Marketing to Developers: Why Happy is Our Hack with DigitalOcean's CMO
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Carly Brantz, CMO @ DigitalOcean Amelia Ibarra, GM & SVP, Marketing @ SaaStr
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Marketing to Developers: Why Happy is Our Hack with DigitalOcean's CMO
- 1. Marketing to Developers: Why Happy is Our Hack with DigitalOcean’s CMO Carly Brantz CMO DigitalOcean @carlybrantz Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 2. 1. Provide value to your community 2. Prioritize simplicity 3. Stay agile on the journey 4. Center growth – your customers’ growth The Building Blocks to Marketing to Developers Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 3. Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 4. Marketing to Developers: How Do You Cultivate Happiness? Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 5. 1. Provide Value to Your Community Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 6. 1. Provide Value to Your Community Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 7. 1. Provide Value to Your Community Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review. ● 6,000+ tutorials (and growing) ● 28,000+ community Q&As ● 5M+ unique community visitors per month
- 8. 2. Prioritize Simplicity Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 9. Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review. 2. Prioritize Simplicity Awareness Consideration Conversion Targeted Customer Conversion Journey
- 10. Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review. 2. Prioritize Simplicity Awareness Consideration User is interested in learning code User gets targeted ad promoting curriculum course on Twitter User begins using educational resource on DO User returns to DO to research VMs User has a problem while learning code User goes back to DO to find the answer to problem User fixes problem and continues to use DO educational resources User sees numerous retargeting ads based on DO content they consumed User researches competitors User decides to try DigitalOcean! User needs a cloud-based VM Conversion
- 11. 3. Stay Agile on the Journey Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 12. Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review. 3. Stay Agile On the Journey Hobbyist Full-time Developer Entrepreneur *One of the many customer journeys at DO
- 13. Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review. 3. Stay Agile On the Journey ● Small, nimble team ● Even front-end developers often monitor infrastructure ● Series A startup ● Became a customer through DigitalOcean’s Hatch program ● Open-source project that has hosted over 3 billion minutes of online classes ● Pandemic spurred new infrastructure needs How can we meet customers at every step of the way?
- 14. 4. Center Growth – Your Customers’ Growth Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 15. Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review. 4. Center Growth – Your Customers’ Growth Most important desired outcome among DigitalOcean’s SaaS customers*: 96.3% “Build a more successful product or business” *Based on 2020 DO user research study
- 16. 1. Provide value to your community 2. Prioritize simplicity 3. Stay agile on the journey 4. Center growth – your customers’ growth Top Takeaways For cultivating happiness among prospective customers: Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 17. THANK YOU Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
- 18. Q&A Do not place text, or graphics in any of the red space Your faces will be here Logo Overlays will be here DO NOT DELETE SaaStr Team will delete these guides in review.
Editor's Notes
- Abstract: Marketing to Developers: Why Happy is Our Hack Carly Brantz scaled marketing at SendGrid to grow company revenue from $5M to $200M. Now as DigitalOcean’s CMO, she’s focused on marketing to its developer and startup audiences and helping them on their growth journeys. Carly will share lessons learned as a marketing leader – and how simplicity, community, credibility and happiness – provide a powerful platform for growth.
- Intro and path to DigitalOcean How marketing to developers has always been the goal across your roles and what specific and overall learnings you’ve gained over the years
- Industry-wide, it seems as if there’s some apprehension toward marketing to developers, or at least uncertainty around where to start. From my experience at SendGrid, Twilio, and DigitalOcean, one trend is clear: in order to cultivate growth you first have to cultivate happiness. Developer and customer happiness can take many forms, but I’ve outlined a few guiding principles to start with on the following slides.
- Our first principle centers around providing value to your community.
- At DigitalOcean, this manifests itself in a few different ways, starting with our vast library of tutorials (many of them platform and vendor-agonistic), and continuing through ongoing educational and support programs such as Hacktoberfest, our annual deploy conference, Hollie’s Hub for Good, and our Hatch incubator program.
- DigitalOcean has carved out a place for itself as a top educational resource for developers, and not just those building on DigitalOcean – our community site sees over 5M unique monthly visitors, with over 5k tutorials to help them at every stage of their learning journey, no matter what they’re trying to create. And these numbers are growing! Just this week we announced that DigitalOcean has acquired CSS-Tricks, one of the largest developer education sites in the world. CSS-Tricks will now be “powered by DO”, and the site’s ~8k tutorial articles, reference guides, and videos will continue to be freely available for all developers. “Providing value” also means meeting your community where they are – for developers, our marketing team is strategic about what platforms and sites we’re trying to engage them on. This means forum sites, YouTube, developer conferences, and even platforms like Twitch are all fair game – our Developer Relations team currently livestreams weekly Cloud Chats on Twitch to run through recent cloud news as well as play games and present demos or tutorials. This type of content also performs well since it’s not just a brand educating developers, but developers themselves educating and giving back to other developers. At every turn, marketers should be asking themselves: Is the content I’m putting out providing value to our community? How am I engaging our audience in a meaningful and relevant way? Oftentimes you’ll see content fail when it’s not meeting this benchmark of providing value, when the content is not relevant to prospects outside of the brand value.
