Ask HN: How do you learn digital marketing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you learn digital marketing?

11 pointsGooblebrai16 comments

As a developer, I find marketing learning resources very uneasy. Unlike programming, that have concrete tutorials with specific outcomes, marketing tutorials seem to be a bunch of concepts that I can't figure out how "legit" they are. There's no way to fake a "for loop" in programming but any marketing guru can invent that "you need 5 likes within 10 minutes for the algorithm to bless you" or things like that. I feel like there's a lack of evidence behind many marketing techniques.

I think I need to approach it in a different way with a different mindset. Did any developer here mastered digital marketing? How did you do it?

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Marketing is fundamentally opposed to programming, because of the people/things or empathizer/systematizer dichotomy.

You need to empathise with people in a broad sense, often without any immediate feedback to adjust in the initial instance. Thankfully, academia has done a lot to systemize this into something approximating a science, thanks to trial and error of the minds of yesteryear.

Digitial marketing relies heavily on generating some feedback via metrics, but if you fundamentally dont "get" people this will be functionally the same as troubleshooting and gathering data from a lawnmower because its not doing a great job at cleaning your floor.

The principles to your question are: "I want to market to people digitally" There is preparation and there is actioning, and there is analysis, and then re-iterating based on the new information from analysis.

1. Who am I selling to? Everyone? In order to improve the feedback for adjusting and improving your marketing iteratively, splitting people you are aiming at into groups can massively improve observations. (Looks like a youtube short had much better reception in the under 30s). This then lets you tune various parts of your marketing.

2. What digital mediums do the people I am targetting use?

3. How much budget time and resource do I have to pursue this? What options are there and how do I best utilise them? What return am I expecting

4. In these digital mediums, what are the factors for success, do I want a short or long video, what do existing successful people do and why? What makes people stop engaging with content that was previosly successful?

5. Prioritise biggest impact for least hours

6. How much budget time and resource do I have to pursue this? What options are there and how do I best utilise them? What return am I expecting

7. Refine your proposed actions based on info to this point

8. Execute

9. Observe and analyse what performs and how long it takes, note any failures that are immediately apparent

10. Go to 6 and repeat until success

> Marketing is fundamentally opposed to programming

No it isn’t.

Programmers and marketers both love to believe this but it’s not true. You should instead look at them as complementary rather than oppositional.

Can you expound for the curious, like myself? I also see these two fields as diametrically opposed, but I'm open to having my mind changed, despite having a low-grade-but-persistent loathing for marketing in general.

You both work for the same company towards the same goal.

Can you explain why they are diametrically opposed?

I did already above the parent comment.

I don't think you did a great job explaining it but I'll try.

> Marketing is fundamentally opposed to programming, because of the people/things or empathizer/systematizer dichotomy.

I don't understand what you mean here. You are saying that different skill sets are needed to succeed in marketing vs. programming? If so, shocker lol. Different fields require different skills. This doesn't mean that they are in opposition to each other.

> You need to empathise with people in a broad sense

This is true of every job. If you lack empathy you'll never be as good at your job as you think you are.

See my original post for explanation

In all products, there is a problem and a solution. The engineering is how you build the solution. The marketing is how you communicate it to the customers. If the product is well-done and a fit for the market, the customers are happy to hear the communication to know about the solution to their problem. That whole scenario is not opposition, it is multiple roles working towards solving a problem.

Now, people who are bad at one side or the other can make life difficult for the other group. And you do often see that. But flawed execution of the tasks is a problem with how they are done, not an inherent conflict between teams.

A framework that has worked for me is this framework by Brian Balfour:

1. Marketing-Product fit

2. Product-Channel fit

3. Channel-model fit

4. Model-Market fit

Reference: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/market-product-fit

https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-channel-fit-for-grow...

> Products are built to fit with channels. Channels do not mold to products.

Some great advice in those articles. Thanks for sharing.

I was the sole IT guy for a "marketing" company for 15 years... I almost turned the job down when a friend offered it to me, because of my preconceptions about marketing (equating to spam, junk mail, etc). It turned out they helped people do Trade Show exhibits, events, and the like. So, it wasn't actually evil.

Here's the non-technical part of what I learned. I hope some fraction of this is useful to you. These are the fundamental things that cause people to pay you money to do your work. Others can advise far better about the technical and logistic levels of detail.

You need to get the customer (who is paying you to do marketing) to specify what message they actually want to deliver, what 3 things they want the customer to walk away knowing. Everything else reinforces those 3 things. You also need to know who that customer is, and how they have traditionally reached them. It would help to know what the customers needs are as well.

The customer's boss needs to know their marketing budget isn't being wasted. You need to figure out some criteria they will agree to, as a measure of success. This means you need to be able to measure how many responses they get through the sales channel, etc. In the Trade-Show business, we were able to have people actually fill out paper surveys, and tabulate those. The world has changed, but the ideas are the same.

Read up on A/B testing, etc... this isn't something we really did, it's more of a computer enabled tech.

If you're looking to market a new product I'm looking for testers for an app to help with that. If you add your contact details to your profile I'll ping you once it's ready (hopefully 1-2 weeks).

There are many resources for learning these days, I started hunting around for new info in this arena a couple years ago, and started posting some of the resources I thought others may enjoy here:

https://steveiscritical.com/smma-info/

It's not exhaustive by any means, but I feel it's best to dip your toe into a little of this person's style or that person's style and see which people resonate with you.

There are also many lanes of digital marketing and I am bit jelly of those who are really awesome at any one of them - kind of like that 'you suck at excel; video.. so best to get a nice overview and start to dive deep in the areas that resonate with you.

I put some info in random blog posts as well, (https://steveiscritical.com/) like the linkedin learning, meta certs / learning, and CRO courses - which are great as well imho.

It's fun, there is also lots to learn, and there is more of a science and tech to it these days than just being an 'art' I think.

There is evidence in marketing techniques if you are allowed to use conversion pixels and can see the journey someone came through to book / buy.. and rabbit holes in youtube that expose some of the pseudo science of things like 'smart campaigns' that are really good at getting clicks and taking your money..

I need to update these pages with more info and make some layout updates one of these days.

trial and error

I agree it’s not rocket science — and I think that when it looks like rocket science, there’s something wrong.

That said, I think you need to have a goal and a guesstimate of how to reach it, and of how much it will cost you to reach your goal. That way, you can decide if your initiative worked, if it could work if you work long enough on making it better, or if you should move on and try another course of action.

MBA. Go back to school to learn this the right way. Then you have to learn to talk to and influence people.

> There's no way to fake a "for loop

There are multiple ways to do loops and developers have passionate baseless opinions about everything. Developers use those opinions to fake what they can and lie to themselves about how important they are all the damn time. If it’s not measured with numbers it’s almost certainly bullshit.

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