Developer marketing doesn’t use the same techniques as traditional marketing, and the way you measure success also looks different. When putting together a developer marketing team, and recruiting talented developer marketers, you need to outline what you expect from your new hires in a well outlined job description. The metrics you use for success are different, and these metrics are still evolving just as this area of marketing develops.
But, you also need to work out how you can attract talented developer marketers to your company by talking about what you can offer them, not just about what you expect from them. While some of these benefits will be the same as other roles in your company, there are some unique employee perks that developer marketers will look for.
Below, we’ll discuss what measures for success you should include in your developer marketer job description, as well as the employee benefits you need to highlight.
Success Criteria
In this section, include the metrics you use to measure developer marketing success and explain what will be expected from your new hire. This includes:
- Increase awareness of the product, including # of registrants to your developer newsletter, # of impressions to your developer portal or content, social media subscribers and mentions, and blog article views & reads
- Improve product adoption, including how many trials are being spun-up, how many applications are being built or have been built, the number of built applications per developer, and number of 3rd party integrations onto other platforms
- Increase engagement, including how often developers are using your product and which features they’re using, the average number of logins, the number of active developer API tokens, and the number of developers engaging with your product 30 days after sign-up
- Developer community development, including # of developer groups, the # of new developer groups added, the # of developer meetings per month, # of developers per group and # of total developers
- Developer satisfaction, including your Net Promoter Score, a low “Time to First Hello World,” and a fast time-to-value
Benefits
Include a section informing developer marketers about why they would want to work at your company. As developer marketers are in demand due to this rapidly emerging field and sought-after skills, you need to define what your company offers above your competition. While this will be unique to your business model, here are some examples:
- Ability to connect and work directly with developers and technical end users
- Access to a product and engineering team dedicated to improving the company’s product(s) for developers
- Budget for developer education, developer marketing, and developer advocacy activities
- Competitive base salary and a rewarding bonus scheme based on a combination of success criteria mentioned above
- Learning and development opportunities
- A flexible work schedule
Start Assembling Your Developer Marketing Team
Developer marketing requires a long-term strategy; you won’t achieve results overnight. Industry experts suggest that it can take 12-18 months to successfully build a developer marketing program. You should start your search soon for experienced developer marketers or traditional marketers (with very technical backgrounds) who can quickly learn the ropes.