Diverse Audiences in Technical Marketing
In this month’s Draft.dev webinar, we explored the complexities of marketing to diverse technical audiences with experts Tom Williams, Partner at Catchy, and Ryan Paul Gibson, Founder of Content Lift.
Read on to discover insights about understanding various technical personas, their motivations, and strategies for effectively reaching them regardless of their role or seniority.
Defining Technical Audiences
When discussing technical marketing or developer relations, we often lump many different roles under simplified banners. However, this approach doesn’t do justice to the diversity that exists within technical audiences.
As our experts discussed, technical audiences can be segmented in numerous ways:
- Role (developers, data scientists, DevOps, security professionals)
- Seniority (individual contributors through to C-suite)
- Company size (startups vs. enterprises)
- Industry vertical
- Technology stack preferences
- Geography
Tom Williams highlighted that at Catchy, they typically approach audience segmentation through the lens of roles and decision-making authority:
“We tend to see a three-role technical audience model of developer, technical decision maker, and business decision maker. I like to go a little bit deeper because there are idiosyncrasies to audiences like DevOps or Engineering Managers that are important to pay attention to.”
Ryan Gibson emphasized that job titles alone can be misleading:
“Titles are often not a good representation of what people’s tasks are or their motivations. A title can be just made up in a business.”
Understanding Motivations Is Key
Rather than focusing solely on job titles, our experts suggested understanding the motivations driving different technical audiences. These motivations vary widely across organizational roles and levels.
Tom explained that motivations range across a spectrum: “At the developer end, what you want is something that’s well documented and easy to integrate.”
Ryan emphasized the importance of understanding how solutions fit within business processes: “GitHub is not the process of development. It is one tool to aid the process of development. I like to try and understand how does this all fit into the mix.” This perspective aligns with our exploration of B2B marketing funnels and how technical solutions fit into larger business processes.
Seniority and Company Size Differences
Approaching technical audiences requires understanding both their position within an organization and the size of the organization itself. A CTO at a startup may be hands-on with code, while a CTO at an enterprise might be focused entirely on strategy.
Ryan described how company go-to-market strategies must account for these differences:
“I’ve seen it over two decades. I don’t think either approach [top-down or bottom-up] is wrong. I think what happens is either we get myopic into thinking one is the only way, or we discount how we don’t often spread our thought process on what can be.”
He highlighted Snyk’s approach as an example: “Part of their go-to-market strategy was a product-led approach. We’re going to get developers to start using our product, and after we hit a certain critical mass, we will then reach out to the executive function.” This exemplifies the product-led growth strategy that many developer tools companies employ, as well as bottom-up marketing approaches.
Red Flags When Segmenting Technical Audiences
Our experts identified common mistakes marketers make when segmenting technical audiences:
False Assumptions
Ryan pointed out how marketers often mistakenly project their own experiences:
“People thinking that their lived experience is representation of the whole… we often think the way that we look at and evaluate and buy things will lead to how we should market and talk about things, and I don’t think that’s the case.”
Stagnant Personas
Tom emphasized that audience understanding should evolve:
“Nothing is ever done and dusted, or should be printed and put in a frame. We need to be continually testing those assumptions, iterating them.”
How to Understand Your Technical Audience
So how do you actually determine which technical audiences to target? Our experts shared their methodological approaches.
Ryan starts with the person responsible for building the business case:
“I always like to start with the person who has to build the business case. Who has the motivation? Who has the need? Who’s seen that X process needs to be improved?”
He suggests using this framework:
- Understand their role and responsibilities
- Learn about the firmographics of the business
- Understand the process they’re trying to improve
- Identify how challenges manifest in that process
- Recognize buying triggers
- Determine how they build and evaluate their consideration set
- Map the dynamics of the buying group
Tom shared a three-phase approach:
Phase 1: Data Collection
- Stakeholder interviews across departments
- User interviews or surveys
- Social listening data from GitHub, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn
This approach is consistent with recommended practices for generating content ideas that resonate with developers.
Phase 2: Prioritization Workshop
- Bring candidate personas to stakeholders
- Align personas with business goals
- Settle on 2-3 priority audiences
Phase 3: Persona Development
- Flesh out 3D personas with specific roles
- Continuously test and refine these personas
Measurement and Evolution in Technical Audiences
Understanding when to reevaluate your technical audience segments is crucial. Our experts suggested focusing on a few key areas:
For new or resource-constrained companies, Ryan recommended simplicity:
“If you’re a challenger brand trying to get into a market, really all you need to understand is: Are people becoming aware of you? Are they adding you to a consideration set? And out of that consideration set, how many of your deals are you winning?”
Tom encouraged using the language of hypotheses:
“We at Catchy use the language and culture of hypotheses a lot in our work. People are a lot more comfortable with changes of direction when it doesn’t feel like we’re throwing out the entire strategy and starting again.”
Both experts stressed that different personas require different success metrics. As Tom put it:
“Success for a developer audience might be engagement with documentation, or your blog, or API calls, or forum participation. Versus a tech lead—it might be downloads of a particular case study or an ROI calculator usage.”
This aligns with our guidance on maximizing content marketing ROI and measuring the success of developer content.
Content Channels Vary Less Than You Might Think
When it comes to where different technical personas consume content, our experts cautioned against overgeneralizing. Ryan noted:
“I’ve seen surveys of technical audiences that tried to understand this, and the discrepancies between the two were like 2-3%. Humans are diverse in how they approach these things and how they consume information.”
Rather than focusing narrowly on specific channels, Tom suggested mapping content types to buyer journey stages:
“I find a more useful mapping of content types is when you start mapping different types of content along a buyer journey or a developer journey. Understanding the difference between discovery, awareness-level content and the deep core documentation or code samples that are fundamental.”
This approach is particularly valuable when creating developer content strategies that work and scale, allowing for content that addresses different stages of the technical buying process.
Conclusion
The key takeaway from our discussion is that technical audiences are diverse, complex, and constantly evolving. Rather than approaching them with rigid, one-size-fits-all personas, successful technical marketing requires:
- Understanding motivations rather than just titles
- Recognizing the impact of company size and industry
- Avoiding overgeneralizations and assumptions
- Continuously testing and refining your audience understanding
- Tailoring metrics to specific personas and journey stages
As Ryan reminded us, “Markets aren’t static.” Technical audiences and their needs evolve rapidly, especially in today’s AI-driven landscape. The most effective technical marketers are those who remain flexible, continuously engage with their audiences, and avoid the trap of viewing technical buyers as a monolith.
For companies looking to build stronger relationships with technical audiences, consider exploring our resources on developer relations and building developer ecosystems.
If you want to learn about navigating diverse audiences in technical marketing in more detail, you can watch the entire webinar here:
Draft.dev’s monthly webinars are a great way to learn more about similar DevRel and technical marketing topics. Join us next month for another insightful discussion with industry experts.