🍐 #66: Startup VP growth shares journey to acquisition, marketing measurement with marketing mix modeling, and amazing homepage header

Hey,

I changed the domain from developermarkepear.com to markepear.com. A clearly better 🍐to text ratio.

This week on the agenda:

• Amazing homepage header from Modal

• Marketing measurement with marketing mix modeling

• Run:ai VP of growth learnings from their journey to acquisition by NVIDIA

• + a few bonus links at the end

Before we start, this week’s sponsor is:

How to surface product qualified leads (PQLs)?

In this playbook folks from Common Room show how:

• Connect product data, Slacks, socials, GitHub repos

• Define product/website/community activity qualification

• Add filters on company size, funding stage, economic buyer etc

• Create alerts that notify your team whenever a user becomes PQL

• Reach out to them as they reply (and convert) x times better.

They have a free plan so you can just see if it works for you.

Developer marketing insights

1. Run:ai VP of Growth learnings from their journey to acquisition by NVIDIA

Here are my takeaways:

• If you want PR find a story worth telling. Run:ai found their strategic narrative around “GPU shortage and scarcity” and stuck to it. It led to them getting coverage from New Your Times, Forbes, and others.

• If you want ads to work hyperfocus. They hand-picked companies, roles, skills, geographies. And have a relevant message for that audience. No amount of optimization will save you if your message is meh. BTW, they ran ads on LinkedIn, shared their awesome ad before. 

• Be accountable for a metric that actually matters. It makes marketing easier. They chose qualified demo requests (I think ;)), not leads from gated white papers. When you do that you can do activities that drive actual impact. Not superficial lead numbers.

• Create great social content and run ads on it. They did that on LinkedIn growing followers from 4k to 20k. And the content is good. Check out their LinkedIn.

• If you go to events create memorable experiences for your audience. They went all in on pink booths, did games, and gave away nerdy prizes like Hot Wheel toy cars.

Cool brand and a great share from Ariel.

Read post and comments on Linkedin ->

2. Marketing measurement with marketing mix modeling

Recently listened to this episode of Exit Five podcast with Pranav Piush about marketing measurement. This was really good.

He talks about marketing mix modeling which helps you make budget/resource allocation decisions without UTMs or intent data, and even works OTH marketing like billboards.

There are various caveats of course but the method actually works.

He also explains how to do it yourself in a spreadsheet:

• list out all your channels/programs however granular you want to get

• for each channel/program find impressions that you get per month over the last 12-24 months

• get your bottom-of-funnel conversion event, like a qualified pipeline created. Pick something that cannot be challenged by sales (or yourself)

• create a simple linear regression model using impressions in channels/programs as X and conversion events as Y

• see which channels/programs actually add incremental improvements

Yes, there are various assumptions, most notably that impressions can impact the conversion event in the same period, but so there are when you are looking into GA or self-reported attribution.

I ran that analysis for my newsletter and Neptune and it gave me net new insights.

Listen to the podcast episode ->

3. Amazing homepage header from Modal

The homepage header is about landing your core product message.

For Modal it is basically LLM infrastructure with great developer experience.  

And they do a great job delivering it:

• Input/output visual: I think for infra products this is a great choice.  Show what code you run, show how to run it, show what you get. Ideally, this all looks nice and easy.

• Headline/subheadline: They explain "what is it" and "for whom is it" (or what use case): "what": Serverless infra platform, "whom" ML teams.

• Great calls to action: If you don't know what to put this is the best baseline imho. Get started (Signup) and Docs.

• Social proof: devs want to know if others like them and/or respectable companies use it in production. While dev testimonials do that better, logos is what people expect to see here. Don't have them and you raise flags, especially if you are unknown.

• Branding: if you can make your page/company memorable on top of landing  that message -> great. And with that green gradient and uncommon colours they definitely do.

See more dev tool header examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

Every week I have a few slots for Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage/messaging/ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

See how it works ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 🎧️ Developer onboarding with Kilian from Polypane 

• 👓️ Enterprise is Dead (from Sentry CEO)

• 🗒️ GitHub - scraly/developers-conferences-agenda: This repository list of tech conferences's date and CFP

3. Join our Slack community

1600+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->