| The most difficult part of being a marketer is finding out what actually works. There is all sorts of advice out there from people that give you tips and recommendations, and 99% of them have no idea what they're talking about. In that way it can be a lot like programming; you can either pay some kid $10/hour to slog it out and figure it out as he goes, or you can pay a premium for someone who can say, "oh yeah you do this and this and this," and he's done. It's a lot easier to pretend to be a marketer than it is to pretend to be a programmer, because you can sell something that doesn't work all day and people will still unknowingly buy it. Some people, I fear, discount what great marketers can do because they never actually learn the difference. One of the reasons marketing and finding a good marketer is hard, is because you don't know why (or if) it's not working. Imagine if every time you coded something up you never actually got to run a program and see what the results were. Marketing can feel the same way; you build something, and it is probably failing somewhere, but until you finally put it together right you don't really know where. Are you advertising or marketing in the wrong places? Does your landing page suck? Maybe your product actually sucks and no one cares? You just have to test and test and test to try to create some semblance of data. Then when you do actually do it people say, "Oh, that's it? That wasn't hard." Like when a great designer creates a very simple logo that communicates the essence of the brand in a beautiful way, and someone says, "Well that only took you five minutes." It's not about the five minutes it took me to create that; it's about the years of work I put in to learn how to create that. It takes a hell of a lot of work to get to simple. I had some serious cognitive dissonance when I started giving out some of my hacks in "The hacker's guide to user acquisition" (first chapter - http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1...), the only reason I'm spilling some of my hard-earned secrets is because I see too many good products die because whoever built it never got it out to the right people. I'm not sure how programmers can differentiate between a marketer that knows what they're talking about and one that doesn't; that's as difficult as a marketer discerning who is a gifted programmer and who isn't. So, knowing what actually works is hard. Is marketing harder than programming? Not for me, it took me a week to figure out how to get my first rails server live and on Github. But just like any other field, there is a long, long learning curve if you're going to do it well. |
"because I see too many good products die because whoever built it never got it out to the right people."
- yes. Great ideas DESERVE to be found!
"difficult as a marketer discerning who is a gifted programmer and who isn't"
The street goes both ways. I would say that it's easy to fool a marketer into thinking you're a rockstar programmer.
"there is a long, long learning curve if you're going to do it well."
Well said. I still personally think it's more difficult -- maybe not conceptually, but it's terribly labor intensive and unpredictable.