DevOps Rockstars, Creating Community, and the Conundrum of Marketing Part III: Know Your Audience

“I won’t be a rock star; I will be a legend.” Freddie Mercury

Human nature is as such; some of us are “legends in our own minds” and some of us want to be legends of industry. How big of an audience you want to attract to become a legend is the question. In general, marketing’s job is to create legends (brand, product) and the goal is to target the largest sector of customers. What we have learned in Part I and Part II of this self-indulgent series is that in the modern data era, getting to know your audience can be nuanced depending on which DevOps / IT persona the developer is relying on today.

Marketing for these new personas, whether they are Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), Platform Engineers, IT Admins, Kubernetes Admins etc.…it really does not have to be a conundrum. Of course, if we look at the community efforts in Part II, it comes down to the more subtle marketing efforts. So, let us dig a little deeper. Overall, if we are venturing to an “on location” event; you want to adapt to the venue, the innovation, and the audience. Let review some analogies. If you were a concert promotor and the Rolling Stones were coming to your local arena; you would 1) have a lot of swag, beer, and food 2) lights, pyrotechnics, fireworks and 3) earlier start time so attendees can get home earlier than midnight. If you were a small club owner and a new indie band is playing you would 1) rely on flyers outside the venue, Instagram and Tik Tok, 2) open the bar and 3) line up opening bands that complement the headline and go until closing. The audiences are different as well. It should not be assumed that the people attending the Rolling Stones are the same that are hitting a small club.

Now, relate that to our DevOps communities and enterprise-strategy sized marketing organizations relationships. As mentioned already, a small, intimate community event such as DevOpsDays will sometimes find a company with the reputation and size of Dell Technologies to somewhat stand out like a sore thumb however we have challenged that status quo with our subtle marketing approach. We also know the audience for this conference is going to be more technical, so we bring the more technical content and representatives. Then when you need to turn on the “charm” with dollar signed sunglasses, you open your conversations to the variety of personas at a larger event such as a KubeCon, which even at that event you have to still be technically slanted and engage with an audience that still isn’t so sure why you are there but you are also now reaching the business-oriented decision makers as well. In conclusion, assuring that the offers, topics, and discussion points are applicable to the audience’s needs’ legendary conversations may resonate long after the conference is over. And of course, throwing epic parties and giving out the softest of all t-shirts does not hurt either.

Happy pondering!