This article is based on Kaitlyn Barnard’s talk at the Developer Marketing Summit in San Francisco. As a DMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here.

A few years ago, I joined a Kong as a Senior Developer Marketer. As we were building out our developer relations (DevRel) team, leadership started talking about all the things DevRel would own. I thought to myself, "Wait a second, I do a lot of that." 

At the time, I told my manager, "I'm going to give a talk and convince everyone that developer marketing and DevRel are one and the same." 

He looked at me and said, "Please don't do that." Coincidentally, that was around the time the entire world shut down, so I couldn’t give that talk anyway. 

Now, three years later, I'm hearing a lot of my peers interchangeably refer to themselves as dev marketing or DevRel. So, I think we're ready to have this conversation.

Here's a peek at what we'll cover today:

  1. A common misconception about developer marketing and how I think about it
  2. The importance of developer marketing (which I hope I don't have to convince many of you about)
  3. How to create a culture where marketing and DevRel can succeed together
  4. How to enable everyone within your organization to be a community advocate
  5. How to build messaging and programs that developers love

It's important to note that this article is more about culture than a tactical playbook. We'll be focusing on the big picture and how to create an environment where developer marketing and DevRel can thrive together.

Let’s get into it.

Do developers actually hate marketing?

When people hear I'm a developer marketer, they often say, "But developers hate marketing." 

This used to frustrate me because it never feels good to be told that an entire group of people you've dedicated your career to helping hates everything you do. Now, I actually enjoy this comment because it's a great opportunity for education and to discuss what really bothers developers about marketing.

This aversion to marketing isn’t exclusive to developers. I think we all hate marketing to some extent – when it's done poorly. Consider these scenarios:

  • Someone comes to your door trying to sell you something, and you hide, pretending not to be home. 
  • You have a private conversation in your living room, and suddenly you start getting retargeted ads. It feels creepy and like an invasion of your privacy.
  • You get ads that seem completely irrelevant, making you wonder what in your search history led to this.
  • You see an ad for a product, but you don't understand what it does because the messaging is wrong and they didn't understand their audience at a fundamental level.

On the flip side, we love to be shown things that solve our problems. I don't have time to dive into research every time I need something, so I really appreciate it when someone does all that heavy lifting for me and says, "Here's the perfect solution to your problem."

That's my entire philosophy of developer marketing. We're here to help, educate, be a resource, and provide a solution if and when the time is right.

The importance of developer marketing

In the current financial climate, it's crucial to have a clear talk track about the value we bring to our organization. Let me explain a bit about our team structure at Kong to illustrate this.

My developer marketing team reports directly to the CMO. We own functions like campaigns, content, and community management, and we partner very closely with the demand gen team. 

We’re the only team in marketing focused on the developer persona, essentially functioning as a mini-marketing org within the larger one. While the demand gen team targets the buyer persona, we supplement their efforts by focusing on developers, allowing us to influence the pipeline strategically.

By comparison, our developer relations team sits on the product team. They're focused more on the later funnel stages, such as activations and user success functions. They also own areas like developer experience and documentation.

Key strengths of developer marketing

Our developer marketing team has four key strengths that make us invaluable to the organization:

  1. Deep persona knowledge: We’re the developer subject matter experts (SMEs) on the marketing team. We have a genuine interest in understanding their world. 
  2. Technical expertise: To understand the developer's world, we maintain a level of technical expertise. This allows us to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences, bridging the gap between developers and other parts of the organization.
  3. A focus on education: Developer marketing is all about relationship building, not selling. There’s a whole other team that focuses on selling to the buyer persona; we’re not doing that. 
  4. Experience in mapping to business value: We have insight into how our efforts impact the business and can effectively communicate the impact of developer marketing programs on revenue goals.

How marketing and DevRel can succeed together

Often in organizations, DevRel has a kind of mistrust of marketing. That can be because they've been asked to do marketing activities that feel inauthentic, or because there's an organization-wide misunderstanding of what DevRel is in the first place. Developer marketing's role is to help bridge that gap.

So, let’s explore how to create a culture where marketing and DevRel can succeed together:

1. Build a cohesive strategy together

First, it's crucial that developer marketing and DevRel don’t plan in silos. Here's how we do it at Kong:

  1. I get my goals from marketing
  2. DevRel gets its goals from product management
  3. We meet and put together our plans
  4. DevRel sees my plan before leadership ever does, so there are no surprises

This approach allows you to present a united front anytime someone questions your community activities. If you and your DevRel leader are on the same page, you have a much stronger argument for leadership about what you're doing.

2. Divide and conquer

How DevRel and developer marketing teams divide their workload varies from company to company. So DevRel may be used to owning some dev marketing functions, and vice versa. 

I recommend playing to your strengths. For example, my team owns community management. At many other companies, that falls under DevRel, but my team is better placed to own it because the majority of Kong’s community management is taken on by marketing.