What is the core idea behind developer marketing in financial technology?

Developer marketing in fintech focuses on engaging developers by allowing them to interact directly with the product, rather than relying on traditional marketing tactics like dinners or meetings. Developers want to try the product, understand how it works, and decide on its value themselves.

Why is product/market fit crucial in developer marketing?

Product/market fit is critical because it ensures that you’re offering the right product to the right users at the right time. This is based on understanding the users’ needs and pain points and developing a solution that meets them. Developer marketers play a key role in connecting product development, user experience, and commercial strategy.

How should companies approach developer personas and buying cycles?

Companies should create developer personas to understand developers’ needs, behaviors, and decision-making processes. Developers often play a significant role in the buying cycle, so it’s essential to address them alongside other key stakeholders, like CFOs and CIOs, ensuring your value proposition resonates with the entire buying committee.

A developer marketing approach to financial technology

My name is Hector, and I’m a Global Marketing Leader at Goldman Sachs. I’m here to give you an overview of a robust developer marketing strategy.

Needless to say, this is a blueprint that can be applied not just to finance, but to any software as a service (SaaS) organization, and particularly to any enterprise expanding their portfolio into digital solutions.

My core background is in marketing; I’ve covered both brand building and product development. About four years ago, I became interested in the finance space and joined the Goldman Sachs team, where we recently launched our platform for developers. Before that, I spent a decade at Google in various marketing and design roles.

Financial services is an ever-evolving business

Financial services is an industry that has experienced rapid change in the last few years, and will continue to evolve as new technologies are applied to provide better financial solutions.

At Goldman Sachs, we had to learn about a new audience segment to reach out to, with unique characteristics that differ from the well-known traditional clients.

The same is true for other companies that are going through a digital transformation process. All of a sudden, they see themselves in need of stronger relationships with the developer community.

While these companies have traditionally relied on account-based marketing to reach new clients, developers are saying, “Don't take me out for dinner. I'm not interested in that. Rather, let me play with your product, understand how I can use it, and then I'll decide if it's for me or not.”

This is an actual quote from a user. So, where do we start?

Identifying your product/market fit

As with any business, a good place to start is with product/market fit. This is a common marketing equation that’s usually overlooked. Give the right users the right product at the right time. Simply put, if your product fits in the market, you’re halfway there.

Now, to build a strong product/market fit, we need to start not with the product, but with the market.

What’s the user telling you? What’s the job they’re trying to accomplish? And what are the pain points? Once you have a research-based sense of that, ask, “How can I help? What do I have or what can I develop to minimize your pain points and provide you with convenience?”

And, finally, let's make a business of it. “How much would you be willing to pay for my help? Is it a one time transaction or would you need a subscription for it?” In other words, if done correctly, user experience, product development, and commercial strategy will determine how strong your product/market fit is.

It’s the role of both product and developer marketers to be involved in all steps of the process, and to be the connecting point across them. Both product and developer marketers need to be fluent in all areas and help with the communication flow.

Developer marketers are the champions of the user, the champions of the product, and the champions of the business. So, in simple terms, there’s a problem, there’s a solution being offered, and we give it a specific value which is enough to make it competitive and appealing. Therefore, we have ourselves our unique value proposition.

Understanding your users

We’ve crafted the product with user insights, and now we need to deliver it and delight our users. So, let's do a bit more research on our audience. What's the best way to approach them?

From the product/market fit exercise, we identified a total addressable market, we did some segmentation, and now we have a few target users.

It's important to note that, in many cases, our users aren’t the same as our customers. Whether we’re in B2B or B2C, we need to understand who we’re having a commercial relationship with. So, let's create ideal customer profiles.

Traditionally, we know how to create our buying personas. We understand the roles of these in the buying cycle. But, with digital products, we need to make sure we’re covering the needs of all our segments.

We've probably mastered the office of the CFO, and in some cases, we also know how to address the CIO. Now, are we prepared to demonstrate our value to our tech users? Are we considering the developers at all? They’re the ones who’ll implement our solution, after all. So, we definitely need to convince them.

Around 96% of developer leaders are involved in the buying cycle. They make the decision based on input and feedback from their developer teams. As marketers, we need to understand who they are, where they are, and how we can reach them and engage them better.

There are existing studies that can give us some clues about this segment, whether they’re demographics like graphics, popular coding languages, you name it. However, I’d encourage you to get immersed in the developer community.

Remember that as much as we champion the product and the business, we as developer marketers are the voice of the developer, and we should represent them properly. Developer marketing is truly developer relations, so we need to build those relationships.

Once we understand and empathize with developers, we can then craft our unique selling proposition.

Expanding your reach with developer marketing

Now, we’ve shown that we have a few buying personas to address and we're expanding our reach to developers, but we still need to care for other groups like the CFOs and the COOs. Who else is involved in the buying committee?

For most enterprise organizations, account-based marketing is an effective way of reaching customers. Sales and marketing work together to identify and vet high potential accounts, and then plan a go-to-market (GTM) strategy to engage them.

Developer marketing complements this work and should be executed as an orchestrated effort.

Now, let's take a look at the components of a developer marketing GTM strategy.

In general terms, we need to understand our value proposition and goals. We need to have a clear message, identify the right channels for this message, and create the right opportunities for engagement to happen.

Let's unpack these concepts a bit more.

We already did our homework by crafting our value proposition. In there, we’re reflecting our brand story and voice. We have our positioning and a clear understanding of what jobs need to be done. We also need to make sure we have clear objectives and results.

