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Can a marketing plan be "over-engineered" or "too hacky"?

As an engineer and designer, I'm always wary of over-engineering or over-designing the products I work on. In the spectrum between "complete hack" and "astronaut architecture" there is a sweet spot of engineering and design that is "just enough" to get the job done. After working on enough products hands-on, you start to learn the tell-tale signs that you're getting close to either end of the spectrum.

On my current project, I'm trying to solo-boostrap my product and in the process, I'm learning a lot about marketing plans, strategy, and techniques.

But I'm still learning! One thing that I worry about is that I don't yet have a good intuition for what makes a "good enough" marketing plan/strategy. I'm concerned I might be either spending too much time on the wrong things or not enough time on others.

For those of you that spend a lot of time in the trenches doing marketing work: Is it possible to "hack" or "over-plan" marketing? If so, what are the tell-tale signs that you're over-doing it?

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    Build systems don't hack. Create leads, close leads. It is that simple. So how can you do this with code. We did. https://pepper4fb.com/pepper-sales-page-main?fpr=jeff11

  2. 1

    I agree with @rosiesherry about experimenting. The worst thing you could do with a marketing plan, in my opinion, is lock yourself into something for ages so that you don't react fast when it stops working. Marketing is basically a big, exhausting, ongoing experiment to see what works. You can increase your chance of success by 1) trying a lot of things 2) having an extremely honest and robust way of measuring whether any of those things worked (that means things like great analytics, great attribution, large enough samples to see if your results are significant).

    1. 1

      Yep definitely makes sense for the growth phase! I'm in pre-launch so just trying to make sure I don't blow my chance at a good initial first impression. Getting things polished up like: Branding, PR, Beta signups, landing page, etc... I feel like in this phase you could spend an eternity tweaking stuff.

      Definitely a case of "perfect is the enemy of good".

  3. 1

    It can definitly be too hacky and way to clong.

    One page is all you need but it is also a living document as you progress.

    Break it down into phases:

    Before--->Propesct= Goal here is to get them to know you and incidcate interst.
    During--->Lead= Goal here is to get them to like you an dbuy from you the first time.
    After--->Customer= Goal here is to get them to trust you and buy form you regularly and refer new business to you.

    This is high level but chekc out the 1-Page Marketing Plan by Alan Dib to go deeper. If you need help navigating it let me know.

    1. 1

      Awesome. I really like the forcing-function of keeping a plan to a single page.

    2. 1

      Also,Id be interested in learning about your app. Let's connect.

  4. 1

    I think with all things these days, the key is to experiment to try to get to a place where you feel that things are working, but are also inline with who you are, or want to be. Marketing can be tedious work at times, it's important to enjoy the journey and feel like you are adding value.

    The doing and experimenting will help you define what marketing you should do. I would choose that over metric driven goals (x number of followers, x number of email subscribers).

    I'm also a believer in how things should become habits. So start small, ala Tiny Habits, do a bit every day, slowly increasing the commitment as you see results and get better at doing it.

    1. 1

      Good advice!

      Do what feels right. Repeat what generates results. Make incremental progress. Enjoy the ride.

      🙌

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