Ask IH: Marketing for Indies / Hackers?
I’m a developer, and product guy.
My Achilles’ heel right now is marketing and audience building.
Where/how have you learned your marketing chops, and which resources could you recommend for a beginner in the field?
I do understand the basics of the theory, but I am looking for something concrete and actionable.
Hey Josh, thanks for the recommendation, I love intercom and was not aware of their growth handbook!
Anyway, Omar it depends on where you want to start. Customer acquisition is a huge topic!
If you are trying to figure out what you want to learn in marketing I would check out Brian Balfour's article "How to be a customer acquisition expert".
It gives you an overview of "growth" in terms of skills acquisition. You can make a roadmap for how you are going to learn to grow a product by prioritizing certain skills/channels instead of trying to learn everything at once.
https://brianbalfour.com/essays/customer-acquisition
If you are not interested in long term skills acquisition and want a roadmap for setting up basic growth systems for your product I recommend Julian Shapiro's Growth Guide. Its the most pragmatic approach to setting up growth systems you will find.
https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro
Content based SEO needs to be a part of most companies long term growth strategy. Content is a major growth channel.
One of the best SEO experts in terms of content marketing is Nat Eliason. He actually gives away a ton of the strategy his growth agency uses to build up high traffic blogs quickly. His clients use these blogs to drive traffic for registrations/sales.
His free video course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFPJhuqEkhk&list=PLkHkG0VxT2WigZ7_VU2luWc7FZuMKZbur
If you have specific things in growth you want to learn or specific channels you are going to focus on I can add those in.
Cool thanks for the suggestions here. Brian Balfour does great stuff, but I feel like even experienced marketers are trying to catch up to his stuff :)
Oh wow the Growth Guide from Julian looks very close to the hands-on kind of resource I was hoping for!
I'll make great use of the links, much much appreciated! Thank you @Imcca001
Glad I could help!
I would recommend that you try and test a few channels and if you find one that works, double down on it. The traction book is a great resource: https://medium.com/@yegg/78-takeaways-from-traction-book-1b44d2a03dda
Personally I am a completely self thought marketer and I have found quite a bit of success in the B2B space using tools like LinkedProspect: https://linkedprospect.com You do need to know who your market is and what you are offering them to be able to be successful
While I understand the concept of channels to a certain extent, I'm lacking the overall vision and sense of marketing strategy that will help me prioritize and pick which channels to go with.
I am also lacking the "gut feeling" which I am assuming can only be built with some experience.
Thank you @dawie nevertheless for the precious links. While still a bit ahead of my current stage, I've bookmarked them and will definitely reach back to it at the right time.
All you are trying to do is reach out to your customers. I would suggest that you do this by contacting people in your market on email and/or LinkedIn saying you are doing research and getting their feedback on the problems you intend solving.
I'm currently working on getting press coverage for my side-project. I've gotten some results but it's only been a week. I plan on posting my results on IH to share and get feedback from fellow IH's. I think it may be something IH's are interested in hearing about.
Where have you gotten coverage?
Give me another week and I'll post my results on IH. When I say "press coverage" I don't necessarily mean TechCrunch or TNW or big tech magazines like that (though that may come later, who knows), I mean industry specific blogs or online magazines.
Looking forward to seeing it. It’s all coverage and it’s all progress :)
You should share the results, @ismaelyws. Many people like me will get a lot of benefits from it.
Yeah I think it's a major pain point for my startup founders.
Indeed! Please do :-)
Best of luck by the way!
I will, i want to wait 2 weeks to see what happens and then I'll start posting my results.
I'm a marketer. I suggest you start with any of the resources from Intercom and go from there. They're phenomenal at building audience and sharing along the way. https://www.intercom.com/books/growth-handbook
Very much on point, the Intercom book looks so promising!
Thanks a lot @joshspilker.
I recommend a couple places:
Go to distilled.zest.is and you’ll find the best curated marketing content. You can even sort by most clicked and find the all-time list
Find a few blogs that you can mine, like Intercom, Hotjar, Brian Balfour, Julian.com, Backlinko, Ahrefs, Close.io
I have a WIP free (no form) ebook I’m working on if you want to check it out and give me feedback at www.coreyhaines.co/unconventional
Once you've come across https://growthhackers.com/posts , you'll never forget this website for the rest of your life.
Amazing resource! Thank you @Nakkeeran for sharing!
I have been working on practicing Nathan Barry's mantra of "Teach everything you know" and I have been seeing great results from that. His book "Authority" and the ConvertKit blog in general have been really helpful for giving me practical tips and developing a plan.
Every time I implement another step of the plan it seems to be working :)
There are a lot of great resources online and many of them have been mentioned in this thread.
You have the theory, so the best thing for you to do now is try out a few. I know, it’s not the most helpful advice but it’s the truth.
I’ve gotten over 6 million views on my content over the past 2 years because I stopped consuming content and started contributing to the internet.
After a while, if you’re consistent enough, people start looking for you.
What do you mean when you say "contributing to the internet"? Like contributing to discussion like this one and other twitter threads?
That’s part of it, but also getting on podcasts, publishing an insightful blog, guest posting, etc etc
Since writing this post, I found a little gem from Google that might be useful for others:
https://www.yourprimer.com/
If you like DuoLingo style of learning, it might be very interesting!
It seems very basic but I will try it as well