An Engineer's Guide To Marketing

So, it's about 11 years ago now when I was fresh out of university that I decided to start my business. And right here, you're looking at the worldwide corporate headquarters of Robert Elder Software Incorporated back in 2014. This is the place where I sat when I officially incorporated my business. It's also where I used to sleep at night and worked during the day. Back in those days, I didn't really know very much about marketing. So, of course, I Googled the term a few times and read whatever came up, but I still wasn't very satisfied with the answers that I found. Conveniently, at the time, I also had a roommate who actually worked in marketing. So, I asked her what exactly did she do all day. She mentioned some stuff about planning advertisements for billboards and a few other things, but I didn't really find that answer satisfying either. But over the last 11 years, I've had a lot of time to think about this question. And today, I think that I can finally give a pretty good answer. Now, if you ask someone to define what marketing is, they'll probably mention a lot of the stereotypical things that people usually think of, like flyers, billboards, word of mouth. But I would argue that successful marketing is actually a lot more than that. And as you can see from this diagram, I've divided marketing into two categories that I'll call feed forward marketing and feedback marketing. Most of the stereotypical ideas about what marketing is fit into the feed forward marketing category. So when you ask the question, what exactly does a marketer do all day? The answer could actually vary quite a lot. They could be organizing information and images that will appear in a flyer. And just to see what would happen, this is actually something that I tried back in the day. I made up my own little flyer to describe what my software consulting services were. And I collected about 50 addresses of local businesses and individuals who I thought might be interested in these services. After mailing out the 50 flyers, this resulted in a total of zero leads. Now, if you're a big company with a huge marketing budget, you could also use billboards. But of course, that's not something that I ever tried. In my experience from the early days, word of mouth was actually the most successful marketing method for me. And if you work outside the field of marketing, the term copywriting might be new to you. And by the term copywriting, I don't mean filing a copyright. In the context of marketing, the term copywriting is used to describe the process of writing the text that actually appears in your marketing material. For example, the introductory text that appears on your company's homepage or the text that appears in a product description. It could also be the text that appears in your content marketing, which brings up the next answer to what a marketing person might actually do all day. Content marketing is exactly what it sounds like. Since a lot of the traditional marketing speak, such as the text that appears in your company's homepage, is usually fairly bland and not very interesting, the more modern way of marketing things, involves creating content that's interesting by itself. If you can create content that's interesting on its own merits, like a blog post or a video, you can likely convert a small percentage of that traffic into paying a bit of attention to whatever you're trying to sell. The other thing that marketers do all day is setting up and managing ad campaigns. You might think that the process of setting up an ad campaign is fairly easy and quick. However, if you want to set up an ad campaign that's actually effective and doesn't just lose a ton of money, you're going to have to spend a lot more time on the setup process. And once you've set up your ad campaign and have your ads running, you're not done in the slightest. You'll have to continuously monitor your ad campaign. And in addition, you'll have to monitor and make changes to any AB tests that are running with your ad campaign. And more broadly speaking, you can also apply AB tests to any of these other marketing activities as well. So next, I'll talk a bit about this side of the diagram that I've labeled as feedback marketing. So this includes all of the aspects of marketing that have to do with responding to feedback. So this could include things like receiving feedback directly from customers, but it more so refers to the process of retrieving and reviewing information about customer behavior. So for websites, this can include things like Google Analytics, which shows you information about your traffic. And the process of setting up Google Analytics on your website involves installing a small script. The script contains a small ID number to identify your analytics account. And some of you may be surprised to learn that many popular social media sites offer a similar service. And often these small scripts are referred to as tracking pixels. In the simplest setup, you can use these analytic services to just monitor how much traffic you're getting. But if you actually want to be successful in marketing, what you really want to do is conversion tracking. And as you might expect, many of these conversion tracking features have integrations that allow them to work with the corresponding advertising services like Google Adwords or Facebook ads. Managing all of these conversion tracking features on your website can get tedious and many marketers use a service like Google Tag Manager to keep track of and manage them all. It's worth emphasizing that setting up all of these conversion tracking and analytics features for your business is a huge amount of work. So when you ask the question, what exactly does a marketer do all day? The process of setting up and tuning all of the analytics could be one answer to that question. For a marketer who doesn't have programming experience, setting up some of these conversion tracking features can be particularly difficult. Generally, some of the setup process for conversion tracking or analytics involves at least a little bit of programming. And if the marketer doesn't have this expertise themselves, they'll have to outsource it to a programmer, and the programmer may not always understand exactly how the conversion tracking is supposed to work. This can lead to a significant amount of back and forth between the marketer and the programmer. For most analytics and advertising platforms, you'll probably have to wait on the order of 24 hours before you can know if your conversion tracking is actually working or not. It's not uncommon to think that you've set it up correctly, only to find the next day that it doesn't work at all. If you're tracking something like sales, you'll have to wait until you get the next sale to know if your conversion tracking is actually working or