Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN How do I learn marketing?
74 points by ryanmccullagh on March 8, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 41 comments
I'm a strong engineer, and that's my core skill. But I want to focus 75% of my time on marketing.

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?




https://github.com/ronakganatra/awesome-marketing

https://github.com/paulbradish/awesome-digital-marketing

https://github.com/vkoul/awesome-Marketing-Analytics ( see "Courses" )

https://github.com/ronakganatra/awesome-developer-marketing


First, I think there are two kinds of marketing:

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.

---

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.


I'd like to add that there is a spectrum between "brute-force" and "precision" marketing. So some people say/think they are doing precision marketing, but they are actually doing "brute-force" marketing with a few precision marketing tactics.

I think precision marketing is most effective when used as a holistic strategy. This often means precision marketing dictates what your core business is. Smart precision marketers first pick a niche and figure out what problems people really need solved. Then they confirm if people will buy even before building the solution to that pain.

Most people do things in the opposite order: think up a business idea, build it, then are confused when it is hard to sell to other people. Both methods can succeed, but I think the precision method minimizes the risk of (market) failure.


Read 100million offers and Russel Brunson books. And watch frank kerns videos. And learn from Aaron Fletcher. And Digital Marketer. Then use OpenAI to create your strategy, campaigns, ads and content.


Marketing is mostly good writing. Start by writing and opining on things you're building, or what you find interesting in the ecosystem you operate in. The more you write, the more articulate you get. Social media platforms like twitter and Linkedin are great places to start voicing some of these writings. Another way to do this is to analyse a company; understand its P&L, its business model, its growth levers and write about it obsessively. It's what folks like Packy do with their newsletters. Eventually, you get better at content dissemination; this is the second part of the puzzle. If attention spans are bad, how do you bait a reader in. How do you frame headlines and get people to read something by invoking their curiosity etc...

If you have these two elements baked in, the next step is to focus on digital and performance marketing aspects — you will learn these in 2-3 weeks tops given how simple and easy to digest they are.


You don't learn marketing. Marketing learns you.

Jokes aside though, you might want to pick up Kotler's book on Marketing:

https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Marketing-17th-Philip-Kotl...


Try cold calling or knocking on doors. There's nothing else like it. Not sure any other experience can teach you as much. Doubtful that any courses or eBooks can provide the same fundamentals.

There's no substitute for being able to look the customer in the eye and observe the cues provided. You know instantly when something isn't working. When you go back to the keyboard you'll be able to understand customers more intuitively.

Analytics, multivariate testing and technical approaches make more sense once you grasp the basic premises. I'd describe in-person sales as an intangible. Maybe you can divine some of those cues from statistics after testing, but that doesn't give you the same intuition to craft a pitch to test.


Marketing Veteran here.

To give you direction I’d like to understand the purpose. If you’re familiar with software engineering you can draw a parallel between vastly different approaches eg FPGA programming vs native app development.

Are you looking to understand strategic (brand/integrated) approach to marketing or tactical (eg performance marketing)? Are you interested in understanding marketing to help specific objectives or to assist a business at different stages? (Aided Awareness or conversions). Are you interested in targeting consumers or businesses.

Let me know and I can provide some directional guidance.


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.


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...


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 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...


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.


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.


There are several good comments (& questions) in here, but I'll add the following:

Know your objective. What do you want to achieve with your marketing? Know your target. Who are you trying to reach? Per the comment re: "precision marketing" search the term "account based marketing". This is a targeted B2B type approach. To over simplify, it comes down to really knowing/understanding who you want to reach, what's life like for them, what issues/pain-points they want solved, & you must consider when is the best time to reach them. Use your knowledge of their life/issues to craft the content to best engage them. Consider the time-frame of what you are trying to sell/promote and the buying cycle... is it long (over months) or short? Thus, you may need to plan on additional follow-ups/touchpoints for the 'buyers journey". etc.

You're request was how you can learn marketing. College is an option, just as it is for engineering. For more timely and cost-effective methods you can also get access to specific courses on linkedIn learning (check your local library for free access btw). Also check out coursera. There are many other no-cost low cost sources, but I thought I'd give you a few to start.

Anyway, I hope this helps.


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


I see a lot of comments focusing on reading books about marketing.

I've tried this and it didn't work for me.

What worked for me, was starting a project that required a mostly marketing and very little engineering.

First project was a keto newsletter. I needed content and subscribers. So I learned how to tap into Reddit to get stories of people who were already sharing (for content) and then sharing/ask to share on Reddit (marketing 101).

