You suck at marketing because...

Tech people especially programmers (including me) find marketing hard.

For all their lives they work on an environment where some type of input produces a logically expected output.

Change the input and you know you will get a different (and an expected) output.

Call those functions/routines in some logical order, move those variables around, push and pop from the stack and… bam it works.

Repeat it 10 times 100 times 1000 times…. it works the same way and you feel happy having achieved something.

When such me or you start marketing we try to approach it the same way. Because that approach has got hardwired in our brain.

You create a list of inputs

SEO
Blogging
Newsletter
Ad Campaigns
Cold Emails
Whatever new you read on social media …

And then try them all one after another expecting an output (more sales that is)…blindly.

But there is only one problem.

Marketing doesn’t work like that.

No two inputs here are guaranteed to produce an expected output.

For some products Ad Campaigns might give better conversions.

For some, SEO could be completely useless because people are not even searching about it.

You get frustrated that the damn thing doesn’t work and move on to the next

Till you run out of inputs and give up on the product to start the same loop again.

Over time, you start feeling that marketing sucks and only building stuff is your thing.

And that your next idea will do the wonders.

And you repeat the same.

This is the mindset we need to change as programmers; because this does not produce any sales.

I now try to first check at what stage of product development I am.

Stage 1 - Send the minimally baked product to the close friends and family (or if it's a niche that doesn't relate to them, I try to find people in the related niche) to know whatever sucks about it. I am mostly interested to hear the negative or blunt feedback.

improve the product based on feedback

Stage 2 - If I've an email list for that niche, I send it to them. These people trust me and would probably be happy to try it and give me better feedback.

then improve the product based on feedback

Stage 3 - Identify keywords to run ad campaigns to a very specific targeted audience. The more specific, the better it is. Analyze the conversions and goals. Do A/B tests. Ask for feedback from the converted ones.

then further improve the product based on feedback

Stage 4 - Cold email and DMs influencers in the niche and give them free access in exchange for a shoutout. If they do it, people following them will have more chances of trying my product. Talk to those people to get more feedback.

...improve the product further.

Stage 5 - Write blog articles relevant to the keywords and wait till search engines track them. This has the longest waiting period to get any relevant feedback but customers received via this channel are the most filtered ones and likely to buy.

...and in all that, don't forget to provide a good customer support. This is the most underrated marketing (and retention) technique that most people don't care about.

Sure it's not easy for programmers to get into the marketing mindset......but...

You suck at marketing because...

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