This is Part 3 of my 6-part series on business literacy for DevRel. Start with Part 1 if you missed it.
Let's talk about the relationship between DevRel and marketing. And if you just shuddered uncontrollably, you're exactly who I'm writing this for.
A lot of people believe really hard that DevRel is not developer marketing, because somehow a lot of folks decided that sales and marketing are icky. But I think that in a lot of ways, DevRel IS developer marketing (or at least a lot of it), and that is NOT BAD.
Before the pitchforks come out, let me state clearly that DevRel serves developers first. That's non-negotiable. But DevRel also exists within companies that need to generate awareness, create demand, and ultimately get developers to evaluate and adopt their products. That's ... marketing. And pretending otherwise doesn't make us more authentic; it just makes us harder to work with.
DevRel Is Not Marketing (But You Still Need To Understand It)
Okay, so maybe you're at a company where DevRel definitely isn't marketing. Maybe you report up through engineering, or you're your own thing, or you roll up to the CEO. That's cool. Lots of different org structures can work.
But regardless of where you sit on the org chart, you work at a company that has a marketing function. And that marketing function has goals, processes, and metrics that affect you whether you like it or not.
Understanding how marketing works doesn't mean you become a marketer. It means you can collaborate effectively, communicate your value in terms they understand, and (critically) advocate for why DevRel's approach is different and valuable.
What Marketing Actually Does
At the highest level, marketing's job is to create awareness of your product, generate demand for it, and nurture prospects until they're ready to talk to sales.
But within that simple description, there's a ton of nuance:
Brand Marketing focuses on building awareness and perception of your company and product. They care about things like "do people know who we are?" and "do they associate us with quality/innovation/trust?"
Demand Generation (or demand gen) is about creating interest in your product and generating leads that sales can work with. They're running campaigns, creating content, managing paid ads, and generally trying to fill the top of the funnel.
Product Marketing sits between product and go-to-market teams. They're figuring out positioning, messaging, competitive analysis, and creating the narrative around your product. They're the ones writing the website copy and creating the slide decks that sales uses.
Content Marketing creates educational content (blogs, guides, videos) to attract and engage potential customers. This is where things get really overlappy with DevRel, and we'll dig into that.
Field Marketing handles events, sponsorships, and local/regional marketing activities. If you've ever coordinated with someone about booth staffing or event sponsorships, you've worked with field marketing.
Meet the Marketing Team: Roles You Need to Know
CMO (Chief Marketing Officer): The top marketing executive. They own the overall marketing strategy and are usually accountable for things like lead generation and pipeline contribution.
VP/Director of Demand Generation: Focused specifically on creating and nurturing leads. They often own the lead generation targets and are judged on how much pipeline they help create.
Product Marketing Manager (PMM): These folks are the bridge between product and go-to-market. They craft positioning, create sales enablement materials, and often lead product launches. If you're launching a new feature, you're probably working with a PMM.
Content Marketing Manager: Owns the content strategy and often manages writers/creators. If DevRel is creating content, you're probably coordinating with this person to avoid duplication and ensure alignment.
Marketing Operations (MOps): The behind-the-scenes folks who manage the marketing tech stack, set up campaigns, and make sure data flows between systems correctly. You might not work with them directly, but they're critical to how marketing measures success.
Where DevRel Sits: This varies wildly by company. Sometimes DevRel reports into marketing. Sometimes engineering. Sometimes it's its own thing. Sometimes it doesn't exist at all and marketing just has "developer marketers." None of these are inherently right or wrong, but each has implications for how you operate.
The Marketing Funnel: How Marketing Thinks About the World
If you've spent any time near marketing, you've heard about "the funnel." And if you're like most DevRel folks, you've probably rolled your eyes at it because it feels overly simplistic and doesn't capture the messy reality of how developers actually discover and adopt tools.
You're not wrong. But the funnel is still a useful mental model for understanding how marketing thinks about the buyer's journey. So let's decode it.
