🍐#93: LinkedIn CEO/founder playbook, voice of the customer in ads, and “perfect“ socks

Hey,

I am going to Vancouver for NeurIPS tomorrow and will be there the entire week. If you are in the area and want to grab a glass of red (or pear juice🍐) let me know ;)

This week on the agenda:

• Use the voice of the customer in ads

• LinkedIn CEO/founder playbook

• “Perfect“ socks idea from Sanity

• + a few bonus links at the end

Total pearusing time: 5min

Before we start a word from this week’s sponsor:

Wizard on Demand is a technical content marketing agency.

What they do is:

• develop specific ideas for content that is loved by the readers and delivers results that you care about (signup, demo, trial, qualified sales pipeline)

• write technical blogs, landing pages, case studies, e-books following an interview-based approach with your subject matter experts

• design illustrations and diagrams to make the content look great and share well

• distribute the content for you via SEO, paid search, and paid social (LinkedIn, Twitter/X) including ad copy and creatives

Unlike many other agencies, they optimize for your KPIs, get to know your product in detail to do that and combine paid and organic strategies to get you results.

They work exclusively with technical companies such as CircleCI, deepset, Appsmith, and AWS.

Watch a video about how they work, or Book a meeting with Oleksii Klochai (he is also in our community).

Developer marketing insights

1. LinkedIn CEO/founder playbook

David Reed grew Gong's LinkedIn powerhouse. Then went to Clari and grew their CEO/founder profile to 30k followers and engaging.

And he shared his playbook for growing executive profiles in a way that drives results for the company in this talk:

My takeaways:

• “Know who we are, like what we are about, and trust we can help them”

• How to sell this to a CEO: Tie this to your CEOs goals, every CEO has a short list of goals for the year

• Founder still doesn’t want to be “that person”: if you are complaining that we are not different, not creating pipeline/MQLs enough, not a first choice → this is how you change that.

• Pick “one word to own”. You want to spark word of mouth, especially the one that happens behind closed doors. When there is an important meeting going on, your trigger word pops up, you come to mind, and people go to take a demo. That is the dream but it is doable.

• Pick one focus persona: A good exercise is to ask your sales team if someone signs up for a demo what the role is you are really hoping for. If someone comes to your booth at the conference then who that is?

• Content pillars/topics: People want to know what their peers are seeing/thinking/doing. Figure out ~3 core ideas you want to talk about.

• “But I don’t have time”, says CEO: Take 20min a week for an idea brain dump. No prep, recorded interview with that founder (or other SME). You direct it so that you get something that touches content pillars.

• Good questions to ask your CEO: “What happened this week?”,”What was surprising?”,”What was something you learned?”, “What annoyed you?”, “What something someone said you didn’t like?”, “What did you hate this week?”, “What did you love this week?”

• Metrics and results: self-reported attribution works fine. You should see more people mention your CEO, target persona engaging with content etc.

2. Use the voice of the customer in ads

I started following Dan, CEO of TLDR a few months ago. He shares learnings from his days building ScraperAPI and then technical TLDR newsletter.

This is a super powerful tip that I also share with founders and dev marketers a ton when asked about how to improve the copy of ads, website, and organic posts.

By doing that you are almost guaranteed to resonate.

The questions that can help you surface those words/phrases/themes are:

• How do you explain our product to other devs?

• What sucks about X problem?

• Why did you switch from Y?

And then follow up with why, tell me more etc.

And incorporate it into your website/ads/content.

See more dev tool ads examples ->

3. “Perfect“ socks from Sanity

Socks as swag always work, but this twist makes it 10x better.

So Sanity, a CMS that lives in the Next ecosystem, gave away socks at Next js conf. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it is a good idea if you have no other ideas. "People will always need socks" kind of a deal.

But.

They did a few things differently:

• The socks they gave away had different vendors/tools from the Next js ecosystem on them

• You couldn't take two of the same tool, you had to get two different ones

• One of the socks you got was always Sanity

This is brilliant. Fun, playful.

And it helps you convey that you play nicely with the Next js stack.

What I like about it is how reusable this is for other ecosystems and tools that are just a component of a bigger stack. Kudos Sanity!

See more dev tool swag examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me 🍐

If you want my help I do Workshops (60-minute session on whatever you want), Teardowns (audit+suggestions for your homepage, messaging, ads etc), and longer-term Advising.

See how to work with me ->

2. Bonus links to check out

• 📰 Thought Leadership for Technical Founders | Heavybit

• 🍊 The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat | Hacker News

• 🎧️ Meagen Eisenberg - CMO Lacework (Security) | Standout Startup Brands

3. Join our Slack community

2000+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking shop.

Check out marketingto.dev ->