NB: This article is based on a talk given by Stacey Kruczek (who's now Director of Developer Relations at Aerospike) when she was still Global Developer Marketing Lead at Zebra Technologies.
Hi, my name is Stacy Kruczek, and I’m the Global Developer Marketing Lead for the Developer Relations team at Zebra Technologies. I've been in this role for close to seven years. I started in the engineering team as a Technical Marketing Leader and quickly became a Developer Relations/Developer Marketing Strategist for the team to help them build the developer marketing toolbox from the ground up.
Anywhere you throw a tech product, you're going to hit a developer. So, it becomes really important to stay on top of the measurement of this and whether or not it's working.
How to align your team goals with your company goals
Let's first make some sense of the metrics because it's pretty daunting when you think about it. There's all this terminology and measurement that's going around and spinning our heads so to speak. They can be very different for each organization and they certainly are for developer relations and dev marketing.
There are numerous models out there on how to measure DevRel or developer marketing success, from acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue, to SMART, and so many more.
But today, I want to share how we look at these metrics as a company for the DevRel and dev marketing strategies and how we aligned with those.
I wanted to provide a perspective from a developer-plus company standpoint. And although many of the points reflect our corporation today and some of our findings, they can also apply to developer-first companies quite easily.
But let's ask the real question, how do you measure success? Is it the number of developers visiting your site each day? Is it those who register, join, download an SDK, or participate in the forums? Or is it simply impressions and activity you have on a certain tweet?
Actually, it's all of this and more.
Teresa Garanhel
Metrics should provide a clear picture linking to your company, team, and stakeholders, their goals, and aspirations. And they should add value in how you help the corporation reach those key strategic initiatives (KSIs) along with their pillars of success.
Any and all of these metrics can help the team evaluate and break them down into KPIs.
Are you communicating and engaging with your developers? Where was this successful and where does this need to be re-evaluated? Obviously, we need to show how developer relations contribute, project if and when our goals can be reached, and if not, adjust them.
These can also justify the need for resources and growth in the DevRel team in your organization. So, it could be very important from that perspective as well.
To give you some substance, I'll share some examples of KSIs and KPIs, how we align, and what we measure.
If you were going to look at this from our viewpoint, let's say the company’s looking at the KSIs. Matching that, the DevRel team is looking at the KPIs.
Building the foundation for all of this are three key pillars. You can identify what you can influence in force with these pillars as well. So, let's talk about a few of these and give you some examples.
This is what the company's vision is for the future. Above the pillars in this example are the KSIs.
Pillar one is growth. So let's say a company's key strategic initiative under growth may be to increase market share in a specific region or expand offerings.
Pillar two is about entering new markets. Under this pillar, they can be expanding into the high-growth technology areas like machine vision.
For pillar three, we really want to focus on the DevRel experience. KSIs under this pillar refer to what the experience is to the customer and what their needs are, identifying those needs, and refining their digital experience.
It's very much aligned with what we're doing on the DevRel team today.
It's a great place for your team to start and align with your corporation to show the value and importance of your developer community. All of these should align with your stakeholders' aspirations and be very clear and distinct so it's understandable as well.
Aligning KPIs to the developer marketing funnel
Let's start with the basics. For your program, you'll want to properly align to your program goals and track the metrics while considering these four stages of the developer marketing funnel below.
Let's do a quick review of each stage, how they relate to dev marketing and DevRel KPIs, and pull in some examples.
Awareness
The awareness stage is crucial for developer relations and developer marketing today. Some of these KPIs may be the number of people registering for your newsletter, or blog article views and reads. They may even be social media mentions, likes, and retweets.
Awareness paints the picture that they’re aware of your offerings and that you exist. This is a large driver for the developer marketing strategy, and it's the first phase before we move into consideration.
Consideration
In this stage, we can really reveal the first-time dev marketing KPIs in terms of the number of people that open your newsletters and click on an article as an example.
It's not only providing awareness to finding that information, but it's also moving into consideration of your offerings.
Another example would be visitors to your developer portal. Are they aware of this portal? Are they engaging with a blog and continuously visiting the site? Are they looking at all of the content and considering it? Are they looking at an API and considering that API?
Nick Knuppe
Engagement
The next phase that we want them to move into if they’re considering this is whether they’re going to use it. Are they going to engage with it? So, we're drilling down to engagement and enablement.
Here, your developers are now becoming your customers because they're engaging with your brand and identifying with it.
Some KPIs for DevRel here may be:
- Are they downloading your latest SDK?
- How many unique users are on your site?
For dev marketing, the attendance rates for your developer webinars are important, as well as newsletters and click-through rates for articles. Are they directly going to that blog and reading and engaging with it? How long are they staying on there and reading it?
Retention
The last part of this is retention, and this is where we want them to stay. These measures could be repeat attendees at your webinars for example. It could be the number of use cases and applications built and how they’re using your technology to create new opportunities.
These are just some examples of each stage of the funnel. Now, let's look at some more specific KPIs that we do on our team.
Developer relations vs. developer marketing KPIs
Some of these types of metrics can reveal if your audience is being reached. And when we take a look at some of the specifics to get a sense of what we’ve found to be important to us, let's keep in mind that some of these can be aligned with your community and activity metrics.
They can be both qualitative and quantitative.
Note that we also strive to find correlations between these metrics across the channels to see how the developer experience is doing.
For the developer relations team and for our developer marketing metrics this year and next year, our North Star is really about that developer experience. Are they having a good experience on our developer portal? Are they registering as users? Are they coming back and drilling down on that content?
This is a key driver for us because it’ll really evaluate whether or not we're delivering on the experience.
And with that, we can start to knock down some of those other pillars in terms of growth and expanding our market offerings.
