Marketing *at* developers doesn’t work. Creating community does.

“The question is how can I help, not how can I market.”

I often get asked, “How do you market to a developer?” or “How can a company better communicate to the developer community?” The developer community is an inspiring community. They are, after all, building future innovations. If you want to reach the developer community, you have to start by asking: what value can I provide for them, not what product or solution am I going to market?

All companies are becoming technology companies. Behind every great company are great developers. Developers are builders. They are working collectively to solve today’s and future technical and business problems. They are behind the innovation development at every company. Developers are the most in-demand talent on the market today, and there are more job openings than developers in the world to fill them. In the U.S. alone, almost?200,000 developer jobs?will need filling each year through the end of the decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. It means there is a huge opportunity to help developers.

If you want a developer to know who you are, trust who you are, and value your product, don’t think of them as any other enterprise buyer. If you make it your mission to add value to what developers do and help to make their jobs easier, you can add value and build a life-long partnership as a professional developer navigates their own career path.?

Getting to know developers

There is an old stereotype that developers are individuals, coding away in their basements. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The developer community is diverse and collaborative. They are interconnected, they rely on each other, and build on each other’s code across their larger open source and inner source community. Helping one developer can often mean helping hundreds or thousands of other developers. It is inspiring to see this kind of collaborative innovation. This is one very large, global community helping to support each other, helping to advance each other, to make a greater impact. These are all attributes we have in common to support our business goals.

Developers are changing the world, one industry at a time. From artificial intelligence, to autonomous cars, to smarter homes to combat climate change, to applications that address global health challenges we face -- everything is connected and runs on code, and developers are engineering a future where technology touches every aspect of our lives.

How to connect with developers in a meaningful way

There are three key ingredients you need to keep top-of-mind to reaching developers where they are.

1.????Understand the audience – Listen and learn to find out what are their values, what are their roadblocks?

2.????Find common ground – Lead from a place of contributing value. A pay-it-forward approach, for the benefit of the community working towards a common purpose/outcome, will go a long way.

3.????Selfless communication – Communicate from a place of developer-first, not company-first or product-first.

In my past experience, enterprise companies started with “we” or “me” first. In other words: what we offered our customers, what we sell, and how we could make our product fit the customer or developer’s need. My time with GitHub taught me a new perspective – to embody a customer-first mindset. This mindset is something that every marketer should embrace. Start by changing the conversation with developers (and customers). Start by asking “is this the best thing for the developer, or customers?”

Being customer-first, or customer-obsessed, is common language in business today, but the delivery doesn’t always support the words. Truly executing on a customer-first strategy needs to be embedded and actioned across every part of the business – from product development, to operations, to sales, to marketing, and across every business unit, every business initiative, and every employee. My customer-first mindset continues at VMware and everything we do in marketing revolves around the customer.

Here's an example. Let’s say you have a big event coming up and your company really wants to reach the developer community. You consider putting forward your most experienced spokesperson from your senior leadership team. What many learn the hard way is that seniority, or executive level job-titles, might not hold the much weight if the spokesperson isn’t perceived as having credible experience as part of the developer community.

I have seen this time and time again. One event from my past comes to mind, where the spokesperson came across as merely a talking-head. While he was completely “on-message,” he wasn’t relatable. He wasn’t perceived as someone developers felt they could learn from, or be inspired by, and so the message fell flat.

The obvious lesson: the messenger matters as much as the message. Peers and developer luminaries are important, just like any professional who wants to learn from like-minded professionals. Sounds obvious, right? For developers, events should be tailor-made to their interests, preferences, and communications style. It’s all about the opportunity to interact, share, and contribute amongst developers and engineers. Don’t force fit the wrong executive spokesperson.

Taking a leaf from the developer playbook

We marketers (and anyone in business, quite frankly) can learn a lot from the developer community and their modus operandi. Many of the principles that this community live by can be replicated in other areas of business, to great effect.

After years of partnering and supporting the developer community, I’ve taken away a few key principles that have universal relevance, even outside of the developer community, which we can all try to emulate in business:

1.????Be a problem solver. Find ways to add value to productivity. You must identify the value you can provide for them and not add a “working tax” and complicate getting things done. This resonates with most roles – everyone wants to be more productive and not get stuck in processes.

2.????Develop a pay-it-forward mindset. It’s not about you, or your company’s agenda. It’s about the problem being solved and how you can contribute to something bigger.

3.????Commit to continuous learning. Developers are motivated to learn from each other and the broader community. Sharing their knowledge, and experimenting with new technologies, are innate in how they interact, how they problem solve, and how they make an impact. Every other tech profession has this opportunity to keep growing, keep learning from each other, and asking questions.

Your call to action

Talk to your developers and engineers. Learn directly from them. And if developers aren’t your target audience, talk to your core audience and learn directly from them.

One of the most rewarding programs I have ever been involved in engaged a group of developers to message test a new company narrative. The question posed was: “is this best for our community?” This “focus group” gave me more insight than I could have received any other way. We continued to meet over several months and chipped away at getting the narrative right. Together, we learned about the audience, found common language, and communicated with our audience and not at our audience. It was an evolution, but we got it right when we went public. I was proud of the result because it resonated. Our community was well represented, and we weren’t talking past our audience.

Build your community

It might come as a surprise to some that a Chief Marketing Officer is saying “don’t market”. But marketing’s key components revolve around customers, community and communication when you boil it down. I’m a big believer in building community, and this is where we, as marketers, have an opportunity to double down. It’s about listening, learning, and connecting, just like the developer community.

I hope my experience and perspectives have inspired you to think about how you can embrace new audiences, by building community, for the benefit of something that is bigger than our own individual businesses. Taking a leaf out of the developer community playbook can serve you well, no matter what business discipline or industry you work in. And to my fellow marketers, in this new year, before you ask how to market to developers, or any audience, remember this:

The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all. It’s a connection and a conversation. It feels like a community that people want to be part of.