B2B Persona Development Among Backend Developers
The Call
The largest global purveyor of online advertising, search technologies, and AI had created a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) application development platform to help developers produce apps capable of performing complex jobs. To better compete in this tightly contested space, they created a new set of cloud computing extensions to appeal to backend developers and wanted to assemble engagement strategies to properly reach this audience. Our previous work identified a stratified set of decision-makers, including in-house and agency developers, so the client came to us to create personas to better understand the unique perspectives driving tech stack consideration and adoption.
Our Response
We designed a series of qualitative interviews focused on technology profiles, software technology adoption journeys, and personal goals and aspirations of this hard-to-find audience.
We worked with a long-time partner who specializes in B2B and tech decision-maker audiences to recruit 30 webcam interviews, parsing through the various drivers that move tech solutions through the AIDA marketing model to study the moments and levers through which our client could impact change and consideration of their platform.
We also exposed initial marketing messages about the client’s new extensions to gauge awareness, potential discovery pathways, initial perceptions, and applicability to developers’ current work.
The Celebration
Our work informed the client’s DevRel team through a combination of written summary reports and video highlights to summarize key learnings while bringing forward the voices of the target audience itself. The personas we created clearly defined the overlapping messaging opportunities as well as specific, audience-specific strategies for meaningful engagement. The client was able to directly glean necessary inspiration to update web assets, targeted ad buys and content creation, and also used our reporting to guide keynote and other major speech themes for their annual developer conference viewed by over 1.4M people. Today, their BaaS platform is a market-leader, and their extensions feature remains a differentiator versus its biggest competitor.