We strive to find those correlations between the channels. For instance, where are most users from on your developer portal? We're seeing high concentrations in India and Germany. We're also seeing a strong correlation with our YouTube watch metrics and where videos are being watched from. And guess what, they're in India and Germany.
Let's break down a few more KPIs to give you a better idea.
Developer relations KPIs
On the developer relations side, we're looking at unique developer portal users. We're looking at those average engagement times like how long they’re looking at our portal.
We're also looking specifically at forum submissions and response times from our team. That's become a really important indicator. Also if they're understanding our offerings, if they’re using our offerings, and if they're having success with those.
Blog views are important, as well as feedback and satisfaction. On satisfaction, we've measured this in a couple of different ways. So let me give you an example.
Teresa Garanhel
Recently, we installed a quick three-question survey on our site that was added to the portal to gauge their interest and ease in finding information that they wanted on the site.
We're gauging the customers’ or the developers’ loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm. ‘On a scale of zero to 10, did you find what you were looking for today?’ ‘Would you recommend this to someone else?’ These are the types of things that we strive to measure.
And specifically on experience, we're looking to see whether or not they're finding the information they want, what type of information that they're looking for, and if they found it difficult, somewhat difficult, or easy. This is a driver of anywhere that we may need to tweak or refine our developer experience.
That's going to be really important for us because we've been listening for quite a few years and even engaging in this small, quick pop-up survey. And we're taking that data and applying it. That's why APIs are of value.
Developer marketing KPIs
On the developer marketing side, let's drill down a little bit on the content. We're looking at the authenticity and relevance of the technical content and what we’re producing through these various communication channels (e.g., blogs and videos).
For newsletters, we're looking at those click-through rates and unsubscribes, which we're really thankful are not bad at all. We're definitely surpassing the industry standards. We're very low on our unsubscribe rates, so we know that the subscribers who are seeing our content are engaged recipients.
For webinars, we're looking specifically at attendance rates. How many people registered? How many people attended? What's that conversion rate? Then are they following that information when we post that recorded video on YouTube? And what are the watch metrics? That's another correlation.
With webinars, we're also looking at those channel assessments. In terms of how they’re registering, we're able to provide unique URLs on the tool that we use, which is called GoToWebinar, and we're able to follow where they're coming from. Are they seeing that content on our newsletter or our developer portal? Are they clicking on a social link?
The majority of people are getting it from an invitation that they've registered for. But we’re seeing numbers on each one of those consistent and custom URLs.
On the social end, there's this view about the need for followers. But followers don't constitute the value that developers are adding to your business.
And you have to remember, it's about the quality and not the quantity. The number of followers doesn’t necessarily translate into the number of tools offering widgets one can sell, but it can identify with awareness.
However, if your audience is as specific as developers, they may be looking at social but finding your content by their own means. They might not want to click on that link and go to the site; they already know the developer portal is going to have the content and they’re a registered user. Or they've seen it in an invitation or a newsletter.
Teresa Garanhel
They'll find the content and click and register on that link directly. But they may not do it through social.
Now, a solid SEO strategy should certainly be established along with this. Keywords are so important, and looking for that correlation between your developer portal keywords and the keywords on your YouTube videos.
These are all things that you have to make sure are consistent in what you're looking at as far as measurement.
Crossover KPIs
So where is the crossover? These are a few of the common crossover metrics that we look at.
We're looking at that website traffic; that's really important for us. A lot of our campaigns are organic right now. We do a few paid campaigns and we'll look at those web campaigns and their measurements.
But we really want to look at the engagement and the content, and prioritize content in terms of subject for our users. What are they looking at? What's the most-read blog?
Webinar content is important to us too. Engaging with those webinars and those blogs becomes a huge metric between the crossover between DevRel and dev marketing.
The way our team is structured here at Zebra is that we have a DevRel lead and a dev marketing lead and we partner together. We have another marketing coordinator on our team and about 10 to 12 developer advocates.
So, all of that adds value and information and we all participate as a team on that. But, we're all driving towards the same sort of goals or KPIs.
Just remember, it can be difficult to be mindful of the advocacy because we're so focused on getting more followers. It's about building awareness, establishing those connections with your community, and building trusting relationships. That still needs to be at the forefront of your objectives.
Teresa Garanhel
Don't lose sight of the importance of advocacy. Promote quality, technical, and authentic content that speaks to your developers.
Top measurement tools used at Zebra Technologies
Lastly, I wanted to talk to you about the measurement tools that we use because I know this can be helpful for people to hear. I'm sure many people will have their own tools in-house that they use with their companies.
From a website perspective, we're looking at Google Analytics. On the corporate side, they're using Adobe Analytics, so we may be moving to that at some point. But Google Analytics has been a very valuable tool for us.
For email, we're utilizing Eloqua. That's how we send out all of our emails in terms of those campaigns. We also use Salesforce because having a customer relationship management tool is important for us.
In terms of social, we're utilizing Sprinklr, and it's actually a very nice and robust tool. It allows us to see impressions and reporting, and we're able to populate content through our channels and then also cross-promote.
Our webinars and meetups are called Dev Kitchens. We're utilizing Zoom and Teams, and then our tool of choice for all of our technical content and webinars online on a monthly basis is GoToWebinar.
Key takeaways
It can be challenging to consistently justify your worth and value to your organization as a DevRel team. It's a constant game. But don't give up. Stay on top of the game, and when it becomes frustrating or you feel you're not achieving the goals you want, just pivot and change direction. Change that thought process.
Most importantly, believe in the process. If you work to clearly define your objectives and goals and you align with your company goals and stakeholders' goals, you’re already a great team player and halfway through the game.
Take it to the next level. Don't be fearful of what may not work. Be fearless and have confidence that you can succeed.
