Marketing is your job, too

Suze Shardlow: So marketing, what do you think of when you hear the word marketing? People hear the word marketing and really what they're thinking about is advertising, promotion or sales. Sometimes they think public relations or PR, but the Chartered Institute of Marketing here in the UK defines marketing as the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. So it's really about having a deep understanding of your market and making sure that your product meets their needs. So a couple of things that I want to get out of the way, straight off the bat here. Two things. Marketing isn't DevRel and derail isn't marketing. They are not exactly the same thing.

So my opinion, Deborah, I should sit outside of marketing, but there is a lot of overlap because we are dealing with products and we are dealing with consumers or users, and that's what I want to talk to you about today.

So my name's Sue Charlow, and so I'm going to take you through that age old principles of marketing and how you can use them to be more strategic and intentional in your DevRel work. You can find me at sue dev or at seus charlow on Twitter. Please do tweet at me. I would love to hear from you. So a little bit about me. I am a software engineer, coding instructor, tech event mc and technical writer. I'm currently head of developer community at Redis.

I love making stuff that people use and enjoy. And here is a photo of me and my 13th birthday using the computer I learned to code on. And the reason I know about marketing is because the UK education system didn't know what to do with girls who like coding. So I didn't know that there was a path to a degree and a career in computing.

So at the age of 18, a few years after this photo was taken, I went to university and I took the most versatile degree I could think of. So I took a business degree specialising in marketing, and then I followed that with a postgraduate diploma in marketing and then worked in marketing and management for the first 20 years of my career before pivoting into software. So that's where I've come into Devra from. So let's have a look at the first at principal that I want to talk to you about.

So Ida or ADA is a marketing principal coined more than 120 years ago by an American businessman named Louis. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. He originally used it to describe the sales process, but over the years it's been developed to fit marketing strategy. So IDA is attention or awareness, interest, desire, and action.

It's a stimulus response model. So in classic product marketing, advertising acts as a stimulus and the purchase is a response. So you can see how folks move through that process, through that journey or how salespeople move them through that journey or marketing people move through that journey. So each Deral team or even Deral professional is involved in some of these stages of the customer journey to varying degrees.

We're not usually involved in the advertising world or the sales process, but we definitely take developers through this journey when we're educating them about our products and helping them to have a good experience with them. So to take users through the iida journey, we need to have the seven Ps down. Now the seven Ps of marketing started off as four Ps and were defined by McCarthy in 1960. So the first four you can see there were the traditional four Ps of marketing, product, place, price, promotion, and then another three were added on in 1981 by booms and bitner, they expanded these out to add people process and physical evidence.

And if you go to university tech marketing degree like I did, you'll get this hammered into you. If you then go and take the postgraduate diploma, you get it hammered into you. Again, this is really the backbone of marketing and what I want to talk to you about today is how you can use these agile principles of marketing to help you be more strategic and intentional in your DevRel strategy. So let's take them one by one.

And so product in the traditional sense, like we said at the top, the traditional kind of definition of marketing, it's about finding out what customers need or want and developing the right product with the right level of quality to meet their expectations both now and in the future. So how can we do this as dev professionals? So as several professionals, we really need to know our product and our market and the product for developers might be a subset of the main products.

So I'm thinking that if Google G Suite is a product, then the dev activities would focus on the API and not the consumer user experience. So we're very much focusing on something specific. When we work in Dev, we're not necessarily looking at the consumer product. We also need to have two way conversations with Debs to establish how they're using the product, what they want from it. And we also need to take a proactive approach and go out and find this information.

Otherwise, we fall into the trap of only talking to people that look like us, which is definitely not what we need to be doing to make sure our product is the best fit for the users. And DevRel is a user zero or customer zero. So the user is relying on you to be their voice. Again, it's a two way thing. So where people often think as marketing as a one-way thing, it's advertising, it's marketing messages, then we very much operate on a two-way situation.

We can also get the community to help with user testing. So while we are user zero or customer zero, it's really good to get the community involved in that early testing to make sure we're on the right track. And we also need to have our finger on the pulse of what other tech our users are using and what else is on the horizon.

Two to figure out where our product fits in with that. So the second one then price. In the traditional sense, this was all about how you would develop a pricing strategy for your product and we are not necessarily involved with that in DevRel directly. Pricing is the only element of the marketing mix that generates revenue, but can we influence this? So what value are we offering to users and do we know if our users feel that the pricing is fair?

We are some of the closest people in the company to users, so we are probably in the right place to be finding out this information. What is the cost of attending our events both in time and money and what's the cost of signing up for a free account? Do people have to subscribe to your marketing information because that could actually be a barrier.

Some people might see that as too high of a cost. Do you have individual coupon codes for free credits that you give out? So while we're not involved in marketing messaging necessarily, sometimes we can help to actually track how effective the marketing has been and how effective our developer relations activities have been. Can you give certain special groups an early look at new features? And this kind of ties a little bit back in with the user testing I talked about earlier.

Are people settling for a watered down version of your product in the free trial? So are you going to that extra mile of giving them the full thing to try out in the pre trial or you holding something back? Have a think about whether or not you want to do that.

Derails aimed at technologists who aren't the customer necessarily, but they can be properly educated to influence the purchasing decision. So the people that we speak to don't necessarily know about price or have any purchasing power, but we can enable them to influence the purchasing decision with those who do make the decisions. And also Devra can help the rest of the business understand the open source segment of the user community and obviously the open source segment is unique and they deal with something that is really available. So that is a really interesting insight that we can help the rest of the business to get.

So the next one then place in the traditional sense in the marketing, it's the product must be available in the right place at the right time and in the right quantity. So place was always about product distribution, but in terms of developer relations, it's about meeting your users where they are. So are they on social media? Are they on fora, et cetera, et cetera.

Go and meet your users where they are. Don't ask them to always be coming to you. Find out where they're talking. Conduct an audit of where all the discussions about your products are happening. So there might be more places than you actually realise. Really go and dig deep and find out where people are talking about your product and see what they're saying and look to see what kind of meetups hosting talks about your product. You might be surprised there as to the kind of groups that are inviting talks about your product and it gives you more intel about what kind of people are using your product and who's interested in it.

See if there are any meetups purely dedicated to your product as well that your company is not managing.

I personally think this is a good thing. I think it's very healthy and I think it's really cool when people want to create these meetups to talk about your product because they're so passionate about it. So it is not necessarily something to be scared about. However, you do need to consider whether or not you want to be involved in certain places because some of them are harmful to certain groups. So yeah, definitely think about where those conversations are happening and where you need to be involved with them. We all love speaking at conferences and meetups, but really we need to be strategic about the conferences we're speaking at and be intentional about the meetups that we're speaking at because we need to make sure that we're talking to a good range of people, not just talking to people that are like us and not just talking with people that are like us as well.

What do the lineups of these places look like? What do the organisers look like, et cetera?

Is there a diverse set of people involved? Conduct an audit of your online presence and where do you want developers to go and see and interact with you and see your content? And is it clear which parts of your public facing efforts are geared toward developers? So if people land on your corporate website, is that where the developers need to go or is there a special section just for them? Think carefully about gatekeeping developer resources. So have you put them behind signups or mailing list subscriptions? Some people are okay with that, a lot of people aren't. So I think very carefully about what hoops you want folks to jump through to get all of that good stuff that you've spent so much time creating.

And remember that DevRel doesn't happen in a selling place, it happens in educational settings.

So you need to be a trusted advisor, but also make sure that people know where they could buy if they want to. So coming on to promotion, then, like I said, this is what a lot of people think marketing is. If you say the word marketing, they think promotion. And in a traditional sense, promotion is all about the way a company communicates what it does and what it can offer customers in a derail sense. How involved you are in promotion depends on where you sit in the organisation. So arguably if you do sit in the marketing section, you're probably going to be more involved in promotional activities than if you sit in the engineering section or in the product section. In terms of promotion, the way that we derails are doing it is by showing, by doing.

So promoting the product, by building something with the product and the voices on our team can be different, but the messaging should be consistent.

So just like with any type of marketing, any type of promotion, messaging should be consistent, but it's really good to have different voices and think about where you're going to have the two way conversations. Like I said, a lot of folks look at marketing and think it's a one way thing, but think about where you can have those two way conversations and think about where your developers go to find out how to be better at development. Think about your content cadence and be strategic and intentional about it. I know a lot of folks have talked about streaming on this conference and how often you should do it. So really think about that and just have a shared understanding with your audience and your community about how often they should expect to see you. And if everyone's on the same page, then nobody minds if it's really off or not very often and try new channels again.

We've seen a lot about this in the last three days.

So definitely try those out and find out what really appeals to people. If you're trying out new channels, repurpose your contents. If you're doing a Twitch stream, upload it to YouTube, maybe extract pieces of that to create, explain the videos as well because everybody responds to different things. So while somebody might not want to sit through a live stream, they might be quite happy to just watch a little snippet. And also in terms of promotion, make sure you're doing good internal promotion as well. Make sure the rest of your company knows what the DevRel team does and what the derail team is for. This might seem really obvious, but a lot of people dunno what DevRel is. So make sure you really do promote that within your company and make sure that folks are sending people to you and they're sending the right people to you and they're involving you in the right projects too and you're getting some good collab with the rest of the teams in your organisation.

So then looking at people in the traditional sense, the reputation of your brand rests in the hand of your staff, and this is what boom and Bitner for thinking about when they added on the three Ps at the end of the four Ps in terms of people. So think about whether or not you have a diverse team. This is always really important, especially in tech. We know that it's dominated by certain groups and there are a lot of underrepresented groups, so we do need to get more representation. So think about the representation that's reflected in your DevRel team and also think about creating an ambassador programme. So look for the people within your community who are really passionate about your product and they really want to help get the word out as well. How can you reward them? How can you elevate those folks and really kind of bring them with you on this journey and just give them another good reason to talk more about your product.

