You’ll eventually be asked to build a marketing strategy for something you’ve never done before, and when that moment comes, just know you’re not alone no matter how much experience you’ve had.
My approach is always simple: learn and ask a lot of questions.
You’ll probably have some assumptions as to approaches, but sometimes something can be so out of left field – whether you’re marketing to a new audience, or a new industry, or switching from B2B to B2C, or even a different pricing model – things are always variable.
Just remember the following:
- Learn and ask a lot of questions (in case I need to say this again)
- Have a hypothesis to test (or multiple)
- Set some goals and KPI’s
- Be flexible in finding what works
I’ve just joined a developer tools company, and I’m finding myself in new territory. Although I have deep expertise in B2B marketing, I’ve spent my career primarily marketing to marketers (whether in the advertising world or marketing tech). So taking on a new audience – developers – has been a fun, yet challenging, learning experience.
Part of marketing to developers includes embracing the developer community – meaning, creating a developer community or developer relations program. Developers notoriously dislike marketing, so what’s a marketer to do?
Clearly I’ve never developed a developer community before, so I’ll share with you my approach.
Seek out other marketers in my space and read up.
I spoke with several marketers to get their advice on what to know, do, and read. I won’t list the details here, but this was the best resource I had to ask questions. I also got a few books, including this one “Developer Marketing and Relations” which has been helpful, but it does speak generally and have a lot of basics that you may find yourself rolling your eyes at if you’re a seasoned marketer.
Creating a method to get more answers
The next thing to do is be methodical in my approach to getting some answers before I can create a strategy that makes sense. In order to do this for the developer program, I listed the categories I would want answers for
- Goals – What goals do we set?
- Themes – What are the themes for the program?
- Audience – How do we identifying the audience?
- Opportunities – What are the opportunities?
- Execution – How do we execute the program?
- Measurement – How do we measure success?
After identifying the categories, I listed every question and thought I had about the program – whether it was just flat out something broad like “who?” to “does XYZ know about this?” when I thought there might be someone who had an answer.
More research and planning
Then I set off in setting a timeline for gathering answers so that I could put together the strategy. This shouldn’t be unfamiliar, as it’s generally what you do when you’re building strategy anyway. So just go about whatever you need to do to get the answers you need and get to planning.
Really, that’s all. It’s not as hard as it sounds, it’s just about having a framework and going into it with that in mind. That way you don’t go into with too much in mind.
Header Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash