We’ve compiled a list of successful educational examples of developer marketing that move the developer along this buying journey, going from initial awareness of the product through activation, downloading the software, getting an API key, and then engaging and using it regularly. Read on to find out our top five picks and the techniques they used to succeed.
Table of contents
1. StreamNative: Self-Paced Training and Certificates
To bring your developer education and marketing experience to life, you need to offer a variety of learning modalities to suit the needs of different learners, including documentation, instructor-led and self-paced training, and hands-on sandboxes.
StreamNative, a cloud-native messaging and event streaming platform built by the original creators of Apache Pulsar, offers software sandboxes during instructor-led training. These sandboxes also allow students to practice coding inside the self-paced courses. Through the StreamNative Academy, developers can learn about the product, as well as take exams and receive a certificate of completion to verify their knowledge. Badges and certificates help keep developers engaged and using your software.
StreamNative can also track learners’ course engagement, which means the sales and marketing team can get a better idea of who is using the software and which features are causing problems.
2. Chef Software: Industry Content and Courses
Chef Software provides DevOps automation tools to enable enterprises to overcome the complexities involved with automating their infrastructure, security, systems, and applications. To use Chef’s tools, you need to know Ruby and have knowledge of DevOps. With that in mind, Chef created courses through its Learn Chef online university that teach developers the fundamental skills you need to be successful not just with their products, but with many other tools and software.
When people search for resources to learn Ruby, Chef’s courses appear on the results page. When developers find out more about the course, or when they enroll and start learning, they can also investigate the company and the product to see if it looks useful for them.
3. Arrikto: Personalized Learning and Certificates
To deliver successful developer education programs, users should be active participants in their learning process and need interactive and engaging activities to keep them engaged. Arrikto, a machine learning operations (MLOps) company that brings together data scientists and DevOps, provides its developer community with media-rich self-paced courses through its Arrikto Academy.
Within Arrikto Academy, users can access a personalized dashboard to customize their accounts and profiles. With the on-demand, self-paced courses, learners can save their progress and pick up where they left off.
Once learners have completed a course, users receive an HTML certificate that includes their name, course, and completion date. These certificates are shareable on LinkedIn and other mediums. They can view and search for their active courses, resume in-progress courses, and access certificates.
4. Redis: Better Access to Learner Data
Real-time data platform Redis built courses that cover basic principles of databases, advanced concepts, and theories, in addition to courses that covered specific features within Redis’ products. In exchange for getting these free courses, developers register and provide an email address. Once Redis has those email addresses, it can analyze that data and look for patterns and important nuggets of information, such as clusters of users who work at the same company. Redis’ sales team can reach out to these high purchase intent accounts. As these courses last around six weeks, people who complete them are regarded as strong MQLs.
Redis also provides its users an easy way to complete hands-on, software exercises during online training. Developers feel empowered and enabled to be successful with Redis software.
5. Kong: Multiple Learning Modalities
Kong, a cloud connectivity company for API and micro-service management, uses self-paced, hands-on courses to complement its developer documentation as a way of better educating developers, and improving product awareness and product adoption amongst developers and DevOps engineers. When learners are reading through the documentation, there are links to learning labs that provide them with real-life scenarios that teach them to use the functionality.
If users are struggling to understand a part of the product, they can quickly switch to a course to enhance their knowledge as they go along. This helps lower the barrier to adoption by removing unnecessary hurdles to product understanding. Users can fully understand how features work and return to these courses when necessary to reinforce their knowledge.
Kong also provides hands-on product sandboxes to enhance the learner experience and drive product adoption. As users have to provide their details to sign up for courses, Kong gets access to data about who is using their product. The marketing and sales teams can then use this data to decide who to follow up with.
Looking to create something similar to the examples here? One thing they all have in common is that they were built with Appsembler. Find out how it can work for you.