Cultivating community through developer customer champions
5 foundational pillars to provide value to your customers
This is based on a talk I gave at last year’s Developer Marketing Summit - check out their Developer Engagement Summit coming up this September
The growth of community strategy has come a long way. Leadership should be paying attention because a successful community strategy will uncover leads, build organic brand awareness, and fuel a flywheel of customer advocacy that can become a dependable pillar of expansion.
What does this mean in the world of developer led growth?
Developers influence 65% of all technology decisions making by identifying needs and making a recommendation. Developers also leverage online search as a top resource meaning they expect to see technical resources available and other developers talking about your products. Establishing a consistent stream of digital social validation through online learning and community impacts both the top and mid funnel in the adoption journey. It can also significantly decrease CAC and increase CLV.
It’s more than just building a community. To scale you have to enable customers to be leaders in the community. They become an extension of your efforts and drive effective product adoption that’s ultimately more valuable coming from the customers themselves.
The first step is to lay the foundation of your community strategy with the value that you are providing to your customers - essentially the incentives you offer. Build key programs that stay true to this north star that also have clear alignment to how it establishes the community motion and the KPIs that matter.
Five ways to kick off your developer community with value for your customer
First Access as a Developer Partner
This is one of the easiest things you can establish with a core group of developer customers. Think of this as the step before you build an “advisory” type group. This program can have less overhead and be accessible to a larger group, giving them early access for new products and features plus a connection to the team where their voices can be heard.
It is important to build these up with clear processes, communications, and objectives depending on what stage of the product you are in. Are your goals to understand the pain points of your user early in your product development or to get specific feedback on your UX? How are you going to gather feedback, implement it in the roadmap, and close the loop with your customers on how their feedback impacted the product?
When you have a dedicated group who become power users before you GA, it also sets them up to begin to help others in the community (e.g public support forums) and you have the added benefit of launching with early advocates.
The flywheel impact: Built in ‘promoters’ at launch, early peer to peer support
Aligned company objectives: # faster time to success in product, # deflected support
Very public recognition
Identify consistent ways to publicly recognize your community members. Give them a reason to celebrate themselves. It’s not about creating content or social posts that convert, it’s about bringing attention to the actual humans into your community. This can be a small organic ongoing campaign or you can go all in on customer-first marketing as many organizations have done (Salesforce is an excellent example of this).
One of the key ways I’ve done this time and time again is to focus on developers as key narrators for company case studies. There is usually less red tape getting the story and you build up a library of use cases, logos, and community stories from your developer perspective that pair very nicely with your enterprise-focused case studies.
The flywheel impact: Inspiration to potential users, variety of proven use case, champions amplify their own story
Aligned company objectives: # SEO impact, # first company case studies (logos)
Make first time contributions easy
Take a page out of the open source community’s book, however contributions can mean everything from code, sample apps to a guest blog post or a StackOverflow article. The goal is to help people make contributions in a meaningful way. What is the journey for a first time contributor? Know where you want them to focus and lay out the instructions for the journey. This is also a critical part of your overall developer led growth strategy.
The biggest challenge you will have for the majority of the community is helping them overcome their own contributor imposter syndrome. One way to combat this is by creating a way for community members to connect and mentor others. When you have a few key customer advocates in your community, especially ones who love contributing, have them support one other person’s first experience. This in itself can be acknowledged as a contribution.
Create the mechanisms for contributions and be the first hype person until your community can be the hype people.
The flywheel impact: Trust increase by creating the soft landing for first time contributors and the investment in them, early mentor/mentee frameworks that make the community more accessible, outlining playbooks for scale (instructions on the journey)
Aligned company objectives: # measure key contributors and contributions, # brand amplification
Help them be the expert in (their) room
At this point you have a group of engaged customer champions, they have early access to products, they’ve contributed back to the community in their own area of expertise. This is where you should double down on facilitating the opportunities for them. You have the brand power, platforms across channels, and some resources to support your champions.
Think about how to bring together your recognition and contribution programs to scale this. Carve out space for champions as customer conferences or enable them to lead their own localized community - supporting a customer champion in organizing meetups is much more scalable than you organizing them. On the conference front, one thing that’s worked incredibly well for me is helping champions win speaking opportunities at industry events. If you have a little budget to support them, this goes a long way for both the champion and your company.
Be the enabler for your community (their first hype person!) and make contributing to their success as part of your overall strategy.
The flywheel impact: Champions become an meaningful extension of your team
Aligned company objectives: # contributions across owned and earned channels, # extended reach of community, # community-led leads
Cultivate a new ecosystem together
I like to think about the ecosystem opportunity initially in two key areas where you should bring value to your community: formalizing how champions become recognized experts (certifications, official training) and how you plan to help them market themselves (branding). This is investing in the supply side of the ecosystem - the demand side should be proven out though it’s a good place to be when you’ve invested in the supply side to meet early demand.
The added benefit of operationalizing upskilling is that you build up your community’s credibility while validating the value of your platform or product. Build a brand around those skills and recognition at this level that means something to the industry you’re in.
One fantastic use case, the MuleSoft Community Team built a brand around their champions program that yields higher recognition than the certification itself.
When individuals see benefits in their professional life from alignment with your community, you reached your north star.
The flywheel impact: Invests in their career path, creates and serves a skilled market demand, establishes credibility for your product
Aligned company objectives: # revenue impact, # ecosystem growth
Parting thought: Money doesn’t buy authentic engagement
One thing you’ll notice about all of these is that they are not offering money. This has been proven to devalue communities as it’s not an authentic motivator. Offering sustainable incentives that provide long term value to your customers is a mutually beneficial approach.
This blog post was written by a human!
When's the next post, Murph? I have to plan a morning around it.