| Funnny, I am the other side of this coin. I am a founder specializing in product and marketing but I don’t write code. Having now scaled up from zero customers to 100+ I can tell you the main things I see people get wrong: -talking too much about what the product can do, rather than the result the person will get. -focusing on features, which users don’t care about, rather than outcomes which they do. -forgetting that the people you’re writing copy to are people - write to them normally and not in some weird voice. -being overly focused on comparison to competitors. I never mention my competitors once, and no one cares. -copying ideas from very large companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, series D startups). Those companies can afford to burn millions on ads that might not do much. You can’t. If you copy what the big players do you just look lame and unoriginal. -not being creative enough. No one likes boring ads. Not even boring people with boring jobs like boring ads. Average American sees 10k ads in a day. Be unique. -Leading with something other than the main thing that your customer cares about. My company does real estate data, we used to have a headline about real estate data and market analysis. No one cared. Then we changed to taking about what investors care about, which is increasing their investment returns. Suddenly, conversions. -tell a story about your product and plant it in your customers mind. I always say it’s like inception - they won’t remember exactly the story you told or where they saw it but I gets engrained in your mind. It’s really quite strange. -not investing enough in marketing. Advertising done well is incredible leverage. -don’t be afraid to write things that are long. Long headlines, long landing pages. There’s this prevailing advice to make things short, and while I do also do that, I have found that it’s not the length that’s the problem, it’s the content. If something is really good valuable and interesting, people will read things that are super long. -provide value. The person on the other end of your landing page likely has a job to do and a boss to answer to. Help them solve their problems and they will buy from you. -the single biggest thing that moves the needle is telling a better story about your product. -don’t a/b test too much. It’s good to follow data, and do look at and compare performance. But you can’t a/b test your way out of bad positioning. Get it right the first time as much as you can, then iterate. |
I will add that if you're a programmer first, and marketeer second, then you have to be deliberate in finding time for the marketing. It's more fun to put that off and write one-more-thing. Set aside a specific time for marketing, and be disciplined to stick to it.