Making the metrics count

NB: This article is based on a talk given by Stacey Kruczek (who's now Director of Developer Relations at Aerospike) when she was still Global Developer Marketing Lead at Zebra Technologies.

Hi, my name is Stacy Kruczek, and I’m the Global Developer Marketing Lead for the Developer Relations team at Zebra Technologies. I've been in this role for close to seven years. I started in the engineering team as a Technical Marketing Leader and quickly became a Developer Relations/Developer Marketing Strategist for the team to help them build the developer marketing toolbox from the ground up.

Anywhere you throw a tech product, you're going to hit a developer. So, it becomes really important to stay on top of the measurement of this and whether or not it's working.

Today, I’m going to cover:

How to align your team goals with your company goals

Let's first make some sense of the metrics because it's pretty daunting when you think about it. There's all this terminology and measurement that's going around and spinning our heads so to speak. They can be very different for each organization and they certainly are for developer relations and dev marketing.

There are numerous models out there on how to measure DevRel or developer marketing success, from acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue, to SMART, and so many more.

But today, I want to share how we look at these metrics as a company for the DevRel and dev marketing strategies and how we aligned with those.

I wanted to provide a perspective from a developer-plus company standpoint. And although many of the points reflect our corporation today and some of our findings, they can also apply to developer-first companies quite easily.

But let's ask the real question, how do you measure success? Is it the number of developers visiting your site each day? Is it those who register, join, download an SDK, or participate in the forums? Or is it simply impressions and activity you have on a certain tweet?

Actually, it's all of this and more.

Metrics should provide a clear picture linking to your company, team, and stakeholders, their goals, and aspirations. And they should add value in how you help the corporation reach those key strategic initiatives (KSIs) along with their pillars of success.

Any and all of these metrics can help the team evaluate and break them down into KPIs.

Are you communicating and engaging with your developers? Where was this successful and where does this need to be re-evaluated? Obviously, we need to show how developer relations contribute, project if and when our goals can be reached, and if not, adjust them.

These can also justify the need for resources and growth in the DevRel team in your organization. So, it could be very important from that perspective as well.

To give you some substance, I'll share some examples of KSIs and KPIs, how we align, and what we measure.

If you were going to look at this from our viewpoint, let's say the company’s looking at the KSIs. Matching that, the DevRel team is looking at the KPIs.

Building the foundation for all of this are three key pillars. You can identify what you can influence in force with these pillars as well. So, let's talk about a few of these and give you some examples.

three key pillars that include growth, new markets, and experience in KPIs and KSIs

This is what the company's vision is for the future. Above the pillars in this example are the KSIs.

Pillar one is growth. So let's say a company's key strategic initiative under growth may be to increase market share in a specific region or expand offerings.

Pillar two is about entering new markets. Under this pillar, they can be expanding into the high-growth technology areas like machine vision.

For pillar three, we really want to focus on the DevRel experience. KSIs under this pillar refer to what the experience is to the customer and what their needs are, identifying those needs, and refining their digital experience.

It's very much aligned with what we're doing on the DevRel team today.

It's a great place for your team to start and align with your corporation to show the value and importance of your developer community. All of these should align with your stakeholders' aspirations and be very clear and distinct so it's understandable as well.

Aligning KPIs to the developer marketing funnel

Let's start with the basics. For your program, you'll want to properly align to your program goals and track the metrics while considering these four stages of the developer marketing funnel below.

Let's do a quick review of each stage, how they relate to dev marketing and DevRel KPIs, and pull in some examples.

Awareness

The awareness stage is crucial for developer relations and developer marketing today. Some of these KPIs may be the number of people registering for your newsletter, or blog article views and reads. They may even be social media mentions, likes, and retweets.

Awareness paints the picture that they’re aware of your offerings and that you exist. This is a large driver for the developer marketing strategy, and it's the first phase before we move into consideration.

Consideration

In this stage, we can really reveal the first-time dev marketing KPIs in terms of the number of people that open your newsletters and click on an article as an example.

It's not only providing awareness to finding that information, but it's also moving into consideration of your offerings.

Another example would be visitors to your developer portal. Are they aware of this portal? Are they engaging with a blog and continuously visiting the site? Are they looking at all of the content and considering it? Are they looking at an API and considering that API?