Martin Gontovnikas, also known as Gonto, is a successful marketing anomaly. A developer at heart, after working at companies such as Zauber, Globant, and Aquicore, he turned his focus to growth marketing and went on to become SVP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0. Today he’s a co-founder and General Partner at HyperGrowth Partners. The way Gonto’s experience intersects the developer and marketer worlds makes him perfectly suited to speak to the challenges many tech companies face in crafting marketing strategies that draw in developers while also winning over executives.
We held a virtual breakfast roundtable with Gonto and leaders from a few of our portfolio companies, including Upsolver, Evisort, VGS, Gitpod, PerimeterX, Testlio, and Valtix. Here are some of Gonto’s top tips from our roundtable discussion.
Conduct interviews with customers and prospects
This technique can be helpful as you’re defining your next set of marketing goals and developing your approach. Create two sets of questions for each group. When interviewing customers, find out what originally brought them to your product. For prospects, ask questions unrelated to your product. You can open with “I want to talk to you about your colleagues and what you do.” Follow with “What are you interested in learning about? At what point in your process did you think to look for an outside solution to the problem you’re facing? What apps do you use on your mobile phone or a computer? Why do you use those?” It’s also helpful to use these interviews to find out what keywords both groups use to search for the information they’re looking for. Their answers can guide everything from what content you should produce to whom you should network with (more on that a little later).
Market to developers through tools for success
If a developer is the end-user, center your marketing around helping them learn new things or acquire tools that will aid them in their day-to-day — anything that will further their success. How-to content can be especially effective. Gonto’s team at Auth0 discovered that when readers saw at least eight blog posts (or visited the blog eight times), the likelihood of their conversion to sign up increased from 1.5% to 8.7%.
Getting readers to spend more time with your content is key. One noteworthy approach is to identify which topic gains the most traction on your current blog, and then build a separate, mini product or tool that can act as a resource around that subject. People will trust a tool more if it’s not branded as a company, so create a unique domain name (which will also help with its Google search performance) and custom branding. However, keep a soft reference to your company (a great example of this is jwt.io). When Auth0 used this strategy, while all of the new traffic didn’t jump to the Auth0 site, it may have had an impact in the long run — after the effort, their site traffic increased by 3.5 million unique visitors.
Create two content teams
While your entry point may be a developer who is searching for tools that apply to their work, executive decision-makers who are more concerned with ROI (and other topics developers aren’t interested in) are the people with whom you’ll be making your sale. To bridge that gap, Gonto recommends creating two content teams.
One team can report to product marketing and focus on writing content for the decision-maker. This can look like white papers, blog posts, compare sheets, and more. The other team should be a technical content team — the crux here is that they’re not content specialists; they’re developers and engineers. Look for people who want to learn about new technologies and want to become known speakers, but haven’t done so yet. They can use your platform to build their own following while developing your company’s brand. It’s a win-win. In Gonto’s case, although the developers weren’t the most polished writers, the content was solid because they were their audience. His teams used an English grammar service called Wordy to edit and strengthen each piece of developer content.
One other tip on execution: aim for simple, clear language. Whether targeting an executive or engineer, Gonto’s rule is “to speak the way you would speak to your mom, no matter what the topic is.”
Become a speaker at events — but not for who is in the audience
Speak at as many conferences as you can and use the visibility to develop your influencer strategy. (Try to target companies that came up in the customer interviews you held.) As a speaker, you’ll build relationships with other presenters, and down the line, they’ll share that how-to content you’ve made. Eventually, developers who follow influencers for insights will come directly to you for answers to their questions.
Think of experiments as an arrangement of bets
A strong way to prioritize which experiments to try is to first think of every experiment as a bet you’re placing on what will drive results (big bets, medium bets, and small bets). Then, decide on an arrangement that mixes the size of those bets. One framework could be one big and two medium (or two small). Creating a mix will help you avoid focusing solely on experiments that are all small wins. Some may fail or result in a bit of an improvement, but others might create a step-change. By balancing your arrangement, you’ll hopefully have something to show for the effort. It’s important to remember that experiments take time. Gonto recommends starting with extreme tests. Two similar tests can require much more time to get a result. If you conduct tests between two completely different elements, you’ll get faster results, and that will help you decide what experiment to do next.
Closing
Gonto is a true wealth of information! Thanks to everyone who attended and huge thanks to Gonto for allowing us to pick his brain! You can learn more about HyperGrowth Partners here. Want to reach out to the Vertex US team? Drop us a line here.