Prioritizing Education to Find and Connect with Target Audience
Customer Details:
Armory enables enterprises to unlock innovation by reliably deploying software at scale. Enterprises leverage Armory’s enterprise-grade, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform and 24/7 expert support to accelerate their speed-to-market.
Business Results:
5,700+ downloads to Armory sponsored DZone publications
“It’s really critical to find the right sites, services, tools, events, and things that are visited and respected by your target audience. The quality of what you deliver, and the consistency of what you provide… DZone is a place that I trust.”
Keen on connecting with the developer community, Armory – an enterprise software company best known for its open-source continuous delivery platform built on top of open source, Spinnaker – knew that education and value-add content had to be at the forefront of its content strategy. With a limited amount of in-house resources, Armory needed to be highly selective about their brand placements to ensure they could efficiently reach their desired developer audience. Given these constraints, choosing DZone was a no-brainer for Jennifer Hooper, Senior Director, Developer Marketing, Brand and Content at Armory, who was already familiar with DZone publications and Zone sponsorships from previous roles.
Leveraging Content and Community
Jennifer describes working with DZone as a partnership: Upon describing Armory’s goals, the teams collaborated to brainstorm the best product fit. Their talks led to Armory’s sponsorship of DZone’s The Essentials of GitOps Refcard, published in May 2021, and CI/CD: Automation for Reliable Software Delivery Trend Report, published in June 2021, and DevOps: CI/CD and Application Release Orchestration Trend Report, published in March 2022. Together, Refcards and Trend Reports are a powerful combination of technical content that provides readers with the information they need to know now, and the technology and trends that affect the future of continuous development.
The sponsored editorial nature of Trend Reports was appealing to Armory – having a third party provide their insights into the future trends in CI/CD would be the most valuable to their audience. Incremental value can be found in the content shared: the Sponsor Opinion, appearing adjacent to their full-page ad, provides the Armory point-of-view on how enterprises can, and should, leverage continuous delivery in their software development life cycle. The collaboration also resulted in a great cross-discipline conversation on Continuous Delivery Trends: A Candid Conversation as part of the CD Foundation Continuous Learning series.
The sponsorship was a winning bet, getting trusted research, informative articles, and the Armory brand and advertising into the hands of over 4,700 downloaders – DZone’s most-read trend report in 2021.
Shareability, Impressions, and Downloads
Where Armory finds the greatest benefit is the ability to re-share the content they sponsor. Participating brands receive a white-labeled version of the Trend Report that can be used in marketing efforts post-campaign. It’s a fruitful resource as Armory’s highest-trafficked link, confirming that readers continue to find value in staying informed on the trends in continuous delivery. In describing the Spotlight Report, Jennifer states: “Having something that we can share with people to say ‘this is what a third party is writing about and where the future trends are going.’ It provides value to our audience for us to be able to promote that.”