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What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

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Re: What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

#51

Post by coryl »

andyl wrote: post #41

Old-style marketing is where you run around to meetings and conferences, build relationships, convince people one on one. Old-style marketing is dead. I say this as an old-style marketer. Why dead? Old-style isn't repeatable, it doesn't scale, and you can't train for it. Old-style is expensive, and doesn't mesh with developer culture. Growth hacking has replaced old-style marketing. (google it!) Growth hacking has su…

The two types of marketing are for different products. Growth hacking is when you have data, flow of traffic and can manipulate it with code.

You can't do that when your doing marketing for B2B sales clients, which pretty much requires you to show up for meetings, etc.

Re: What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

#52

Post by jonnathanson »

RobSpectre wrote: post #36
jonnathanson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't so much that marketers don't have concrete and measurable KPIs. They do. But at many companies, marketers affect those KPIs only indirectly. For instance, if you work in marketing for a B2B sales-driven company, it's very hard for the marketers to quantify their performance (whereas it's fairly easy for the salespeople to do so, even if some credit deserves to be shared). Similarly, if you're workin…

Really like this analogy. I'm coming around to the metaphor that engineering is the fire and marketing is the gasoline. Still not sure if it applies universally, but generally acknowledge it can be the catalyst for a great product to get widespread adoption.

I think Apple is a classic example of tech marketing done extremely well. The engineers and designers build some truly outstanding products, but the marketers figure out how to sell those products to customers in equally impressive ways. There is real (and undervalued) skill in taking the set of all features a product has, and winnowing that set down to the perfectly curated and articulated list of benefits. And vice versa: there's real skill involved in figuring out the unarticulated needs of the marketplace ("the problems people don't even know they have").

Re: What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

#53

Post by andyl »

seestheday wrote: post #49
andyl wrote: post #41

Old-style marketing is where you run around to meetings and conferences, build relationships, convince people one on one. Old-style marketing is dead. I say this as an old-style marketer. Why dead? Old-style isn't repeatable, it doesn't scale, and you can't train for it. Old-style is expensive, and doesn't mesh with developer culture. Growth hacking has replaced old-style marketing. (google it!) Growth hacking has su…

It's not dead. Far from it. You still need to have meetings and conferences. The amount will just depend on your industry. I really like the idea of growth culture, but thinking that it will apply to all industries is short sighted IMO. I run a marketing analytics groups and I'm an ex-hacker/ex-database analyst (C/perl/php/mysql/postgresql/SAS/Oracle). Most of the good marketers making their way to the leadership pos…

Well, I have to agree. How you go to market depends on your business and industry.

But to the extent that you can align your business with growth-hacking style marketing, the better off you're gonna be. IMHO.

Re: What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

#54

Post by organico »

Nice piece - as a coder turned entrepreneur, the sales and marketing side of things has been exceptionally hard for me. It's a battle everyday, and if I could turn back time I would have ensured I worked in a marketing department, or with people skilled in the area before embarking down my current path...

That said, I'm in the hole now, learning as fast as I can, solo. Can anyone make some current/and also seminal marketing book must-haves?

Re: What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

#55

Post by bootload »

"... Sales and marketing were skills I just didn’t have and were I to ask others to entrust their livelihoods and their families in such an enterprise, it would be incumbent upon me to learn. ..."

Business/marketing readers, this would be the line you give back to hackers who say learn to code and point number 4, "You Can Learn To Schmooze" highlights a hackers weakest link, people.

Re: What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

#56

Post by aik »

mindcrime wrote: post #20

Good stuff. I guess, as hackers go, I was always a little weird, in that I always found marketing fascinating. But over the past year or so (and especially the past 6 months) I've been diving into marketing big time , studying as much marketing (and, to a lesser extent, sales) material as I can, and starting to do things like putting together a tentative marketing plan for our startup. Wow. The OP is right, this stuf…

I'm in a very similar position currently. Do you have any recommendations on resources/books to study? Actions to take?

I've been in the process of trying to redefine how we talk and show our product, build product flyers, discount flyers, pricing sheets -- all for using at conferences we attend and for attaching to e-mails. In addition, learning about the customer segment is something I've been trying -- but it is HARD!

E.g.: - How much can you really talk to your existing customers, or potential customers, to gather information before stepping over the line?

Building a great understanding of your customers is absolutely necessary to be an effective marketer. Building that understanding, and having a sense of how tuned-in you are, is hard and something I haven't yet figured out.

Re: What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

#58

Post by mikeash »

caseysoftware wrote: post #5
Nowyouknow wrote: post #2

That was a great little read. Whenever I try to explain to my developer friends why my job is important, I'm usually shrugged off rudely. This guy gets it, experience is the only way to learn WHY marketing is so essential. My humble request to developers: Stop being dismissive of marketers, they are an essential part of the equation.

I think it goes back to what Rob highlights in the post.. the bad marketing is what sticks out. When we think of marketing, we think of booth babes, commercials with bad actors saying awkward things, and airheads who don't understand their business or product. The best "sales" guy I ever met was a guy who just stopped and listened. He would ask a few questions, work to understand the underlying problems, and if he co…

This applies to so many fields. IT and security are two common examples from more technical areas. Both are invisible unless they screw up. Programmers get this a lot, too. Good software is often invisible to its users, and programmers mostly get attention when users hit bugs or bad design.

The way we see marketing is often the way a lot of people will see us, so it's something worth learning more about.

Re: What A Hacker Learns After A Year In Marketing

#59

Post by RobSpectre »

organico wrote: post #54

Nice piece - as a coder turned entrepreneur, the sales and marketing side of things has been exceptionally hard for me. It's a battle everyday, and if I could turn back time I would have ensured I worked in a marketing department, or with people skilled in the area before embarking down my current path... That said, I'm in the hole now, learning as fast as I can, solo. Can anyone make some current/and also seminal ma…

Thanks partner - hats off to you for jumping in the deep end.
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