We take on this work and generate outcomes and content strategy, covering the path across the buying cycle from thought leadership and white papers to technical documentation and step-by-step tutorials.

We identify the channels where we’ll find our audience, whether it's on an external publication as earned media, a keynote at an industry event, or paid on social media.

And finally, we make sure we have the right engagement mechanisms in place for nurturing and strengthening those developer relations we’re forging. Are we doing any conferences? Could we run product hackathons? Maybe the interaction is done via chat bot.

Implementing good engagement mechanisms will allow us to ultimately have growth loops along the way.

When creating our GTM strategy, let's remember the buyer's journey and be present across the developer's learning path to facilitate their decision making process.

Starting from when they identify a pain point, be there in advance. When they’re evaluating multiple solutions, let them try yours. Show them why yours ticks all the boxes, show them your roadmap, and make them part of it. When they’re running viability analysis, show them how easy your product is to implement.

Finally, when they’re ready to invest, support them along the way.

Evolving from sales-led to product-led growth

Plot twist: developer marketing doesn’t end when the purchase is made. It goes hand in hand with the product life cycle, particularly with the software development life cycle.

Thanks to lean and agile software development, we know that life cycles can be extended and maximized, so our marketing and business strategy needs to evolve from sales-led to product-led growth.

Make the product the center point, and have developers contribute to its evolution. We're in the business of creating value, and the success of our users is also our success.

There are some considerations to be aware of when moving from a sales-led business to a product-led one.

Firstly, a traditional marketing funnel roughly considers these stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. However, a growth marketing funnel considers product usability phases and a user's experience and end-to-end journey.

Funnel diagram illustrating six stages of a customer journey, labeled from top to bottom: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral. The funnel narrows as it progresses through each stage, visually representing the decreasing number of customers as they move from awareness to referral.

Secondly, as marketers, we traditionally support our sales teams with pitch decks and battle cards. But are we supporting our buyers throughout their discovery path? Particularly developers, who are curious by nature and prompt to discover and dissect solutions for themselves.

Are we serving them with the right content at the right time? Are we enabling them to use our product with the right tools and make an informed decision to purchase?

71% of B2B buyers would consider spending more than $50,000 in a self-service model. That’s with no intervention from a sales rep. This trend is only expected to go up in the coming years.

At the end of the day, we should put our attention and efforts into the user experience. And in the case of developer marketing, the developer experience. Make them succeed and you'll succeed with them.

So, what does a good developer experience look like? In simple terms, there are four elements that need to be present:

We need to offer an easy way for developers to get from 0 to hero. No friction and as minimal steps as possible.
Developers need a test and learn environment. Whether it's a trial period or a sandbox ecosystem, we need to enable a try before you buy option as much as possible.
An admin control is required to monitor and manage usage and pricing. Are we offering developers this granular level?
Whether it’s self-service documentation, direct contact with a support team, or inbound mechanisms to provide feedback and feature requests, developers are an active part of product development, so involve them.

Analyze, learn, and grow

Lastly, with a GTM strategy ready and a good developer experience laid down, how do we measure success? It’s time to analyze results, learn the insights, and drive business growth.

Assuming we had clear and defined campaign objectives and key results right at the beginning, we now need to establish a good measurement framework.

Think again about the customer journey and the expanded marketing funnel. What key performance indicators (KPIs) do we need to monitor and analyze across the different stages?

Going back to our objectives, what are the KPIs that’ll tell us how we performed? The truth is that we can get lost in a sea of KPIs. Some might fall into the category of vanity metrics, which don’t give us any valuable insight. Some might be vital to understand the health of our business.

There’s one golden rule though. Don't chase metrics for the sake of it. Instead, chase customer success.

Now we’ve analyzed our performance and we have a few learnings, what are the changes we need to make to enable sustained growth? How can we implement growth loops across the funnel?

The idea here is to build and automate marketing workflows as much as possible that’ll recapture and re-engage our users.

Furthermore, we want our existing users to be advocates of our product and help us onboard new users. So, let's also facilitate that.

Ultimately, we want to get to a stage where we use machine learning, modeling, and similar technology to trigger predictive marketing based on certain signals.

The goal here is to evolve from a traditional marketing funnel to a self-sustaining growth flywheel: track, engage, and delight.

Cycle diagram illustrating four stages of customer engagement: Conversion, Retention, Advocacy, and Nurturing. The stages are arranged in a circular flow with arrows connecting each step, indicating the continuous nature of the customer lifecycle from conversion to nurturing.

Summary

So, to wrap things up, let's review:

Identify your product market/fit. Developer marketers must have a full sense of the problem, the solution, and the value.
Understand the user. This includes your customer and all the buying personas involved.
Expand the reach. Align your developer marketing strategy with other marketing efforts, and know when and how to engage developers as they go through the buying cycle.
Focus on product-led growth. Enable the developer to reach success with your product.
Analyze, learn, and grow. Optimize your product and re-engage your users.

Developer marketing isn’t new as a practice, but there’s still work to be done inside organizations to reflect its value. It’s not brand marketing, and our strategy will fail if we think it is.

We also know that developer marketing is a long-lasting relationship that doesn't end in the acquisition. It continues along the product lifecycle.

This article is based on Hector GHF's talk at the virtual Developer Marketing Summit in 2022. You can enjoy the complete presentation – and hundreds of others – with Developer Marketing On Demand.

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