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Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

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Re: Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

#31

Post by carlosjobim »

I am self learned, so I can't point to any resources, but I can give you some advice:

- Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and try to understand what they probably need and offer that.

- You have to understand your own product and what you offer, be clear with what you offer and what it costs and what your terms are.

- Make sure it is as easy as possible for you customer to purchase your product. Remove everything that gets in the way and hinders the customer from giving you his money. That means stripping away cookie banners, newsletter modals, "Adress line #2" and all such nonsense. Every bump in the road for the customer is an increased % that the customer desists.

- Your website should be fast, responsive, informative and easy to navigate. Nothing should be left to chance. If you think your website is a hassle you've already lost, the website is your most important asset. Don't forget to submit it to Google!

- Social media is a waste of time unless your business is huge. Make 90% of your investment in your own website, you can put any content there just as easy. But do make social media accounts with some basic info just so people know you are serious.

- Get your initial web site online as soon as possible, it takes some months to start ranking on Google, unless what you offer is extremely unique and interesting.

- If you use any paid advertising you should use promotion discount codes in order to know which channels actually work and bring paying customers. Too many get sucked into Facebook and Google advertising games, where they keep "betting" small sums and changing some targeting metrics to try to "hit the jackpot". Don't do that.

- You should always test and test again the purchase flow for your customer, to make sure there are absolutely no hurdles or errors stopping them from doing business with you.

Edit: One more: The absolute worst thing you can do is to not publishing a price because you are worried that you'd miss out on charging more for a bigger customer or because you're worried that you'll sell too cheap. Figure out your costs and margins and publish your prices. You can't figure that out after a customer has contacted you.

Re: Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

#33

Post by mdcrowcroft »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #19
mdcrowcroft wrote: post #9

I think one big difference between learning marketing vs learning software engineering is the lack of a feedback loop when you start out. If you want to learn marketing properly, it's worth thinking of marketing tactics and marketing strategy as two different things. - Marketing tactics are things like, running ads, writing content for SEO. Comparable to writing code day to day. - Marketing strategy is the high level…

Thanks for the recommendation. Reading the preview it does seem to assume marketing jargon knowledge, as if you are already a marketer.

The 'intended audience' the book is written for is for the C-suite/business execs where marketing as a part of business has lost a lot of credibility which is why is serves as a good research based foundation to marketing.

You're right there's definitely jargon and if you're coming in cold the book is quite dense. Maybe this would be a better step two or three in someone's learning.

The reason I will always recommend this book to anyone interested in marketing is that there's a lot of junk thought leadership surrounding marketing that is thoroughly debunked.

Re: Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

#36

Post by comprev »

Marketing boils down to one thing really - reputation.

When scandals flare up (politics), a new product is launched or someone has an idea they want to realise, they rely on marketing to spin a positive outcome.

How easy that task is depends first on how strong your reputation is at that time.

Launching a new Ferrari for customers to buy is significantly easier than a no-name engineer building their first hypercar. Getting more investors in a startup requires confidence as a result of your reputation.

How you build this brand reputation will depend on your target customer base, and often for tech people this is a combination of successful real-world projects and presentations (written form, podcasts, on-stage performances, etc.)

Think hard about precisely what "it" is that you can offer and how your potential customer demographic will best see it.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

#37

Post by rchaud »

Start by writing some blog posts. Nothing fancy, just describing a common use case people have, that your product can fulfill.

Look at the HN submissions from Plausible.io (Plausible Analytics). They usually write blogs about changes to Google Analytics, the market leader. They don't mention Plausible until the end of the article. Why do they do it this way? Because they are trying to bring in traffic from search engines, and searchers are more likely to be looking for GA-related information than a small rival product. But if the rival's website can offer useful info about forthcoming changes to GA, maybe it's worth looking at them as a solution too.

Their articles get a ton of comments on Hacker News. A link posted on HN will bring in more free lifetime traffic than a paid Google search ad (although you can do that too).

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=plausible.io

Re: Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

#38

Post by quickthrower2 »

mdcrowcroft wrote: post #33
quickthrower2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the recommendation. Reading the preview it does seem to assume marketing jargon knowledge, as if you are already a marketer.

The 'intended audience' the book is written for is for the C-suite/business execs where marketing as a part of business has lost a lot of credibility which is why is serves as a good research based foundation to marketing. You're right there's definitely jargon and if you're coming in cold the book is quite dense. Maybe this would be a better step two or three in someone's learning. The reason I will always recommend…

If there is a book with this wisdom but more “101” style I would be interested. But it might be worth the slog with this anyway.

Re: Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

#39

Post by Leftium »

carlosjobim wrote: post #31

I am self learned, so I can't point to any resources, but I can give you some advice: - Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and try to understand what they probably need and offer that. - You have to understand your own product and what you offer, be clear with what you offer and what it costs and what your terms are. - Make sure it is as easy as possible for you customer to purchase your product. Remove everyt…

Very solid advice!

Just to give some examples for points #3 & #4:

- Gary Halbert insisted on replacing web site (credit card) forms with a toll-free 1-800 number where a real person took your order and credit card info. This was at a time when people were not used to buying stuff online, yet. Huge bump in sales/conversion rate.

- The publisher made a fancy, gorgeous site (with Flash, etc) for "Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets Of A Marketing Rebel." However, it took too long to load and didn't have good sales copy. John Carlton got it changed to a simple "ugly" site with testimonials along the side[1]. Again, boosted sales/conversion rate.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20020409092118/http://www.market...

Re: Ask HN How do I learn marketing?

#40

Post by dsshanley »

magundu wrote: post #16
AlexITC wrote: post #12

I'm also learning about marketing and while I can't comment on that, I can share an alternative. I have been trying to do "marketing as engineer" (not sure where I read the term). In short, let's make cool engineering stuff where you can place your own ads. For example, I was able to get one of my toy projects at the hn frontpage, I have been speaking at some tech events where I could have mentioned my project. Relat…

Yes, building free tools related to your product and promote your product inside that tools will be more effective.

This works, but, just so you know, the free tool has to have a minimum of friction to use, and it has to _actually_ be valuable to your audience. Marketing = making others aware that you have a solution for their pain points. These free tools are the simplest expression of that. Deviate from that (complicated set up, low value, etc) and it won't work.
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