Building Audience and Reaching New Personas on InfoQ:
An Interview with John Staudenraus
InfoQ recently sat down with John
Staudenraus, Digital Marketing Manager
at VMware Tanzu. Tanzu - a portfolio of
products for building and managing
Kubernetes-controlled applications launched in March 2020, right around thetime the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
John describes how he had to quickly
change his approach to getting in front of
his target audience and how InfoQ helped
him reach his strategic personas.
He talks about the performance of his
recent campaign and how InfoQ helpedhim not only generate a pipeline of quality leads, but also expand
awareness amongst an important new audience for VMware.

John, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role atVMware?
John Staudenraus: I'm a Digital Marketing Manager at VMware Tanzu.
My role is to help market to the developer space. I've been helping
create new avenues for personas that VMware typically hasn't targetedin the past. I'm managing some new outlets that haven't been atraditional VMware audience.
InfoQ represents a new audience for us. One of the biggest positives
we’ve seen is around awareness, because VMware isn't really thought ofas being in the software engineering space. I think just getting it out
there that we offer a portfolio of products for developers - and the factthat we have some of the leaders in the industry sharing that message
with this audience - is probably some of the main benefits that we'veseen.

InfoQ: VMware has traditionally been a company focused on thesoftware infrastructure side of things, such as virtualization. As
the company has grown - through acquisitions and such - how hasits target market changed?
Staudenraus: I think VMware has - from my understanding - gone
through multiple phases as a company since that virtualization phase.
They’ve traditionally been more of an infrastructure play, and right now,they’re moving into the application transformation phase and starting tolook at ways to bridge the gap between the infrastructure and theapplication side of things. They’re looking at more of the DevOps roles.
Software engineers are now an important persona for VMware.
InfoQ: It’s been a little over a year since you first started
advertising on InfoQ. How has the experience been for you overall?
Staudenraus: I think it's been extremely positive. I think that theengagement that we've gotten on InfoQ has been really strong. In
particular, the assets that we’ve been running have seen greatengagement. We've seen a lot of downloads of our content. InfoQ has
been stronger than many of our other channels.

InfoQ: InfoQ’s mission is to help technical leaders drive innovation
at their companies. How has InfoQ's editorial approach helped youin your marketing efforts?
Staudenraus: I think that it aligns well with the personas that we want totarget along with the same subject matter that aligns with our products.

InfoQ: Kubernetes has been an important topic for your campaign
this past year. Isn’t one of the co-creator of Kubernetes, Joe Beda,
still at VMware?
Staudenraus: Indeed, Joe Beda is still here at VMware. He and Craig
McLuckie were the co-creators (of Kubernetes) at Google. They left,
started their own company, and then they were acquired by VMware.
One of the cool things at VMware is that there are a lot of people thathave been leaders in the space that are around. It really helps us as weare looking to the future, that they see the roadmap and understandwhere the technology is going. It's allowed us to create the products thatreally fill that need for the developers.

InfoQ: What have some of your strategic goals been this past year?
How has InfoQ helped you make progress on some of these goals?
Staudenraus: With the timing of VMware Tanzu launching (in March
2020), and then the pandemic hitting, it definitely changed how we hadto go about getting in front of our audience. Our approach certainly
became much more digital. InfoQ really helped with this because we
couldn't rely on the typical conferences and in-person stuff, the field
marketing, etc. We basically had to go 100% digital.

InfoQ: Have you guys achieved your goals in the last 12 months
given some of the perceived setbacks?
Staudenraus: Yes. We have hit our numbers each quarter despite thepandemic.

InfoQ: Are there any lead nurturing tactics that have worked
particularly well for you in terms of getting people qualified, andpushed further along the funnel? Any tactics or best practices youcan share?
Staudenraus: I don't think that there's anything really out of the ordinarythat has worked for us that probably isn't working for others. We’ve put apretty big emphasis on lead nurture, and continuing to put them throughthe funnel.
Our webinars have been extremely successful at generating pipeline.
Typically, those are people that have already been in our nurture, so I
think continuing to stay in front of them and providing them with relevant
content is important. When we get top-of-funnel leads we segment themout, so that the content that they're getting through the nurtures andthrough the webinar offers are pretty relevant to them.

InfoQ: Are you able to share any new customer success stories,
based on your recent lead gen program at InfoQ?
Staudenraus: What we're finding is that there are so many touches thatcome into play in our sales cycle that generally on InfoQ, while it could

be the first touch, there's just so many other things that come through.
We are seeing pipeline, which is great. It is a positive number.

How would you describe the quality of leads that you’ve received
from InfoQ?
Staudenraus: I would say that we have received high quality leads fromour campaign. We have a measurable pipeline that is significantly morethan other channels targeting this audience. The pipeline number keeps
growing as we continue our nurture to these leads and as more become
qualified.
Would you recommend advertising on InfoQ to a peer. If so, why?
Staudenraus: Recommend – Absolutely. The engagement with InfoQ
feels more of a partnership than a client/vendor relationship. The
customer service that InfoQ provides is much greater than what you
would typically find in an ad platform. They have taken much of theheavy lifting during the process and make standing up campaigns supereasy. The wide variety of ad formats is also great as you aren’t stuckwith just running banners that rarely generate leads. The lead volumeand quality have been great as well. This has become a major source ofTOFU leads for us