Create Developer Engagement with Audience Insights

Tech companies often seek the secret sauce to engage more deeply with the developer community. In this article, we share an example of how in-depth audience research can help generate meaningful engagement to address the client’s needs.

Ziwei Chen

Senior Strategist

Best Practices

Win developers’ buy-in by engaging them as partners

Developers, though rarely the person who writes the check, have a strong influence over the discovery, evaluation, and advocacy of your products. Successful developer marketing does not gauge the interest of developers by showering them with marketing fluff. Instead, developers are attracted to companies and programs that engage them as partners. Therefore, your marketing team needs to become developer’s partners first and help them understand the value of your products, encourage them to test and play with different tools, and direct them to the support and guidance when needed.

That’s where audience insights come in.

How audience insights can help you understand and empower developers

Clients frequently approach Catchy, a developer marketing agency, to help them engage more deeply with their existing developer community. It’s not always about top-of-funnel demand generation. Often, the greatest growth comes from doing more with the developers you already have.

Here is an example of how we used in-depth audience research to generate meaningful engagement for our clients among the existing developer community.

Meet the client

Our client is a prominent global technology company. They already had an established developer community where developers learn about, evaluate, and try out their products. Knowing developers were already innovating with their products, the client wanted to discover how to surface more of these ideas across the wider business. How could they bring developers out of their teams and get their ideas and thoughts to a bigger audience?

Introducing our approach

We conducted in-depth interviews with developers, C-suite executives, and engineering managers, focusing on their thoughts on developers influencing decision-making. Candidates were selected based on their relevant experience and to get opinions from different perspectives.

Insight:
- Developers have lots of ideas; however, they don’t always know who to talk to and how to best present their ideas.
Solution:
- Create a ‘How to’ guide for developers. Help them to understand the different objectives, motivations, and perspectives of leadership in other departments and the C-Suite. Give them a set of tools to generate the confidence to take their ideas out of the room.

Here’s what we made

We translated our observations into practical recommendations and put together an engaging guide. This included actionable content about stress testing your ideas, how to visualise your ideas for the c-suite, and how to prepare a high-level “why this is good” argument. Developers use it and learn to pitch their ideas to their leadership team and get their ideas invested. At the same time, our client is seen as a true partner to their developer audience.

Want to learn more about your developer audience?

While in-depth audience research allows Catchy to uncover unique audience insights, it is done cross-sectionally for a specific project. Catchy has created a Developer Signal Hub program to understand the developer audience over time. We create customized queries and dashboards for clients to monitor and analyze ongoing conversations among their target developer audience.

In our next blog, we’ll discuss how we use Developer Signal Hub to help our clients monitor developer engagement over time and use insights to build and grow communities.