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

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!)

James Higginbotham

November 5, 2013 · 2 min read