Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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I've worked in Marketing for the better part of a decade. It's a constant pain point that even in this thread people are conflating marketing with advertising. The reality is that advertising is probably one of the lowest ROIs of a marketing department.

If you are a young/solo techie, here is some marketing advice to save you a ton of time:

- The number one source of new customers will be existing, stable customers. You make customers stable by offering tons of resources and post-sale updates.

- You would not believe how many deals I have seen lost because a founder didn't respond to a inquiry or forgot to schedule a follow up meeting. Have some sort of process in place to make your marketing-sales pipeline smooth and consistent.

- Have a specific plan for the kind of people you want to look at your company, and how you are going to get them to look at your company. Search ads are obvious but getting crazy expensive. Billboards are surprisingly effective. So is direct mail - you will never beat the ROI of sending a CTO a bottle of something fancy with a nice handwritten note.

- In person events are great. So are tradeshows. People are literally walking around looking for interesting products. If you don't get leads from these, it's probably because your product isn't interesting.

- Social media is a huge time and resource suck with limited opportunity for creating customers.

- If your product is going to make people happier/better off than the alternatives, they will be happy you found them. If you don't believe this about your own product, quit right now - this is how you end up exploiting people.

I hate advertising but I agree with almost all your points.

When I actively look for products, I don't consider it advertising, I consider it information. When I go to a market or open the store app, it's because I want to look at products. I only object when companies start trying to shove that information in front of my face without my consent.

Cultivating reputation, word of mouth, real world events... It takes time and money. It's much easier to just spam people with ads. I don't think that should be allowed.

My word of warning though - unless you are well connected, you cannot jumpstart a company by word of mouth alone. Too many great ideas have sputtered out because the founder was too proud to look for customers.

If you are bootstrapping, you need a plan from Day 1 on how to get your idea in front of new people. A Show HN post ain't going to cut it.

To add to this:

- Good marketers are troubleshooters. Is the problem you are not getting enough new prospects? Fix/invest in something there. Not enough trials? Tinker the problem there. Too much churn/dropoff? What are the fixes the product needs? If your marketing people can't separate out distinct problems and provide data points to troubleshoot them, get rid of them.

- Marketing strongly favors the upstart. Big companies have to saturate the channels for increasingly diminishing returns. You are forced into lower ROI activities just to feed the business. Small hacky companies can get by with a lot less. But this is also why you have such large departments at big companies seemingly just spinning their wheels.

> you will never beat the ROI of sending a CTO a bottle of something fancy

Did you mean:

1) A whiskey company sending a bottle of their whiskey?

or

2) (e.g.) "Microsoft" sending a bottle of whiskey?

The second sounds unethical and it would shock me to know this is common.

It's incredibly common. If you are a CTO at a software company, you are getting multiple boxes of swag or gifts a week. If you check your employee handbook, it may even specify what kinds of gifts you can accept.

Generally can't do it with government employees. But marketing to government is a whole other thing.

It's much worse on the PR side of the house. Journalists and bloggers are absolute grifters.

Makes me want to put “CTO” in my LinkedIn profile as my title for my freelance shop…

They first look at how much your are worth.

There's nothing in the employee handbook where I work about bribes^Wgifts.

I have significant indirect power over a lot of purchasing and impositions^Wrecommendations for clients.

Send me good whiskey ;)

2 is unfortunately still pretty common. Together with let's make friend with the CTO and invite him to a restaurant and pay the large wine and cocktail bill. Note that this is actually forbidden in many places like State universities and some companies (usually as they grow larger).

And is illegal in many countries, including Sweden. If you want to send for example a Christmas present to one of the customers, it can’t cost more than something like $30, and there are similarly limitations on what is considered a reasonable business lunch.

This is super insightful, especially the last point which makes a lot of sense yet feels counterintuitive in practice.

My wife freaking loves getting catalogues in the mail. We enjoy looking at specials when we shop. There are brands I have signed up for product alerts from.

It's one of those things where you ignore the kinds of marketing you like and get mad at the ones you don't.

This is a good point, but this is advertising not marketing.

From the OP: It's a constant pain point that even in this thread people are conflating marketing with advertising

OP never said that advertising is not marketing. Read OP’s next sentence. The point is that marketing is not only advertising.

The quote is:

It's a constant pain point that even in this thread people are conflating marketing with advertising. The reality is that advertising is probably one of the lowest ROIs of a marketing department.

To expand on the "advertising is probably one of the lowest ROIs of a marketing department" bit, marketing advertising is for brand building. That's those very expensive branded videos, banner ads etc. It's a very specific type of advertising which is generally pretty untargeted and doesn't aim at specific actions.

This is NOT search engineering advertising, which is highly targeted and typically part of the sales, not marketing department.

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