Next project I bought. A weekly lead report (https://www.fundedlist.com). I'm learning cold emailing, setting meetings and learning to close (marketing 102?).

Realizing however, that the easiest customers are searching for what I offer anyway. So next foray will be into content - blog posts (marketing 201?)

Learning through real life projects with a little bit at stake is the sweet spot for learning. I learned programming the same way.


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!


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.

Related to the product I'm working on, it took me a considerable time but I think I finally figured out a nice strategy to do marketing as engineer (I have high hopes but we'll see how it goes).

Overall, I feel this is considerably more engaging than doing traditional marketing.


I think they called this channel "engineering as marketing" in the book Traction from Weinberg.


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.


Marketing is the skill of pairing consumer interest to business need. There are many different expressions of this, and they reflect different marketing ideologies.

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.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35006601


I am trying to do the same. What I find the hardest is getting into the marketing/sales mindset. I hate selling. I am a developer, I like creating, improving things, I don't find natural having to tell others how awesome my product is and how it might help them, I have an intrinsic and wrong expectation of "build it and they will come" that it's very hard to get over.


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.


Wonder if there's a Hacker News for marketing.


You could specialize in SEO which feels like coding in that it's very analytical (simplified example: write 5 blog posts, check Google Search Console for how they're performing, write 5 more that should now do better based on what you've learned, etc.)


I'd read

https://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practice...


Marketer here. If I were to define the fundamental aspects of marketing, it would be as follows (I also have a note about feedback loops after):

1. Customer empathy: you need to know their pains, dreams, opinions, frustrations, and more. The first step of marketing is to always meet people where they are the most frustrated. Good resources for this are Amy Hoy’s Sales Safari [1], or Netnography [2]. I also like Sean D’Souzas Brain Audit [3]. Sean’s is the most accessible.

2. Copywriting: Once you can empathize with the persona / customer, you’ll need to learn how to relate your product or service to the person’s problems, needs, or dreams. There are many scammy resources out there, but the person who does his marketing in the most ethical way is again Sean D’souza [4]. Robert Bly is also good [5].

3. Distribution: once you solve for customer empathy and the right positioning (through compelling copywriting), the final step is to distribute your copies in various media. Weinberg’s Traction is a good starting point [6].

Some will recommend Russell Brunson, Sam Ovens, Gary Halbert, etc, but these folks are in the extreme end of marketing, and may not suit everyone. Their methods work for “get rich quick” online courses or coaching programs, but not for real products or services where you need to sustain a brand over time. The resources I mentioned are a good foundation for ethical marketing.

RE: Feedback loops - the fastest way to get a feedback loop is to start with content marketing. Your article must solve a tiny problem, then you distribute it. If you get good feedback, then make a longer article, then get feedback again. Then turn it into an ebook or small online tool, then get feedback. Keep increasing the size of your solution until you get to your desired goal (like a SaaS).

Another way to get a feedback loop is through ads: run multiple ads, compare their conversion rates, drop the worst ones, scale the best ones, then add more ad tests.

[1] https://stackingthebricks.com/video-sales-safari-in-action/

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Netnography-Essential-Qualitative-Soc...

[3] https://www.psychotactics.com/products/the-brain-audit-32-ma...

[4] https://www.psychotactics.com/home-study/copywriting-home-st...

[5] https://www.amazon.com/Copywriters-Handbook-Step-Step-Writin...

[6] https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...


Read books mentioned here in the comments. Everyone should learn Marketing (and Sales), especially tech folks. It's often undervalued or ignored because they don't teach it in college.


I learned software engineering on the job. I learned marketing in school as part of a business degree.


First you put the crab costume on, and then you wave the sign with the name of the all you can eat seafood place. Simple really.

Or rather, you probably need to say which form of marketing you want to do. Any form of promoting a business can be considered marketing.


Hey man

I suggest you check blackhatworld.com, you will find a ton of valuable things.

It is the biggest internet marketing forum online and only 1 now, and don't be intimidated by its name, its non related with "black hat".


If you hate the black theme, don't worry, in the left corner, turn it into "white theme" .


thank you for the question


You don't learn marketing. You merely pay for it.


I am trying to pay for marketing, but it's almost impossible to find good marketers/partners to market my product. If someone is really good, they don't need a product, they just market themselves and become influencers.


How do the people you pay to do marketing learn marketing?


Google: "roadmap to learning marketing"


How can you say that you are a strong engineer ? Prove it here.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: