Articles we like.

The Iron Horse Insight: At the core of any successful developer marketing or DevRel activity is the experience itself. Beyond just providing basic materials and resources for your developer audiences, how are you facilitating the discovery and consumption of those assets? In this article Tan and Utard, discuss the secret behind Algolia’s developer program. While many facets reflect your typical dev marketing approach, Utard reveals how they focused strictly on developer needs (as opposed to business KPIs) to build a platform that truly was helpful and functional for any dev. Much like individual resources and campaigns, it’s crucial to remember that when building developer assets it’s important to “create something that is low bar (anyone can use) and high ceiling (so powerful there is never a reason to switch).”

The Iron Horse Insight: As marketers, we often preach personalization in regards to customizing outreach to resonate with potential audiences. In developer marketing, that methodology is even more important to captivate user bases. In this article by Len Shneyder, he explores the similarities between marketers and developers. He illuminates the fact that both parties share the same objective when it comes to building a relationship- attenuance and personalization of an experience is key to success. So the next time you launch a developer-focused product ask yourself, “What would *I* want out of adopting this solution?”

The Iron Horse Insight: When reviewing developer content, Iron Horse often finds a disconnect between what brands think developers want versus what developers actually need. Empathizing with developer audiences and providing functional resources is the key to success. At the core of this article, is a deep-dive into your target audiences and truly understanding what assets they are looking for at certain points in their development journey. While documentation is always good, it’s important to keep in mind that supporting content should provide an immediate solution for most developers rather than a litany of case studies and/or thought-leadership. Listening to and empathizing with your constituents is important to providing a streamlined journey and facilitating the consumption and active use of your solutions.

The Iron Horse Insight: Developer relationship (DevRel) programs are often loosely defined with more qualitative, than quantitative goals. It’s important to find a balance between the two and at a bare minimum establish some baseline in order to compare against. Aligning activities with basic business goals is crucial to continued DevRel success. As a starting point, Iron Horse often maps business goals to development milestones to understand progress and efficacy. For example, a typical DevRel goal would be community growth, with marketing looking at database growth and DevRel looking at the volume of community conversations and engagement. Developers are not typical clients/customers. DevRel success will look different than general marketing programs, thus tracking and attribution should also be customized to match the uniqueness of activities and audiences.

The Iron Horse Insight: Establishing strong developer relationships is key to successful developer programs. Advocacy is almost always the true end state and being able to genuinely connect with the developer community will yield dividends. At the core of DevRel is being able to understand developer problems and help solve them. Developers are both end-users and decision-makers from a business sense—so outside influences could affect them more than the average stakeholder. Being compassionate and empathizing with developers is incredibly important within peer-driven communities. Attending to real-world issues, both sociological and technical, will help your brand establish itself as a contributor and a true community partner.

The Iron Horse Insight: SEO is about getting the top spot for your key terms when someone is searching on a search engine like Google, right? Wrong. For many search terms, the top organic search result is now below the fold. This means that if your organization isn’t thinking about and actively working on securing featured snippets, paragraph style “best answer” for searches phrased as a question, and the increase of zero-click searches, your organization’s SEO is slowly eroding. Our take is to ensure your marketing team, but also executive management knows why the “SEO of today” is fundamentally different than it was five years ago. It’s important to know what that means in terms of marketing strategy and marketing measurement.

The Iron Horse Insight: According to Gong.io’s analysis of over 39K sales conversations, “asking discovery questions decreases your win rate” when speaking to senior decision-makers (SVP+). Successful first meeting sales conversations “involve only four sales questions on average.” How does this make sense? Senior execs have “discovery fatigue” and most, if not all, discovery questions are beneficial only to the seller. One can see how many sales calls can feel like an interrogation. We’re not ready to say discovery is dead, but we do agree that sales should lead with insights, not information gathering. This is aided by ensuring that sales spends time upfront researching the company, industry, and contact person, before the meeting- because in many cases integration-like discovery calls are a result of lack of preparation.

The Iron Horse Insight: This article resonates with what we see in B2B marketing and sales: the essence of lead generation needs to be rethought. Understanding account-level activity and change in engagement is key, but it is challenging when buyers choose anonymity until their research is complete. Does your organization currently know how many opportunities it’s losing even before a contact is known? Note: The author’s statement that “70% of the buyer journey is complete before the prospective buyer opts in to engaging with the vendor” is a common misperception. This stems from a SiriusDecisions data point that states 67% of the buyer’s journey is done digitally, which in no way indicates that a salesperson isn’t engaged until more than halfway through the buying cycle.