The Life-Long Customer

The Other Approach; When Your Target Audience Does Not Respond to Traditional Marketing - with Matthew Geise, VP of Marketing, Liquibase

December 10, 2021 Revenue Rhino Season 1 Episode 115
The Life-Long Customer
The Other Approach; When Your Target Audience Does Not Respond to Traditional Marketing - with Matthew Geise, VP of Marketing, Liquibase
Show Notes Transcript

"The challenge with developers is everybody wants to market to them, but they have no interest in being marketed to. It does come off as a challenge for folks because a typical marketer wants to tell you why their product is so great and all the great things it's going to do for you.

From a developer's standpoint, they really want to see it. It’s a ”Don't tell me, show me. Let me get my hands on it. Let me try it out and show me how to do it.”

It takes a lot of what we refer to at Liquibase as outside-in thinking, instead of inside-out. We could sit and say, “Here's what we want people to know.” The reality is you have to sit and do the outside-in and say, “What do they want to know? What do you need to show them that they're interested in?”

The effort there really is around educating. It's around helping them achieve the goals that they have, helping them, you know, making it, so that it's easier for them that things are streamlined, that they can find the documentation that they have, and have a community that they can lean on. As we go through and look at our product definition, look at all of the things that we're doing.

The biggest focus that we have is just making everything easier, making it super simple for people to come in, get going, find the value while they're actually using the product as opposed to trying to go out and really sell it to them."

-  Matthew Geise, VP of Marketing, Liquibase

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Introduction: 0:04
From Revenue Rhino, I'm Brad Hammond, and this is The Lifelong Customer Podcast. We're interviewing successful sales and marketing leaders in discussing ways in which they're building lifelong relationships with their customer.

Brad Hammond: 0:20
Welcome to The LifeLong Customer podcast. I'm your host, Brad Hammond. And today I have Matt Geise, who's the VP of Marketing at Liquibase. Matt, it’s really nice to have you on.

Matt Geise: 0:29
Great to be here, Brad. Thanks for having me.

Brad Hammond: 0:32
Really excited. So tell me a bit about your company and what you guys are up to.

Matt Geise: 0:37
Sure. So Liquibase is in the DevOps space, and specifically around the database. What we find is, you know, many companies, many development teams have taken their applications into a DevOps pipeline and have done great work getting their applications deployed quickly and with high quality. But we find that the database has been left behind.

And so Liquibase solve this problem. And we've been around-as an open-source project, we've been around for 15 years as a company. We were Datical up until about a year and a half ago, when we changed our name to Liquibase and embraced our open-source routes, created a pro version of that to go along with, you know, our business and enterprise offering. And we're really excited with how much we're doing to help our customers move their database changes through their pipelines along with their application code, and really streamline that process and shift the ownership of the database changes over into the hands of developers with the ability to get the insight of the DBAs and into automation.

Brad Hammond: 1:56
Very cool. So what does marketing look like in this space? You know, who are you specifically marketing to? Who's your ICP, all that stuff? 

Matt Geise: 2:04
Yeah, sure. Most- probably a big piece of our businesses is around financial services, and insurance, some of the highly-regulated industries. We're starting to see a lot more around other industries, whether it's grocery stores that are reacting to the pandemic and moving from people going to the grocery stores to having their groceries delivered. And medical companies that are now doing telemedicine, having to schedule- you know, even government's trying to work with folks to track the virus and schedule people to get their vaccine. 

So the space is really opening up to lots of different industries. But our biggest area of success at this point has been with banks and with insurance companies. As far as the folks that we that we approach- that we serve, our users tend to be- the end users tend to be developers and DBAs, as well as DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, and architects. We kind of run the spectrum in terms of who our target audiences were, you know, of course, trying to support the developers and the DBAs and in the work that they're doing.

But you know, of course, we also want to make sure that their managers, that the architects, that the CTOs are aware of what can be achieved and how we achieve that for them so that we can we can really help move people up to elite status with their DevOps processes.

Brad Hammond: 3:52
Totally. So that kind of gets into today's theme, which is, you know, how do you market to this audience? So I think, you know, based on one of our previous conversations, highly technical product, very specific audience. I'm sure there's some unique challenges when it comes to, you know, what's the marketing strategy there? And kind of opening up in today's topic, you know, if you find yourself as a VP of Marketing or a CMO in this position of having to market to a very specific audience that might be less receptive to traditional tactics and messaging, how do you go about doing that? So love to just open up and hear some your thoughts there.

Matt Geise: 4:33
Yeah, absolutely. I actually came into marketing through as a developer. I was originally a- I actually did Java development myself, ran engineering teams, ran operations team. So it's kind of an interesting thing for me to jump into where I'm actually trying to message to developers and kind of help them see the value in our in our products.

The challenge, of course, with developers is everybody wants to market to them, but they have no interest in being marketed to. And so it does definitely come off as a challenge for folks because a typical marketer wants to tell you why their product is so great and all the great things it's going to do for you. But, you know, from a developer standpoint, they really want to see it. They want to, you know- it’s kind of don't tell me show me. Let me get my hands on it. Let me try it out and show me how to do it. Right?

So rather than- it takes a lot of what we refer to at Liquibase as outside-in thinking, instead of inside-out, right? Because we can sit- inside-out, we could sit and say, here's what we want people to know. But the reality is you have to sit and do the outside-in and say, what are- what actually do they want to know? What do you need to show them that they're interested in? The effort there really is around educating. It's around helping them achieve the goals that they have, helping them, you know, making it, so that it's easier for them that things are streamlined, that they can find the documentation that they have, and have a community that they can lean on.