not. Once you have all of your tracking pixels and analytics installed, the next thing that you might want to know about is called a marketing funnel. Here's a look at my online store that I set up recently to sell some products. And this marketing funnel diagram illustrates some hypothetical numbers that you might expect to see from a site like this. So, in this case, we have 10,000 people who visited the site, and 2 and a half thousand who visited a product page, 500 people who added to cart, and 100 who bought the product. And clearly, the diagram is referred to as a funnel because people drop off at each stage of the purchasing process. And your job as a marketer is to think about why people might be dropping off at each one of these stages. And this is one of the areas where I would say that marketing work is very psychologically different from software engineering work. In software engineering work, the feedback loop is very tight and fast. Oftent times in software development, a junior employee may ask their senior, "How does this function work?" or "How does this piece of code do this or that?" And the senior employee will say, "I don't know. Just run it and find out." In software development, this makes sense because the cost of doing an experiment is usually close to zero and the time it takes to do the experiment is usually very fast and the feedback is very clear. However, in marketing, none of these things are true. The feedback loops are much longer. They're often much less conclusive and every experiment that you do in marketing usually comes with a significant cost. Another thing that's worth pointing out about marketing is that not all analytics data is actually useful. A marketing person will have to look at thousands and thousands of pages of analytics data. And most of that data will be completely unactionable. But since there's going to be pressure to try and optimize something, they could waste a massive amount of time trying to optimize something that doesn't even matter. Most software developers are familiar with the term 10x engineer, which is used to describe individuals who contribute far more to the business than everyone else. I think that this concept also exists in marketing. In fact, I think it's probably much more extreme than in software development. If you hire the right marketer who has a genius idea for a marketing campaign, there's no limit to the amount of upside that it can give you. The next thing that I'll talk a bit about is the importance of messaging in how you advertise your products. When you're building a business, you're building it for a specific reason because you have an idea for a product and you're trying to communicate that to the rest of the world. So, you might consider that purely a feed forward process. But remember, I said that the other half of marketing that's very much underappreciated can be thought of as a feedback process. So very often you might start out with an idea for a very specific product. And as you get better at communicating that product to the world, you may realize that customers want something else. To be successful in marketing your products, you should be as specific as possible. Often you may have a product or service with a large number of features and benefits. It can be tempting to think about advertising your product as though it solves all of your problems, but you have to remember that every word that you use to describe your product is taking up space. Instead of listing all of the features and benefits of your product, it can be very informative to pick only a single feature of your product and advertising it by emphasizing only that. You can try this multiple times with the same product to confirm or deny your hypothesis about why people actually want this product. By doing this, you may actually find results that unexpectedly surprise you, which may change the way that you develop future products. It's also important to keep your messaging as simple as possible. This blog post is the most successful piece of writing that I've ever done. It's been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. It simply includes a bullet list of instructions along with an associated picture. A general rule that's fairly successful is to use short sentences that are fairly simple. Every time that you use words that are unnecessarily complicated or confusing is an opportunity for people to drop off in your marketing funnel. And if you've ever wondered why typical corporate speak is so watered down and neutral, now you know why. It's also worth comparing this type of thinking to the analysis that's done in political campaigns. If you've ever wondered why so many politicians are always so vague and don't want to commit to anything, now you understand why. Every time that a word comes out of their mouth, they're doing a mental calculation to themselves. Hm. If I phrase it this way, I can avoid alienating 20,000 extra voters. Having said this, it's also worth considering the opposite approach. If you have a product or service that's only relevant for a small subset of the population, it might actually help you to use symbols and phrasing that are only relevant to that subset of the population. This way, the unique features in your advertising material can be used to target the information to a narrow subset of users. And generally speaking, the recent trend in advertising has been to be more of an authentic and unpolished person. Trust in generic brands has been going down over time, and people are increasingly looking for information about products and services from people that they feel that they can relate to. If you want to appeal to as many people as possible, you probably shouldn't say much about your religion, your favorite sports team, or your favorite political party. On the other hand, if you want to appeal very strongly to a small subset of people, you can go ahead and list all of those things. The right answer for you is really a personal choice, and it depends what type of business you have. If your business is selling toothbrushes, you probably want to appeal to as many people as possible. If your business is a punk rock music group, you probably want to define your personality very strongly. Now, having said this, the advice that people often give is to be yourself and be authentic. But that's not always guaranteed to work out the way that you wanted to. In discussing this, I'm reminded of one example that I can think of from a few years ago where a prospective employer posted some Tik Tok videos criticizing the applicants to her job. Predictably, this video was not received positively by many people. The reason that we want everyone else to be their authentic selves is because that makes it much easier to figure out who you should stay away

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