Finding Influencers That Deliver on Your Developer Marketing Objectives

Influencer marketing is all about building meaningful human connections with your target audience. This is particularly important in developer marketing since winning the hearts and minds of developers across diverse global communities is not easy.

In part one of our influencer marketing series, we explored what to include in an influencer program to make it effective, how to define influencers based on different developer audiences, and which factors to consider to maximize their reach over time. In this post, we’ll focus on getting started by finding the right influencers for your developer marketing objectives - covering influencer identification and selection tactics.

Identifying potential influencers

Developers don’t have an issue with being influenced. Like anyone else, they follow experts, thought leaders, and innovators who provide inspiring and informative content. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that they’ll be able to spot shallow marketing tactics a mile away. And they will have an issue with this type of advertising.

Therefore, the key to effective influencer marketing is building trust. Influencers whose followers align with your target audience add value through their content and have the potential to create affinity for your product or brand. There are plenty of directions a partnership with an influencer could go in: It could be an organic partnership that focuses on engagement with existing users of your product, or a paid product feature that reaches new developers in your target audience. The right fit is always context-dependent and successful partnerships start with clear objectives.

With this in mind, we’ll cover five steps to help you find the right influencers for your developer marketing needs.

#1 Define your objectives

Any influencer marketing program should start with specific and well-defined objectives. These objectives could focus on a specific KPI, like driving hackathon sign-ups, or a long-term goal, like building brand awareness. Be as clear as possible! This first step will inform what types of influencers you need and what range of content you need them to deliver.

Let’s follow an example from a natural language processing (NLP) platform in the AI and machine learning (AI/ML) industry. In this case, the client had two initial objectives for their influencer marketing program:

Promote NLP to a broader developer audience through educational content
Drive API subscribers through product-specific content

These objectives are the starting points for your research into potential influencers.

#2 Build an influencer matrix

As you start identifying potential influencers, you’ll need a way to categorize them according to the needs of your program. Creating an influencer matrix will help with this.

We recommend setting this matrix up with the following dimensions:

Columns that describe the type of knowledge or expertise an influencer has
Rows that describe the role an influencer has on their channel

Here are the columns (left) and rows (right) that we defined in our NLP example:

Given the complexity of your program and where you are in your product stage, you can define dimensions that suit your specific objectives.

For this example, we used these nine influencer categories:

#3 Prioritize influencers according to their audience

Now that you’ve identified potential influencers, the next step is to prioritize them according to the benefits they offer your program. This is where you can add their audience to the equation and consider what an optimal mix might look like. An influencer mapping process will help you understand how each category from your influencer matrix relates to your target audience.

By arranging the influencer categories into rows and different audience profiles into columns, you can create a supplemental matrix to visualize the reach of potential influencers. Use what you know about each influencer to assign value based on how each category would reach and impact your target audience. This visual profile will show you what different influencer combinations will achieve and where their followers are in their developer journey.

This is what the influencer mapping looked like for our NLP example. We used the nine previously determined influencer categories and a simple “+” marking system to demonstrate reach.

#4 Bring potential influencers together with your objectives

It’s now time to bring everything together and conceptualize the program. Revisit your program objectives and use them to create content themes with influencers that will help you reach your target audience. In this step, you can also determine whether to use an outbound or inbound approach.

Here’s an overview of the conceptualized program for our NLP example:

The client started with two initial objectives: Promote NLP to a broader developer audience and drive API subscribers.

Based on these objectives, we proposed the following content themes for the client and defined the approach, influencers, and audience accordingly:

#5 Add creative extensions to your program

The sky's the limit when coming up with ideas for the influencers in your program. Here are a few creative extensions you can add to support your objectives and take your program even further after launch:

Invite influencers as guest speakers at a sponsored event to build buy-in and provide content opportunities
Design a hackathon that brings the influencer together with their followers to drive engagement with your brand
Create a thought leadership activation (like a “Solutions Summit”) that brings all the influencers in your program together to elevate your brand

From here, you’re ready to bring the program to life.

Adding influencers to your program

If you’ve done your homework up to this point, you’ll be ready to create selection criteria and add influencers to your program. Here are a few important considerations for the selection process:

Channels: Where does the influencer publish content? YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Podcasts, TikTok, Twitch, or elsewhere?
Content quality: What is the production level like for the influencer’s content? Do they focus on informal chats or professionally shot media?
Followers: What do you know about the influencer's followers? How many are there, how engaged are they, and what are their demographics?
Publishing frequency: How frequently does the influencer publish content? How do you envision your content fitting into their production schedule?

Adding the influencers you select to your program can be a lengthy process. The main steps are summarized here, but remember that these steps may differ for each influencer:

Identification: Apply the program approach we’ve covered up to this point.
Outreach: Connect by email, call, or video to gauge the influencer’s interest.
Scope: Discuss the what, where, when, and how of the content you will collaborate with the influencer to produce.
Contracting: Put the plan in writing and make it official.
Publishing: Provide final approvals, verify the publication schedule, and ensure the influencer delivers the correct CTA details.

Let’s get started

Identifying, selecting, and getting started with your first set of influencers is a lot of work - but winning buy-in and trust with your developer audience is very much worth the effort!

Stay tuned for our third and final post, where we’ll discuss how to manage your influencer program after launch by looking at measurement, evaluation, and relationship management.

An influencer program can be managed in-house with an experienced and dedicated team - or through an agency that can provide this team for you. Get in touch to learn how Catchy can help.