Marketing is a skill!
It takes time to acquire the skills of marketing.
Understanding the avatar , messaging, pain points and positioning takes time.
Marketing has a lot of components, just like coding.
I come across a lot of people that test a marketing idea , it doesn't go well and they say that marketing doesn't work. Let's be real here, it going to take a lot of testing before finding the right type of campaigns that work. Their is a saying in marketing.... Test! Test! Test! You will come across a lot of failures but that will lead to a great campaign and that campaign will make up for the previous experiment.
This is to let people know what to expect when it comes to marketing. Don't give up and remember, keep testing! Picture yourself as a scientist, keep experimenting until you find the right promotion/campaign that works.
Stay strong
Marketing should be based on data analytics. Here is an article that explains how mobile analytics helps improve conversion, check it out: http://bit.ly/3kWlFfz
Marketing without data will never work, so it's important to gather data about the target audience by testing different things. Then only you can figure out what till work.
The key to successful marketing is understanding your customers, which means paying attention to their likes and dislikes, hobbies, and personalities. The best way to get to know what they want? Talk to them. Find out what they like and are getting bored of, and design your marketing campaign accordingly.
Marketing can also feel demotivating at first -- you're shouting into the void and get nothing back for months. While it's not scalable, I've enjoyed trying to cultivate an audience on Twitter -- feels like I'm slowly building a group of people I just enjoy chatting with and updating. More classic marketing, like ads, blog, SEO, etc. is still a black box for me.
I like it. Marketing is a skill. Just like any skill it takes time to learn.
I what people dont tell you is how boring it can be, not marketing per se, but testing, failing, testing, failing, test.. ah fuck it. Without the success bit, its hard to stay motivated.
The successful founders are the ones with a high grit level
Agree. But "high grit level" can also mean high tolerance for boring, unrewarding tasks. Great, but doesn't stop the tasks being boring or unrewarding.
High grit level doesn't mean high tolerance for boring and unrewarding task.
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Confused, you think marketing is boring?
No. Marketing can be creative and i like that. Testing, analytics (my personal experience running google ads for example) to me is drudgery, but that's because it wasn't successful (so far). You need the wins to keep you motivated. It probbaly depends which side of your brain dominates. Some people love the analytical and testing side of it, some are more creative. They're very different skillsets, so hard for just one person to excel at. Not impossible, but its not easy.
But to clarify - analytics, testing, ad platforms etc can be boring, when it's not working out so great (unless you're that type).
True. Doing lots of iterations and testing on ad platforms, when it is not working, can be tough. :)
I think the tools are all skills (becoming good at running ad campaigns, etc), but marketing itself is more of a mindset. The mindset can be worked on and improved over time, but I've seen so many people who just have "it" in them by default, whereas I've seen people who have been marketers for years who just aren't capable of putting themselves in their audiences' shoes. Maybe their ego is blocking them, I don't know.
Some people are naturally gifted at things, just like in sports or specific areas in life. There's definitely a method to learning the skill
Yeah when I run Google or Facebook Ads for someone yeah i have some benefit in skipping a bunch of mistakes because of experience. But the main factor that makes me beat others is because I cast a wide net and have a clean effective AB testing structure.
Most people think they know best and run a not diverse pool of ads/audiences etc. and then fail to find a winner.
Being a good tester/scientist is being a good marketer.
exactly!
Marketing takes patience. Full stop.
For my first software company, I blogged and did market research for 10 months before the official launch. It took Google some time to index everything and for my articles to start ranking.
Later, when I did paid ads, it took about 6-8 weeks before everything was humming along really well (shorter, of course, but it's paid advertising).
I sold the company last year, and it got over one million visitors per year from these efforts, but that was after 8+ years of hitting the pavement.
I'm repeating this exact process with GapScout. I'll admit, even I get impatient and I know how it goes.
After reading this makes me think that marketing is intuition. It is not. At all.
Marketing is something you have to learn. It's not intuition that you'll "make it work" by just testing.
Instead of testing and testing like crazy educate yourself. A LOT. Study. A LOT.
And then test. That would be an educated test and sooner or later it will work.
Test, figure out whats not working and test again. Collect data and make decisions base on that data
People tend to simplify things. How many times have you heard "He's good with computers, he'll handle it" by your grandma, uncle, dad, whoever when they had issue with Wi-Fi, windows, Facebook login, smartphone, oven, Christmas lights...?
Now transfer this to marketing, development, plumbing or any other field.
Just because something is easy to use, friction less or just working doesn't mean it's simple.
This.
Marketing is absolutely a skill, it's a profession. Building in public is a fantastic way to garner organic impressions and awareness, but when you dig deeper, it's very complex!