- In order to build happiness, you also have to learn to prioritize simplicity.
- Something that I’ve discovered in marketing to developers specifically is how good they are at doing more with less. Developers typically come in with a very technical mindset that prioritizes figuring things out themselves, without needing to speak to someone in support or sales. While losing that additional human touchpoint may make some marketers quite nervous, it’s actually a worthwhile exercise in how to keep your communications and sign-up processes simple.
- At DigitalOcean, this has meant fine-tuning our self-service model in a way that ultimately drives significant revenue for the company. When we go out to developers with marketing communications, we want to make sure we’re getting straight to the point – either providing them information they need or driving to our website for tutorials they may be looking for. This is one of my learnings from Sendgrid in fact - at Sendgrid, when we launched a product aimed at marketers, we quickly found out they want more communication, more emails, and more often. We discovered this through consistent A/B testing – which we made sure to incorporate as a best practice at SendGrid. When you have this type of data in hand, you’re able to identify different trends across your different audiences – we were able to pretty clearly show that developers wanted to consume, test, and move at a slower pace than other groups on their marketing journey. Once developers have engaged with our website for learning purposes or our emails, and we’ve established that credibility as a technical resource and source of knowledge, we make sure that the rest of the onboarding and sign-up process is as intuitive as possible through simple UX/UI and transparent pricing. When developers are conducting their comparative research on our site or even setting up their first Droplet, we ensure they’re receiving simple and up-to-date information on our pricing and what flat pricing or monthly caps mean for them. This entire streamlined process results in a developer that is happier and more satisfied with having figured out the process for themselves, rather than needing to be hand-held through enrollment. And this principle of simplicity doesn’t just end at enrollment, but is carried out through the rest of their experience on the platform and with the product. Once on the platform, we also want to prioritize developers’ time – they can be up and running with a Droplet or VM within minutes and our app marketplace offers a variety of one-click installs as well. It’s important that your marketing team is working in lock-step with product and customer support/experience teams to ensure a holistic onboarding – your customer is going to be best served when the experience of becoming a customer also matches their experience once they are a customer.
- Our third principle is about staying agile.
- Marketers have heard a lot about staying agile within the past two years, mostly in regard to pandemic-era changes and the constant fluctuation of in-person or virtual events. Where agility matters most to developers and prospective customers, however, is how closely you can follow them on their unique journeys. DigitalOcean is most concerned with addressing the needs of individual developers and SMBs – these are the users that the platform is built for and the audiences that we gear our tutorials and content toward. However, these are the same customers that often make the journey from hobbyists or early learners, to full-fledged developers, to entrepreneurs and startup owners. When we think about developing tutorials and content for these developers, we want to make sure that we’re meeting them at every step of the journey, even if this means pivoting based on what topics are most top-of-mind for site visitors (ie. blockchain case studies) or serving entrepreneurial content to developers that have just started their own business.
- Here are a few examples of companies that we’ve had to individually cater to along their journeys: everything from companies that are still small teams of about five or so, where everyone has a hand in managing infrastructure (Batch), to Series A and beyond startups (Kea) and open-source projects/nonprofits that have scaled rapidly due to heightened demand during the pandemic (BigBlueButton) When you don’t ensure that you’re staying agile and receptive to how the needs of your customers are changing, you run the risk of delivering content that is no longer relevant, or meaningful, to your core audience.
- And our last principle is around centering growth.
- When marketers talk about growth, more often than not they’re looking at metrics like conversion rates or cost per acquisition. While these are important growth metrics to measure, we also reframe growth at DigitalOcean around our customers’ growth. In 2020, our user research team discovered the most important desired outcome among our SaaS customers was around “building a more successful product or business”. Particularly for a company like DigitalOcean – when our customers scale, we do too. That’s why we’ve infused this growth messaging throughout our marketing efforts as well. Growth, along with happiness messaging, resonates with our customers. You’ll see this in our latest brand campaign, which includes billboards and posters and taxi wraps in NYC, San Francisco, and London. We’ve really honed in on this growth messaging to make it clear to developers that they can come to DigitalOcean and grow their businesses.