TOFU (Top of Funnel): This is the awareness stage. People don't know about your product, or they're just starting to become aware they have a problem. Content at this stage is broad, educational, and not product-specific. Think: blog posts about industry trends, conference talks about best practices, social media content.
Sound familiar? Yeah. A lot of DevRel activities live here.
MOFU (Middle of Funnel): This is the consideration stage. People know they have a problem and they're evaluating potential solutions. Content here is more specific - webinars, comparison guides, technical deep dives, case studies.
DevRel definitely plays here too, although marketing might own it more directly.
BOFU (Bottom of Funnel): This is the decision stage. People are ready to buy; they just need the final push. Content here includes things like product demos, free trials, detailed pricing information, customer references.
This is mostly sales and marketing territory, but DevRel can still have influence here.
Why The Funnel Matters To You
Even if you think the funnel is reductive (and it kind of is), understanding it helps you:
- Communicate with marketing in their language
- Explain where your DevRel activities fit in their mental model
- Understand why they care about certain metrics at different stages
When marketing says they need "more TOFU content," they're saying they need content that builds awareness. When they talk about "MOFU conversion rates," they're talking about how effectively they're moving people from awareness to consideration.
You don't have to love the funnel. You just need to understand it well enough to translate.
Campaigns: More Than Just "That Thing Marketing Does"
In marketing speak, a campaign is a coordinated set of activities designed to achieve a specific goal. It might be promoting a new product feature, driving registrations for an event, or generating leads in a specific market segment.
A campaign usually includes multiple touchpoints: maybe a blog post, some social media content, a webinar, some paid ads, and an email sequence. All of these pieces work together toward the campaign goal.
Why does this matter to DevRel? Because your content and activities might feed into campaigns, and understanding this helps you:
- Coordinate timing (so your blog post goes live when the campaign launches, not two weeks later)
- Understand why marketing wants you to promote certain things at certain times
- Negotiate for resources ("if this blog post is part of a campaign, can we get some paid promotion behind it?")
Attribution: The Thing Marketing Obsesses Over
Marketing really cares about attribution - basically, which activities led to which outcomes. They want to know: did that blog post result in signups? Did the webinar generate qualified leads? Did the conference sponsorship create pipeline?
There are different attribution models:
- First-touch attribution: Credits the first thing that touched a lead (like if they first found you via a blog post)
- Last-touch attribution: Credits the last thing before they converted (like filling out a demo request)
- Multi-touch attribution: Tries to credit everything that touched them along the way
DevRel activities often show up in attribution models, which is great! But also tricky, because we might be influencing things without directly converting them.
Essential Marketing Terminology
Let me give you the vocabulary you need for marketing conversations:
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): A lead that marketing has determined meets certain criteria indicating they might be ready to talk to sales. Usually based on factors like company size, job title, engagement level, and specific actions taken (like requesting a demo).
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): A lead that sales has accepted and is actively working. Not every MQL becomes an SQL - sales might reject leads that aren't actually a good fit.
Lead Scoring: The system for determining when a lead is "qualified." Might be based on demographics (right company size, right role) and behavior (visited pricing page, downloaded a whitepaper, attended a webinar).
Marketing-Sourced Pipeline: Opportunities where marketing was the first touch. If someone found you via a blog post, then eventually became a customer, that's marketing-sourced.
Marketing-Influenced Pipeline: Opportunities where marketing touched the lead at any point in the journey, even if they weren't the first touch. This number is always bigger than marketing-sourced, and there's often debate about how much credit marketing should get.
Cost Per Lead (CPL): How much it costs to acquire a lead. If you spent $10,000 on a campaign and got 100 leads, your CPL is $100. Marketing uses this to figure out which channels are most efficient.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who take a desired action. If 1,000 people visit a landing page and 50 fill out the form, that's a 5% conversion rate.
Key Marketing KPIs (And Why They Matter)
Marketing gets measured on things like:
- Lead volume and quality: How many leads are we generating, and are they actually good fits?
- MQL to SQL conversion: Are the leads we're calling "qualified" actually accepted by sales?
