Marketing activities in 2024

[derberg]

In 2024 budget planning we accepted to spend $24k on marketing.

Now we need to agree on the best strategy for it, setting requirements, defining the scope.

Once we do it, we will know what to do: if we should spend it on advertisement, if hire someone, if maybe hire some specific services from some agency.

When I suggested the marketing budget I had things in mind like, what we should spend money on:

• define social media strategy: figure from analytics and through other activities what messages on social media work and we should continue, what are irrelevant. We need to set a strategy and have clear vision for those, like for example "should we continue dropping automated tweets about packages releases"? What should we use social media for?
• running social media - depending on strategy might be that better is to hire someone to do it and not expect @thulieblack does the work as there are more important tasks in community management realm
• vision/instruction on running promotion campaigns like "promotion of swag store", "announcement of conference" or "getting people involved in specific discussions". Maybe enough is to have some pattern on doing things documented that we can follow for any campaign. Maybe somebody has to be hired to do these, like we do with bounty program
• might be that all above is full time or part time, and we can basically hire one person for all of the above topics
• should we use social media advertisement (x, linkedin and facebook) or do more organic approach, have a procedure with list of contact we reach to get help. Basically we might need to have dedicated marketing person that is in constant contact with marketing representatives from different companies that want to be around AsyncAPI and build their brand as API experts, so they are also interested in amplifying the message we have to share with community. Again, we need clear guideline and vision on what we do and dedicated focus.

In past we were doing it in less organized was as some ad-hoc activities. First I did some as community manager and I experimented with twitter adverts. We also had one community member paying for advertisement services from a contractor that did LinkedIn campaigns. Then @thulieblack did it as one of tasks. Sometimes we had @Barbanio experimenting with paid advertisement on Facebook or @fmvilas organizing marketing for specification v3 release last year. This is definitely not the best way to do it forward, especially not expect community manager to do marketing job.

We yeah, we need to together set the scope and then decide on a solution. Might be that we will maybe need to have a dedicated working group.

[fmvilas]

My two cents:

I think we need someone full-time taking care of this. In my experience, working with agencies and people part-time, ends up with someone else having to fight for their attention because they also have other customers. This increases cognitive load on those who shouldn't even be thinking about it and typically ends up with a poor result anyways.

That said, I'm aware that the budget is pretty limited. If we hire someone, we'll probably have zero budget to spend on ads, for instance. From my side, this is "fine" for now. The hired person can also try to find help in the marketing departments of our sponsors and extra budget for specific events like the conference.

Now, regarding what to do, it all comes down to "why do we want to do this?". What do we want to achieve by investing in marketing? IMHO, we have two potential goals why we should invest in marketing:

1. To grow our community of contributors, maintainers, and ambassadors.
2. To grow our community of users.

Depending on what exactly we want to achieve we'll have to do different things. For instance, to grow our community of contributors, maintainers, and ambassadors, we want to make visible that:

• We're a welcoming community.
• We run multiple conference all around the world and you can participate.
• We run on open governance so anyone can join us and they will be treated equally.

However, if we want to grow our community of users, we want to make it visible that:

• Our mission is to standardize the EDA landscape.
• We create a spec and very useful tools that many people and companies all around the world are using.
• With AsyncAPI it's easy to apply API-first concepts to EDA.
• AsyncAPI will speed up your development velocity while keeping things consistent and organized.

We can try and go for the two goals, just one, or maybe another goal that I can't think about right now. But I think it's important that we set our objective(s) first. Once we know them, we'll have a clearer view of what we'll have to do and if we should hire someone, run bounty program, or hire an agency.

[Mayaleeeee]

We need to set clear and measurable objectives to ensure that we are working towards achieving our goals effectively. For example, setting a target to increase the number of contributors/users by 20% provides a specific goal to strive for. Moreover, by setting monthly or quarterly goals, we can remain focused and adaptable, allowing us to modify our plans to reach our main objectives.

It would also be beneficial to create onboarding documentation for individuals interested in contributing to the Working Group (WG). This documentation can provide an overview of our strategies and how they can participate.

However, it is important to establish our objectives first before deciding on the strategies to implement.