If your employees are talking about your services on social media, again, make sure the messaging is consistent. Folks can have their own voices, but please make sure the messaging is consistent and make sure that Devra activities are not seen as marketing or sales events because that's a really good way to erode the trust that you've built up with your developers. Look at the skills across your team. Do you have a good mix of skills across your team to cover different languages if appropriate and different types of content creation? So you might decide you want a JavaScript person. net person, a Java person, et cetera, a Python person, and you might have folks on there that really love presenting. You might have other folks that are more strong at writing. It's really good to have a good mix of abilities and different strengths across your team.

And so people can compliment each other.

And also some communities are different from others. So if you do need folks that specialise in those languages, they will bring with them some good knowledge about what that specific community responds to really well. They can bring that intel to you. And the one thing that everybody needs on the team is that they need to be a good storyteller. So again, are your team members actually part of tech community groups themselves? Are they engaging in local meet arts? Are they engaging in language specific meetups, technology specific meetups?

Do they have a good handle on not only your user community but also the wider tech community? Because we all really need to be keeping our finger on the pulse of that and making sure that we are reflecting any changes in that and attracting folks in that need to be attracted into our community so that we can bring them along with this educational journey about what we're trying to do.

How do people get direct access to your team members? Is it appropriate for you to offer that? If it is, and that's something you want to do, make sure you make it clear to folks how they can do that. So are you running a discord where people can contact folks or you doing office hours or you may be doing an ask me anything on Twitter spaces. People really love direct access and if that is something you can facilitate, make it very clear to folks how they can take advantage of that. And again, segment your users.

This is one, this is a huge, huge discipline in marketing that you could write a whole course on. But yeah, market segmentation. Have you segmented your users? They are not the same and ensure that people have their own voices and personalities and they're not just clients. So in some teams it's fine for everybody to be a cl, but in Dev DevRel it is really crucial that everybody is an individual personality.

You don't necessarily need to have a huge following on social media, but you do need to have your own voice because at the end of the day, we're educating people, everybody responds to something different. Two people can explain the same thing in different ways and somebody might only understand one of them. So yeah, we all need to show that we're individuals here and bring our own personality into the mix.

So process then traditionally, this is all about the process that folks go through from deciding to buy to actually doing the buying. So they invest in an entire experience that start from the moment they discover your company and it lasts three to purchase and beyond. So how does that relate to that role then? So think about how much friction's involved with signing up to use your product, but also how much friction's involved with stopping using your product.

Are you asking for a credit card number and all of that stuff? Because that might put people off from the very beginning to signing up to really think about what you're putting in the way of somebody getting stuck in with your product. Is it clear how people can join your community and what it's for? What are the benefits of joining?

That might seem really obvious, but some people just throw up a thing saying, join our discord. They don't actually say what's going on in there. So make sure that's clear to folks what they can expect and hand in hand with that, make sure you've got a clear and enforced code of conduct too. So that's all part of the process piece as well as that, make sure you've got a good way of checking the accuracy of your content and also the quality of the content that you're putting out.

You really need a peer review process. I don't think anybody can get something perfect first time and then just publish it. Just get somebody else to cast their eyes over that and make sure that it's accurate because this is about your credibility. You are the face of the product you're talking about and you need it to be accurate.

And are you keyed in with your customer success team so you can find out the main pain points that your customers and users are facing? That's a really good intel because it can help you to generate content which supports users through this, and it really helps to kind of smooth that out for people. So keying in with the customer success team or your customer support team is a really good idea. And then once you've created all of this good content or all this great stuff, have you made it clear where people can actually find it?

This might seem really obvious, you put something up on your YouTube and you know where it is, but does everyone know where to find it? Have you got a separate YouTube that isn't the corporate one? Are people going there or are they going to the corporate one by mistake? Are they following the corporate Twitter and not developer Twitter?

So yeah, have a think about whether or not you've made it clear where folks can go through the process of getting hold of your content. And then the last one, physical evidence. So in the traditional sense of marketing, this is all about reducing the user's uncertainty about trying your product by helping them see what they're committing to this whole thing in buyer behaviour about uncertainty. Again, it could be a whole course on that, but yeah, getting people to buy is mostly about reducing the uncertainty around buying.

And if you've ever had to make a difficult buying decision, that is the case. So make sure that your content is high quality and accurate because at the end of the day, you are showing by building, aren't you? So you're showing people how they can build your stuff and what they can get at the end. So you can do this through demo apps, video tutorials, and live streams, for example.

You can also collaborate with members of your community and showcase what they're building with your product. So it's not just you talking about how great it is and how easy it is, it's also the community talking about it. You can create ways for your users to talk about your products. For example, in your community forum as well, you can search for and amplify user generated contents. And you can consider approaching these people to become part of your ambassador programme.

And again, I've said it before and I said it again, make sure you've got a frictionless trial. So ideally have no signups and have little to nothing to instal. For example, put it on cloud or docker so people have a really easy writing to getting to use it.

So there you go. There are the seven Ps of marketing as we can relate them to Dev. I had 20 minutes and seven Ps, so that was a whistle stop tour, but my aim was to give you some actionable tips to help make your Devra activity more strategic and intentional. My name is Sue Char Light. I'm a software engineer, coding instructor, tech mc and technical writer currently head of community at Redis. I hope I've given you something to think about today and I'll.