- Pipeline contribution: How much revenue opportunity has marketing created?
- Website traffic and engagement: Are people finding and consuming our content?
- Content performance: Which pieces of content are actually driving outcomes?
When you understand what marketing is measured on, you can better position DevRel's value. If marketing is struggling to hit lead gen targets, and you can show that DevRel activities drive leads, that's valuable. If marketing is worried about content performance, and your technical content is crushing it, that's worth highlighting.
Where DevRel Overlaps With Marketing (And Where It Doesn't)
Let's address the tension directly: DevRel and marketing both create content, both engage with communities, both attend events. So what's the difference?
The Core Difference: Who You Serve First
DevRel serves developers first, business second. You're creating content because it helps developers, not because it generates leads. You're building community because developers need support, not because you need a lead gen channel.
Marketing serves the business first. They're creating content to generate awareness and demand. They're engaging with communities to create business opportunities.
This doesn't make marketing evil or inauthentic. It just means they have a different primary goal.
Where The Overlap Happens
Both DevRel and marketing might:
- Write blog posts (but DevRel's are deeply technical and educational; marketing's might be more promotional)
- Run events (but DevRel's are focused on learning and community; marketing's are focused on pipeline generation)
- Manage social media (but DevRel is having authentic conversations; marketing is running campaigns)
- Create videos (but DevRel's are tutorials and deep dives; marketing's are product demos and testimonials)
You can see how these overlap but aren't the same thing. The key is being clear about your different goals and respecting those differences.
The Tension Is Real (And That's Okay)
Here's where it gets tricky: even though DevRel serves developers first, you still exist within a company that needs business outcomes. So sometimes you'll be asked to do things that feel more marketing-y than you'd like.
My take? "One for them, one for you." Sometimes you might need to create some TOFU content that supports a marketing campaign. I mean, even Iggy Pop had a song in a cruise ship commercial. You can participate in business-focused activities without losing your integrity, as long as you maintain boundaries and keep the majority of your work focused on genuinely serving developers.
How To Collaborate Effectively With Marketing
Be clear about what DevRel is and isn't. Don't let marketing assume DevRel is just "developer marketing." Explain how you're different, why that matters, and how you can complement what they do.
Coordinate on content. Marketing is probably creating content about similar topics. Coordinate so you're not duplicating effort or worse, creating conflicting messages.
Share insights about developers. You're closer to your developer audience than anyone else at the company. That intelligence is gold for marketing - what developers care about, what resonates, what doesn't.
Help them understand developer audiences. Developers don't respond to typical marketing tactics. Help marketing understand this so they can be more effective.
Set boundaries, but be collaborative. You can support marketing goals without becoming a marketing resource. Be clear about what you will and won't do.
The Thing Nobody Wants To Admit
Here's my controversial take that I mentioned at the beginning: a lot of DevRel work IS marketing, and that's not a bad thing.
Creating content that helps developers discover and understand your product? That's marketing.
Building a community that helps developers be successful with your technology? That's marketing.
Speaking at conferences to raise awareness of your company and product? That's marketing.
The difference is in the approach and the authenticity. You're not creating fake urgency or using manipulative tactics. You're genuinely helping developers. But the outcome - increased awareness, consideration, and adoption of your product - that's what marketing is supposed to do too.
The best marketing doesn't feel like marketing. It feels like genuine help. And that's what great DevRel should be.
What This Means For Your Work
Understanding marketing doesn't mean becoming a marketer. It means:
- You can communicate with marketing in terms they understand
- You can explain where DevRel fits in their mental model (even if it doesn't fit perfectly)
- You can collaborate more effectively on shared goals
- You can articulate DevRel's unique value proposition vs. traditional marketing
Next up: Finance 101. Because understanding budgets, P&Ls, and why your CFO cares about CapEx vs OpEx might be the most important thing you learn in this series. See you there.
Got thoughts on the DevRel/marketing relationship? Think I'm totally wrong about something? Let's talk about it in the comments.
Previously: Part 2: Sales 101
Next up: Finance 101 (publishing soon!)
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