[thulieblack]

I have been pondering on this for a while, and after observing our community (from my point of view). We are doing well with our current initiatives to grow our community and its user base. However, what we really need is a strong Community Engagement Strategy. Here are some ideas:

• We need to grow our Case Studies, but to do so, we should amplify the ones we currently have.
• Social Media is important, but I don't believe in paid marketing. Instead, we should keep up with the trends and dive deeper into analytics to see what works and what doesn't.
• Conference Marketing is another area we need to focus on. We should increase the reach of our conferences and ensure everyone knows about them in advance (Most of the feedback I got was that they found out late that we were hosting a conference), as well as attract sponsors.
• We should also highlight community success stories and testimonials to show our impact and share them with a broader audience. We currently do this on a small scale.
• Lastly, we should promote our store.

There are many other strategies we could implement, but this can't be a one-person job now.

I suggest creating a working group for marketing and inviting individuals who can help in this effort. They can divide tasks and delegate the work within the group, which would be more efficient. I learned this while collaborating with Fran during v3. We could use the budget to pay for tools and other necessary resources.

Alternatively, we could have a dedicated person to oversee the marketing working group and its implementation (and pay them), similar to what we are doing for Bounty.

[fmvilas]

I like everything you said but let me challenge you a bit further 😄 🙏

• We need to grow our Case Studies: Why? What are we trying to accomplish with that?
• Conference Marketing: Why do we need a conference? What are we trying to accomplish with it?
• Highlight community success stories and testimonials: Why is it important? What are we trying to accomplish with it?
• We should promote our store: Should we? If so, why? What are we trying to accomplish with it?

Please bear with me. I'm not saying we shouldn't do all these things. I agree these may be good ideas. What I'm trying to do here is just an exercise for all of us. Let's not jump straight into doing things for the sake of doing things. We should have clear goals in mind first. Once we know what we want to accomplish, it will be easier to come up with things to do. And things not to do too 😄

[Barbanio]

I agree with promoting the marketing area from a working group, making this a community participation area, as @thulieblack says.

I think that we need a marketing professional to be part of the working group and learn with and through them. I think it may be more effective initially to learn to work directly with someone with the knowledge we need.

On the other hand, I don't think paying for ads or marketing tools is a priority for the Community right now. Maybe in the future, but currently, I guess what we need most is a professional guide.

[derberg]

Ok then, let's put this in motion

Meeting for next week scheduled -> 14:00 UTC Tuesday March 26th

Mentioning all folks that shared opinion in this discussion: @Barbanio @fmvilas @thulieblack @Mayaleeeee

If you know anyone who would be interested in the subject, please let them know. I will approach some of our sponsors where I have contact with marketing department - maybe they would like to join

[thulieblack]

From the discussion we had yesterday on the Marketing Calll; these are the recommendations on hiring:

• The candidate should already be an active community member as we are a community-first centric.
• It is more important for the individual to be motivated to learn rather than have extensive experience, as we expect the working group to have a team of experts (to help and guide).
• The person should showcase some basic metrics for marketing (more specifics, tbd)
• Work on the marketing goals defined/discussed during the working group.
• Lead the working group.
• Provide monthly reports on findings, etc.

The above is just a recommendation; we are open to more suggestions!

[lmgyuan]

I am sorry that I could not come to the marketing call a couple of days ago, but I read through the discussions and notes. I also listened to the recording to get a sense of our current stage. As someone who has worked with NGO a lot, I have experience handling situations where a budget is limited but a lot needs to be achieved. That being said, here is my two cents:

I agree with what @fmvilas said in his comment:

I like everything you said but let me challenge you a bit further 😄 🙏

• We need to grow our Case Studies: Why? What are we trying to accomplish with that?
• Conference Marketing: Why do we need a conference? What are we trying to accomplish with it?
• Highlight community success stories and testimonials: Why is it important? What are we trying to accomplish with it?
• We should promote our store: Should we? If so, why? What are we trying to accomplish with it?

Please bear with me. I'm not saying we shouldn't do all these things. I agree these may be good ideas. What I'm trying to do here is just an exercise for all of us. Let's not jump straight into doing things for the sake of doing things. We should have clear goals in mind first. Once we know what we want to accomplish, it will be easier to come up with things to do. And things not to do too 😄

When we have a limited budget, we really need ask difficult questions like these to pinpoint the most important issue and have the best return on our investment. From the meeting notes #1109, it seems that we are not 100% sure about the marketing goal, so for now, I am assuming that the goals @fmvilas mentions are what we want:

1. To grow our community of contributors, maintainers, and ambassadors.
2. To grow our community of users.

My two cents:

I think we need someone full-time taking care of this. In my experience, working with agencies and people part-time, ends up with someone else having to fight for their attention because they also have other customers. This increases cognitive load on those who shouldn't even be thinking about it and typically ends up with a poor result anyways.

