How to generate demand with education

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Jason St-Cyr

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I hate spam. You probably do too! The “paid ads” and big splashy popups on websites. Remarketing campaigns on Facebook trying to sell you the same toaster you bought last week. The splashy booths at events with the smiling faces waiting for somebody who isn’t just there to steal some free swag. The marketing automation nurture campaigns that spam your inbox after you signed up for a webinar.

It’s widely known that technical audiences are allergic to this type of marketing, but I think we can all pretty safely assume that nobody really wants this type of marketing. It isn’t effective at giving us a positive feeling with a brand and it certainly doesn’t make us want to ‘convert’.

What if we tried helping instead?

I believe reaching audiences, particularly technical ones, needs to connect to people. It needs to take advantage of being helpful. Of creating awareness of your brand through newer channels where your target audience already is. It needs to entertain and educate and reach people and create a connection between the brand and the person, building trust. Marketing needs to create fans.

The key piece is to be very specific, very helpful, and actually provide value to your target audience for the problems they want to solve. You lead with education. You also need scale, so you want this content to be able to exist in written and video form so that you can put it across various channels and reuse the investment. This type of outreach might need some extra investment up front, but it creates a higher quality connection. In several marketing circles this is being termed as being “demand generation”, as opposed to the more typical gated “lead generation” activities. Developer Relations teams have been doing this type of marketing for ages, but it’s spreading beyond just technical audiences.

“The MQL conversion rate for the demand gen side was above 20%. While, for lead gen, it was lower than 5%.”

Canberk Beker, HockeyStack (on a podcast with Mike Pastore at MarTech)

This doesn’t mean you need to try to do funny Instagram Reels dance challenges on your brand account, but I am saying that you need to get your brand associated with being helpful to your audience, being where your audience is, and being aligned with them along the way. Helping your users does not go out of style and the connections built this way have much higher fidelity. This is why so many brands invest in community or brand advocacy programs. The closer you bring people to your brand, the more you educate them, and the harder you work to keep them there, the higher the likelihood of generating the deep customer connections you want.

Side note: If you want to see some hard data about the effectiveness of low-cost lead gen MQLs vs demand gen MQLs, check out The Final Verdict by Canberk Beker at HockeyStack. They analyzed “over $100M spend, quarter million MQLs, half a billion pipeline and more than 4K closed won deals from 87 B2B SaaS companies with SLG motions” and it clearly showed that while Lead Gen activities lead to lower cost MQLs, demand gen investment led to lower cost SQLs and Closed Wins.

Building brand trust and credibility

Your name needs to be known for something, it has to have a positive sentiment with your target audience, and it has to be trusted to deliver. And this has to happen before your audience is even considering looking at you for your product or service. During a Bain and Google survey, it was discovered that “90% of buyers choose a vendor that was on a short list at the beginning of the sales process”.

“Buyers make a list of vendors for consideration before starting the search process.
Fully 80%–90% of respondents, depending on what they are buying, have a set of vendors in mind before they do any research. Just as important, 90% of them will ultimately choose a vendor from the day one list.”

– “What B2Bs Need to Know About Their Buyers”, by Saber Sherrard, Rishi Dave, and Mollie Parker MacGregor, Bain

In my view, technology advocacy is primarily around brand trust. You establish credibility, you help prospects and customers feel supported, and you nurture their connection to you. By being helpful, you establish mental patterns with your audience where they become used to working with you, asking you questions, getting you to help with their problem. By the time you are in the room with them, they already know what you can offer. And they already know you understand their problems.

Showing thought leadership and expertise, being helpful, being empathetic… this establishes trust. It establishes credibility. And your audience won’t feel like they’ve wasted their time with you. You need to make your audience feel like they have come away with something more than what they gave you.

How can you be helpful?

If you’ve bought in, you’re probably wondering “okay, so when does this article start being helpful to me?” I hate to tell you that there is no specific one-size-fits-all solution for this. Anybody who tells you they can build out your developer marketing strategy without knowing you or your brand or your products is lying to you. You can build a great product tutorial for two completely different brands on the same topic and one will be effective and the other will flop. This is because it’s not about you or your product… it’s about them: your users.

So here are my 9 suggestions for how you go about building out your map to being helpful:

#1. Know your customer

Not every technical role is the same, not every technical role has the same impact on a buying decision, and not every team is trying to solve the same problems. You need to know who it is you are trying to reach, who makes the decisions, and what makes them choose one thing over another. Your sales team is the one in the room talking to these people and you can often learn a lot by the questions they have to answer and they questions they need to go to the product team for.

#2. Be a part of the community

The answers are not in your head, you need to listen to people and see what problems they are having. The first step here will be joining into the communities where your users are and creating a network, whether those are in forums or on social media or some other channel.

#3. Find the problems

Every product has issues and if you dig in the community you will out what those are. Sometimes, you might have to ignore your most vocal or loyal users and focus instead on those that match most closely to the type of individual you need to connect with at a potential customer. There are a lot of problems encountered by your users and, much like a product manager, you need to find the right ones to focus on. No matter what, document it all.

#4. Prioritize

You can’t help everybody, so you need to make sure you spend time helping where it has the maximum scale of impact. Which problems hit the largest cross-section of your users? Which problems are the ones your potential customers are trying to solve? Which ones can you scale across different channels and audience types to have maximum reuse and impact? Which solutions could help your sales team connect with a customer better?

#5. Learn the pain

Once you’ve identified the problems to focus on, experience the frustrations yourself. Try to figure out how to solve them. Find patterns where a similar problem has been solved elsewhere. No matter the road you choose, your goal here is to become more empathetic with the problem and try to understand what it takes to solve the problem your users are having.

#6. Identify solutions

This is the part where you reduce the friction. If a developer is having a hard time getting their GraphQL query to return results, how could you help? Is it better documentation with troubleshooting steps based on errors so that their Google search will find it? Is it a ‘getting started’ tutorial that helps with that particular flow so they can see the success path? Is it a video that somebody can watch to see where they might have gone wrong or skipped a step? Is it a GitHub repo example so that a developer can see how the code works? We don’t need to create the content yet, this is about identifying the pieces that might be needed.

#7. Create content focused on the problem

This is not the time for signup forms, popup ads, giant banners, product placements, etc. If you have a corporate need to have that on the page, it has to be pushed all the way down. The focus here needs to be on the helpful content and keeping them going through it as efficiently as possible. You are not trying to generate a lead in your database right now, this is about creating a positive experience with your brand at this touchpoint.

#8. Give them a path forward

If they want to reach out to you for more help, make sure there is an easy way for them to find next steps and connect with somebody. This might be into community forums, or sending them to docs on the topic, or a GitHub repo related to the topic… whatever the right next resource is you want them to be able to follow that forward. At this point, you have somebody who is interested and engaged and you want to keep them moving forward with you and knowing where to go next.

#9. Share it widely

This part is probably a post in and of itself, but simply creating the content won’t work unless you maximize its ability to reach your audience. You need to make sure this is in the channels where your target audience are, in their communities, on social, in newsletters, maybe even HackerNews if that’s where your people are. The more you can generate awareness of the content, the greater impact your content will have.

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