#DefragCon 2013 Notes: Developer Marketing: F#%k Leads; Generate Relationships – Tim Falls, SendGrid

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Developer Marketing: F#%k Leads; Generate Relationships – Tim Falls, SendGrid

  • Marketing has gotten really hard
  • Relationships > Leads
  • Handshakes > Clicks
  • Two types of marketing: traditional (banner ads, blog posts, SEO, SEM) vs. non-traditional (trust, relationships w/ real people)
  • Both have their purpose, but there needs to be a balance
  • Recommendations to build relationships and trust:
    • Have your dev team write API libraries in the top 2 programming languages to help a majority of developers
    • Have your dev team answer questions on Stack Overflow and other sites
    • Have your dev team write/improve your documentation
    • Have your dev team speak at conferences to share how they can help developers
    • Have your dev team spend time at hackathons to build one-to-one relationships for recruiting
  • As a result, you will get different/fresh ideas as you will start to do things that you’ve never done before
  • It is expensive to scale, as people are expensive compared to other marketing
  • However, the value from engaging with people is much higher than buying ad clicks
  • Coupon redemptions and signup portals (e.g. hack.sendgrid.com) are useful for tracking traction and conversions from developer marketing efforts
  • Downloads of new API library versions give back and show you appreciate your customers
  • Twilio has a similar approach to marketing via developer evangelists (I’ve seen it – amazing!)