That said, I'm aware that the budget is pretty limited. If we hire someone, we'll probably have zero budget to spend on ads, for instance. From my side, this is "fine" for now. The hired person can also try to find help in the marketing departments of our sponsors and extra budget for specific events like the conference.

Now, regarding what to do, it all comes down to "why do we want to do this?". What do we want to achieve by investing in marketing? IMHO, we have two potential goals why we should invest in marketing:

1. To grow our community of contributors, maintainers, and ambassadors.
2. To grow our community of users.

Depending on what exactly we want to achieve we'll have to do different things. For instance, to grow our community of contributors, maintainers, and ambassadors, we want to make visible that:

• We're a welcoming community.
• We run multiple conference all around the world and you can participate.
• We run on open governance so anyone can join us and they will be treated equally.

However, if we want to grow our community of users, we want to make it visible that:

• Our mission is to standardize the EDA landscape.
• We create a spec and very useful tools that many people and companies all around the world are using.
• With AsyncAPI it's easy to apply API-first concepts to EDA.
• AsyncAPI will speed up your development velocity while keeping things consistent and organized.

We can try and go for the two goals, just one, or maybe another goal that I can't think about right now. But I think it's important that we set our objective(s) first. Once we know them, we'll have a clearer view of what we'll have to do and if we should hire someone, run bounty program, or hire an agency.

The two goals overlap on one thing: we need to increase our presence in the technical community. The reason is that contributors, maintainers, ambassadors, and users are all members of the technical community with knowledge of what AsyncAPI is or may need to use it in some ways.

Therefore, I agree with many of @thulieblack's points in her comment:

I have been pondering on this for a while, and after observing our community (from my point of view). We are doing well with our current initiatives to grow our community and its user base. However, what we really need is a strong Community Engagement Strategy. Here are some ideas:

• We need to grow our Case Studies, but to do so, we should amplify the ones we currently have.
• Social Media is important, but I don't believe in paid marketing. Instead, we should keep up with the trends and dive deeper into analytics to see what works and what doesn't.
• Conference Marketing is another area we need to focus on. We should increase the reach of our conferences and ensure everyone knows about them in advance (Most of the feedback I got was that they found out late that we were hosting a conference), as well as attract sponsors.
• We should also highlight community success stories and testimonials to show our impact and share them with a broader audience. We currently do this on a small scale.
• Lastly, we should promote our store.

There are many other strategies we could implement, but this can't be a one-person job now.

I suggest creating a working group for marketing and inviting individuals who can help in this effort. They can divide tasks and delegate the work within the group, which would be more efficient. I learned this while collaborating with Fran during v3. We could use the budget to pay for tools and other necessary resources.

Alternatively, we could have a dedicated person to oversee the marketing working group and its implementation (and pay them), similar to what we are doing for Bounty.

My suggestions:

1. conference marketing might be a good strategy. The reason is that a technical conference is a rare scenario where people of technical background gather together to see and learn what other people are doing. Thus, we can tell more people about what we do and how we could help them. Of course, there are many different technological conferences in this world and we can't go to all of them. We could focus on conferences or events where AsyncAPI might add value. For example, a conference on event-driven architecture could be a good one. I went to the GTC hosted by Nvidia recently, which exposed me to many interesting companies, so I could tell that it would work with my personal experience.
2. We could also join some conferences' mailing list. Some conferences send out mailing list that presents recent updates and new projects in their fields, which is also a good way to reach people who might be interested in our project. My friends who are PhD in their fields do read those mail lists. Though it's just anecdotal evidence, meaning that analytics evidence might be needed to validate, it still shows that it might be worthwhile to invest in it.
3. Ask technical influencers to promote AsyncAPI. Some technical influencers on Youtube, Tiktok, or Twitter are actually good ways to to promote products. If we can reach a reasonable price with Youtubers like https://www.youtube.com/@Fireship and https://www.youtube.com/@TechLead, a lot of people will be able to know AsyncAPI. Of course, the most popular ones are likely to be expensive. But if we can leverage the fact that we are open-source, we might be able to get discounts from them.

In terms of whether we should find people do it part-time or full-time, I agree that this is a huge commitment, so a full-time person will probably be needed for it. Finding people with passion and willingness to learn sounds like a good idea, since we definitely need to spend money on other things to achieve the maximum output.

Let me know what you think! I am happy to have further discussion on this! : )

[thulieblack]

Hi Folks, we have opened a discussion #1176 on hiring a Community Marketing Specialist for the community. Please jump in and share your thoughts.