How we built credibility and engagement in a new market

Overview

In May 2019, F5 finalised its acquisition of NGINX, the trusted open source leader in web and application server technology. Together, F5 and NGINX bridge the gap from applications to infrastructure, and from developer to operations.

The Challenge

With NGINX as a new business unit, F5’s challenge was to build awareness and credibility for the DevOps audience.

Developers are more technical and pragmatic than the traditional buying unit, which makes them a challenging group to reach with traditional marketing tactics. The objectives of this campaign were therefore threefold:

1. Introduce F5 to the DevOps market
2. Generate opt ins for further nurturing
3. Identify points of interest for ongoing engagement

The elephant in the room? Developers aren’t into marketing. They’re generally suspicious of corporate objectives, and can sniff a drop of marketing jargon from miles away. So it was critical to ensure our engagement was empathetic to their preferences.

The Solution

To fulfil all three campaign objectives and create true advocacy, we first had to solve real-world developer problems. So we set out to provide products, resources and solutions to improve development efficiency.

Our strategy comprised 3 clear steps:

2. Behavioural targeting to locate and engage audience

In theory, we loved this approach. We loved the idea of giving each organisation the right content at the right time based on where they are in their DevOps journey. But we learnt that it was impossible to target accurately at this level.

Without knowing where each organisation was in their journey, we looked to the DevOps professionals who work within these organisations. Switching to this method of targeting, we had a lot more data available to us:

• Group Membership – We found the leading DevOps groups (e.g. DevOps at Scale, DevSecOps and DevOps on AWS) and included these in our targeting.

• Skills – We used the leading DevOps technologies (e.g. Ansible, Kubernetes and Openshift) as skills targeting for our personas. This allowed us to surface the DevOps practitioners in target accounts.

• Interests – We set up Boolean search operators to find keywords like ‘automation’ and ‘continuous development’.

3. Audience surveys to understand individual interests

Now that we had an audience we knew would value DevOps content, it was time to figure out how to identify what phase of the DevOps journey they were in, as well as get them to opt in to receive future content.

We realised that a survey was the perfect fit for the job, but that we’d have to approach the audience of developers with care. We injected humour into the survey copy to show that we were self-aware of our marketing tactics and that we weren’t blood-sucking salesmen.