We created a university program earlier in the year that's, you know, been- we just had our 1,000th person complete their training there. And we continue to roll out more and more classes there. So a lot of it is the enablement material. A lot of it is letting them get their hands on the software and actually try it out and experience it. And in an open-source model that we have, commercial open-source model that we have, we love the fact that we've got so many people using our software, doing such great things. And our goal is to make it easier for them to do that. 

As we go through and look at our product definition, look at all of the things that we're doing, you know, right now, the biggest focus that we have is just making everything easier, making it super simple for people to come in, get going, find the value as they’re- while they're actually using the product as opposed to trying to go out and really sell it to them.

Brad Hammond: 7:14
Absolutely. So let's break that down a little bit. So it sounds like education is really the focus and getting them to get their hands on the product. Can they use the product without even speaking to the sales team? Or, you know, how does that work? Like, can you get it in their hands and all that right away?

Matt Geise: 7:32
Yeah. I mean, in fact, our - we will go through and ask for, say, an email address so that we can give things like product updates, you know. There are a lot of people who download a product who would be interested in hearing that we have a new version that's coming out, so that they know they’ll upgrade.

We don't do a lot of spamming of this audience, of course. We want to make sure that we're respectful of the email address that they do give us. But you know, you can come onto our website, fill out a form, pull down the software, install it, and you're off and running. We're also- our open-source edition is also available on GitHub. It's available as a Dockerfile and through Maven. So you don't even really have to tell us who you are. But they're- you know, when we get into the professional edition, that's where we give you a license key. You just plug that in, and all sudden, it unlocks additional features within that community edition that we have.

And so yeah, they can just literally pull it down. A lot of people- you know, this is the beauty and the challenge of open-source, right, you can use the software. We might not even know who you are, from an operational standpoint, from marketing, that is, of course, our challenge. But, you know, if we can give quality content, quality educational material, eventually, we- you know, we create that value for folks and that they'll raise their hand when the time is right for them.

Brad Hammond: 9:05
Love that. Well, that let's talk about what that content looks like. Is it like how-to guides of- you know, how to use the software and all that? Or is it more broad theme-based topics? And then your software is a component of that? Or what does that content with?

Matt Geise: 9:20
It's a combination of all of that, right? It is, really like I said before, it's really the outside-in is looking at what are the things that this audience is interested in? What are they trying to achieve? And then creating the guides for them to achieve that, right. We have top of funnel materials that will go through and tell people here are best practices for database DevOps, things like, you know, survey that you can take and you can- you know, we'll give you a score and walk you through that kind of thing. So it kind of creates greater awareness of what the best practices are, all the way down to how to actually run Liquibase using Docker, using Kubernetes and, you know- or some other platform and making that work within your environment the way you want it to work.

Brad Hammond: 10:18
Interesting. And what can other marketers that are maybe in the same position be thinking about? Like where are maybe some of the challenges? What are some of the stumbling blocks or the landmines you might run into with all this?

Matt Geise: 10:34
Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously, the landmines you run into are how easy or difficult your product is, what the quality is of your product. You know that if you're talking to developers, the quality of your product, the ease of use of your product is key. As far as from a marketing perspective, it's just being authentic, being like legitimately trying to help them achieve something as opposed to trying to get them to buy something, right? If you go after this audience, and you're constantly just saying, buy, buy, buy, they're constantly just going to say no, no, no, right?

So the key is to go out and help people engage with your products, use your product, see success with your product. And you know, over time, they'll find more and more value and eventually, the, you know, the dollars will work its way out, right? Eventually, you get to a point where the complexity of your team, the complexity of your environment, time is worth more than money in larger companies. Smaller companies, when you're just getting started, of course, time is less valuable than the money that you've got. You need to save your money for other things. And so that's what the open-source model does, is it gives you kind of the way to get started. And then as you grow and the complexity grows with you, you have an opportunity to leverage something else, to leverage the next addition up to kind of get to a point that you can achieve greater heights.

Brad Hammond: 12:15
Yeah, totally. Let's talk about channels. You know, from a few of the others I've interviewed in this space, there's all sorts of different channels of even putting a message in the terminal or have, you know, Twitch or any of these emerging platforms, you know, being utilized. You guys doing anything, like unique or interesting when it comes to channels, or what traction have you found with different channels?

Matt Geise: 12:40
I mean, we're not everywhere just yet. We're still-you know, we're kind of in the beginning, probably mid stages of building our marketing channels. You know, I can tell you as we bring more- hire more people, I get the constant question of like, how come you're not on? Are you on Instagram, for example.

You know, our CTO, Robert, [inaudible], he loves places like Twitch, he would love us to get out on Twitch. I'd love us to get out on Twitch, it's just we have a small marketing team. There's five of us now as of just last week, but we- it's still a small marketing team spread pretty thin. And so we're not in a lot of channels. But we are out, we've got our own Discord channel. We've got our own- we will go out and hit Reddit. We support our community on Stack Overflow. We're, you know, doing the normal things that you would do in Google ads and with LinkedIn, more so LinkedIn for the developers. But you know, Reddit and Stack Overflow are great places for engaging with those folks. And then we have our own forums, of course [crosstalk].

Brad Hammond: 13:59
Very cool. Awesome. Well, for the other marketers out there that are, you know, thinking about and working on, you know, engaging with a very specific audience like this, what advice would you give to them?

Matt Geise: 14:14 
Right. So I would say just put- you have to put yourself in their shoes. You need to give them exactly what they're looking for, not what you're looking to give them. And if you do that, your message will be heard loud and clear. Use their words, not your words. Create their value, not your value. And you'll come out the other end, it'll create great relationships with your customers and great experiences for them.

Brad Hammond: 14:45
Love that. Well, Matt, this has been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining here today and sharing your insights and wisdom and knowledge.

Matt Geise: 14:53
Yeah, thank you so much, Brad. It was great to talk to you.

Brad Hammond: 14:56
Totally.