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Is there a way to learn marketing, in the same way that one learns software engineering?
It's so easy to learn software engineering, and the results are instant. How can I apply the same learning concepts to marketing?
You don't learn marketing. You merely pay for it.
Jokes aside though, you might want to pick up Kotler's book on Marketing:
https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Marketing-17th-Philip-Kotl...
To get started in the space, its helpful to think about how you decide to purchase something. That will tell you a bit about what kind of consumer you are. You can then read about how companies attempt to "reach" consumers like you, and what makes you different from other consumers.
Find out where the marketing geeks hang out, and go hang out with them. Like any other geek, they'll be happy to help you get started.
1. "Brute-force" marketing: hit everyone in a wide area with your message, without much consideration for the target audience. The focus is on you and your product/service. 99% of marketing is done this way.
2. "Precision" marketing: acute focus on the target audience with a deep understanding of their desires, needs, and fears. Don't waste time/resources hitting people not interested in your product/service. I think this is more effective, but it is also much more difficult and requires more effort. Thus this type of marketing is much less common.
There are times when brute force marketing is enough. Everyone is already familiar with Coke, so they just need to remind people Coke tastes good.
However people usually find brute force marketing annoying. And if people don't know/trust your product/service already, it will probably be far less effective.
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Here are some of the best resources to learn precision marketing:
- https://www.consulting.com/ teaches precision marketing in the most "scientific," engineering-like way. However it's also very wordy and could be edited down to about 20% of its actual length.
- https://expertsecrets.com/ is like the greatest hits collection of effective (precision) marketing techniques. Short and well-written, too.
- Gary Halbert was probably the first person to publish and teach precision marketing to a larger, more general audience. Here's his HOWTO: https://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/newsletters/zfkj_hands_...
Note: I coined the terms "precision marketing" and "brute-force marketing." I needed a way to differentiate the marketing I wanted to use/learn/teach vs. the marketing most people are familiar with. It's also more commonly called "direct response" marketing.
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 application of research and marketing science. Comparable to system design.
If you jump straight into tactics, growth hacking, posting on social media etc, you might learn how do some things, but you won't know why things work, and you won't know why generic tactics you read about on line maybe aren't working in your scenario. This is in the same way that you can learn to code online, but if you're only ever copy pasting from tutorials and stack overflow, you're going to get messed up with N+1 queries.
I would suggest getting a base level of understanding the core marketing science that exists. For this I would suggest reading anything from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. In particular the book How Brands Grow, it's a bit dry, but very approachable.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Brands-Grow-What-Marketers/dp/019...