resend it out. That hands on how to, so the content is really important. Don’t submit content that isn’t great. And if you don’t have great content, get somebody to write it for you. If your developers are too busy and they’re focused on product, outsource that content to somebody like, oh, I don’t know, hoopy.io, Matthew Revel has been known to write content, but find somebody to write it for you and get really good content because the editors aren’t going to want to pick up bad content, right? They are going to look at it and say, well, this is not good. Why would I put this in my newsletter?
So really have good content, submit the right content to the right people. And I don’t know about every single newsletter out there, how you get it in there. I know for code project where I used to work, if you write an article and post it on code project, which you can do by on their submissions is across the top, the menu bar, submit an article and if they pick it up, it’ll automatically go in the newsletter the next day. That’s how they do their newsletters. Other people like Cooper Press, you might need to reach out to him and ask him, how do I get stuff in your newsletter? The salespeople are never going to be able to help get the content in because church and state, they’re kept very separate, but do a little bit of research. You can ask your sales person who does it at the news, ask them, they’ll help you, they’ll be able to tell you how to do it, but they won’t be able to do it for you. And then also you can do the paid content. But getting that integrated approach where you’re being picked up editorial and doing the ads around that is a really nice way to work and engage with those communities and that audience.
Matthew Revell:
So really, it’s the old adage of lurk before you dive in. So make sure you understand the culture and the editorial policy of that newsletter. Don’t just spam out a bunch of submissions in the hope that some of them will stick and also have good content to back it up.
Lisa Sidlow:
It almost has to be done by the Derel team rather than a PR firm when you’re working with developer newsletters, right? Because there’s a resonance that it needs to be symbiotic and the relevant content to that audience.
Matthew Revell:
One thing I would like to just note is we’ve got some good discussions in the LinkedIn chat here. Someone, I think it might be Sues, but it just says LinkedIn user might be Sue Shardlow says, regarding who holds the budget for newsletters. The key message from dev marketing and dev advocacy are going to be different. So it’s not unusual for ’em to have separate budgets and separate outcomes that they desire from the advertising. That’s a great point.
Stacey Kruczek:
I understand that point, but it really depends on what company you’re at and where it sits because in my experience, the collaboration between dev marketing and dev advocacy is one and the same. And we have to be very careful about how we’re marketing to developers. If you’re a developer first company as opposed to a developer, plus, your messaging is going to be different and much more direct. And that doesn’t matter, in my humble opinion, of whether or not it comes from developer marketing or dev advocacy because dev advocacy is feeding the content into dev marketing in most cases.
Matthew Revell:
But I guess if I’m in the dev marketing team, I might have a goal of so many signups to the free trial or so many downloads of A SEK or whatever. Whereas in Dev Rel, perhaps it’s a longer term thing and measured on select different things, like you say, it differs from company to company.
Asrar Khan:
Fundamentally, like I said, the audience does really care which team within Google is the messaging coming from. What they well and truly care about is what is Google communicating to ’em. So that is really sort of the focus. How do we show up as Google Cloud versus, Hey, I’m trying to just get signups here. Because if you’re trying to do a one-off thing, for lack of a better term with this community, this is not the community to try these one-off things. This is a community you need to build relationship with. You need to build that brand awareness. You need to build that trust and credibility before this community would do absolute wonders for you.
Matthew Revell:
And it takes weeks, years to build that trust and one bad post on LinkedIn or whatever to lose it. Jamie Lopez says in the chat that he likes to describe what they do at the company as selling strawberries and strawberry accessories, which makes me think of King of the Hill with propane and propane accessories. And the point is that they might sell strawberries, but you need to talk more broadly about the things that go well with strawberries like ice cream and pine blueberries, because developers aren’t looking at this narrow thing that you offer. They want a whole solution of things. And yeah, developers want, they appreciate learning that new things exist, but it really helps if you can present that within the context of complimentary products as well. So thanks. Look, I think we should probably wrap up because we’re 53 minutes in and people probably have jobs to go and do. But look, I really appreciate your time, each of you. I’d love to give you a last word, and let’s go in reverse order of who joined. Lisa, what would you summarize as the most important thing dev marketers and dev rail people should know about newsletters?
Lisa Sidlow:
And I think you nailed it earlier when you said consistency, right? A lot of people think, I’m going to do one newsletter and see how it goes and come back later and measure results, and it doesn’t work. That right? Any advertising, not just developer, you need to go through that whole ADA curve, right? Awareness, interest, desire, action. And so it is consistency. It’s over time building up, building that relationship, becoming part of the community and earning that credibility with the audience that you want to sell to. So becoming part of that community. So it’s a long game. It’s not a one and done. Let’s try it and see how it goes. I see that a lot, and I almost don’t want to sell somebody an ad that wants to just do one because it’s not going to work, and it’s a waste of their money and their time.
Matthew Revell:
Great. Thanks Ra. What’s your key takeaway for people considering newsletters?
Asrar Khan:
Yeah, based on our discussion, really sort of the three dos and don’ts of developer marketing. Number one is be direct and friendly with developers. And on the flip side, basically don’t be sloppy with them. The second thing is be relatable. And like you said, Matthew, don’t be cringe because that really doesn’t go a long way. And then finally what I would say, be creative with this audience because developers are very creative people, but at the same time, don’t be inauthentic with them. So those are sort of the three, the dos and the don’ts that I would like to leave the audience with. Thank you.
Matthew Revell:
Thanks. And Stacy, I’m really sorry we didn’t get into the running your own newsletter all that much, but yeah, I’d love to hear your takeaway for the audience.
Stacey Kruczek:
Well, I think that I can touch on both because I’ve done both the advertising and running my own newsletter as well. And I think everything that Lisa and us are have said today really hits and resonates with me in my experience in the years that I’ve been in this. But I would say being authentic is really a priority, being real and giving people the information that they’re seeking. I think it’s really important to understand too, that your messaging becomes key and how you deliver the messaging. So showing developers ease of use, words like free when you’re dealing with a trial, making sure you have those keywords in there so they understand what they’re receiving. And I think the other thing is, is that I’ve always found it really, really important to give them key takeaways because whenever I go onto a webinar or a blog or a newsletter, I want to know what I’m going to take away from it, or I’m not going to subscribe to that newsletter anymore. So I think you have to just set the record straight and just be straight with them upfront and say, here’s what we want to do with you, and we’re willing to listen because I think being a creative audience, as you stated, creativity thrives on feedback and input in my experience. So I think it’s really important to have that avenue too.
Matthew Revell:
Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, the creative bit’s the hard bit, I think. Okay. But it’s the fun part. So thank you each of you for joining me over the past hour or so. And I’d like to direct people to go and check out what Lisa Ra and Stacy are working on. And also if you want to take a look at hoopy.io/resources, you can see our new dev rail flywheel resource that we’ve just published today. And Decon New York is on the 18th and 19th of July. So if you’re in the area and you can join us, it would be lovely to see you there. But otherwise, thank you so much and thank you each of you again, and see you on the internet.
Stacey Kruczek:
Appreciate it. Thanks Matthew, for having us. Yeah,
Asrar Khan:
Thanks all so much. Take care.
Lisa Sidlow:
Bye. Thanks everybody.