Ask Slashdot: I Just Need... Marketing? 212
An anonymous reader writes "Over the years, Slashdot has had many stories of non-technical entrepreneurs in need of programmers. Now I found myself in an almost opposite situation: I am a programmer with a fledgling mass-market product that needs marketing. I know Slashdot's general sentiment towards marketing. Without being judgmental one way or the other, I must say that for a product to reach the widest possible audience in a given time period, marketing is a necessity. Short of doing everything myself, I see a couple of options: 1. Hire marketing people, or an outside marketing firm; 2. Take in willing partners who are good at marketing (currently there are no shortage of people who want in). With these options, my major concerns are how to quantify performance, as well as how to avoid getting trapped in a partnership with non-performing partners — I already have a tangible product with a huge amount of time, money, and effort invested. Budget is also limited. (Budget is always limited unless you are a Fortune 500 business, but for now that's more of a secondary concern.) So here is my question to Slashdot: how do you address these concerns, and in a more general sense, how would you handle the situation: technical people with a product in need of marketing?"
Marketing Product (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't underestimate the importance of marketing. A crappy product can succeed with good marketing, but a great product will fail without it.
(I'm including positive word-of-mouth as marketing - even this you should work at)
Don't do it all yourself. (Score:4, Insightful)
Partner (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait? You didn't talk to marketing? (Score:3, Insightful)
You designed and created a product without input from marketing? You realize that one of the key purposes of marketing is to determine if a product is even marketable right? Are you sure you will even have customers? What features in your product are they most concerned with? Why would they choose your product over a competitors? Are there even any competitors yet, or are you establishing a new market? Which companys could potentially become competitors?
A sales executive would probably be more useful at this point. Establish some channel partners, and get the product out there. Then hire a PR firm to get your name into the right industry rags. They will also work on some graphics you can do for print ads and websites. At this point, since you decided to go on your own vision rather than do marketing you're pretty much just need some PR consultants to send out whatever message you decided on already.
sell out, license or get a partner (Score:5, Insightful)
look at the drug companies. most drugs these days are made by small biotech and start up drug companies. Pfizer and others do marketing, manufacture and anything else that takes a lot of money.
same with tech. Flash IO licenses their products to HP and others who rebrand it, sell and support it.
or better yet, find a buyer and sell your company. google is always buying startups and integrating their products. some years google buys dozens of small companies
How is this the opposite situation? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've spent the last 7 years in marketing. The idea that the field is non-technical is just silly. Analytics drives the business. It's not enough to create interesting and compelling creative. You have to be able to be able to show a real lift from that test and use that data to drive future campaigns.
There are a lot of smart people in marketing. Both technical and non-technical. The argument that the field is largely non-technical and therefore some how foreign to you is both wrong and unimportant.
What you should focus on is hiring people who understand the field and can use, shape, and sell your mass marketing product. In other words this challenge is the same as any other business, learning how to successfully grow your business.
Re:Find angel investors. (Score:5, Insightful)
My Experience with the Same Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I initially partnered with some marketing folks, where we were going to go halves on the costs, they were the marketing side, and I was the operational side. Their funding backed out after I had a lot of sunk costs (naturally), so I used whatever support they could still give me based on the good-will of our intended relationship, while I worked with people familiar to the market.
The most important advice I can give you is to work with people that already know the customers in your strongest base. As you appear to have experience in the area you're working in, the people who market for you should optimally know many of the same customers you do, know more about them, and know many more people you don't.
The second most important advice I can give you, is incentives for your salespeople. My initial partners had a strong incentive (if we did poorly, they lost money too). My new folks are rewarded for the increased business, and I feel that marketing folks you employ should make very low salaries in set income, with the ability to make more than you make in bonuses if they are wildly successful. Structures on this vary, but always do a reality check when you negotiate them; a smart salesperson is one that makes a small fortune making you a bigger one. A smart con artist makes themselves a small fortunes while you make about the same you would have without them.
Re:Give a pro partner a interest in the profit (Score:4, Insightful)
I work in marketing and find it more challenging than finding a good programmer. Everyone in their profession thinks that others are a commodity because one is so special and unique. My learning so far has been that if you are really talented, you never think like you have just done. You need a great marketing person, and a great team. If you can become a Fortune 500, the least of your worries will be the marketing dues. I'd recommend this: hire somebody that can educate you, and has the personally to be able to handle your ego. You'll thank that person later on.
Remember that IBM's turnaround in the 90's came from somebody that manufactured cookies, not technology.
Re:Don't do it all yourself. (Score:5, Insightful)
I went through this same thing with my first start up.
You should be worried about how the app or product actually works. Don't do the marketing yourself. If you know how you want to market it, that's fine. If that's the case, hire someone to just take orders from you. If you don't know how you want to market it, hire someone that can utilize personal connections in the field you are in.
On the other hand, putting up a web page and selling it from there for a while won't hurt a thing.
You get the time to find all the bugs, address all the end-users issues of understanding, ease of use, desired features, all while dealing with a small user base that you can handle. Most developers vastly over estimate the completeness of their product.
There is such a thing as succeeding yourself to death. Taking in more business than you can possibly handle because some "marketing droids" push too hard, ensnare too many marginal customers, and end up giving a product a bad reputation for poor support.
A year of lower sales volume allows you to build in the quality. As you find yourself answering the same tech support questions over and over again you will find its easier to program around these issues. But none of that will happen when the phone rings non-stop with irate customers
because of an over-aggressive marketing campaign by some marking company working on commission.
Learn to walk before you try to run.
Re:Wait? You didn't talk to marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)
You realize that one of the key purposes of marketing is to determine if a product is even marketable right?
HELL no. In my experiences, marketing people have no idea whether a product is marketable. The best they can do is figure out if a product is similar to another already successful product, and then tell you whether your new product will fit into the known market. That's it. They're fundamentally incapable of judging new markets, or even under-served markets.
Are you sure you will even have customers?
That should hopefully be the impetus behind even creating the product in the first place. Relying on marketing afterwards is putting the cart before the horse.
What features in your product are they most concerned with?
Customers can't tell you what they need. At best, they'll tell you what they want. Good marketing shapes the want, and leaves the need to product management.
Why would they choose your product over a competitors?
That's the job of the sales team.
Are there even any competitors yet, or are you establishing a new market? Which companys could potentially become competitors?
That's all competitive analysis, and has little to nothing to do with marketing. Your sales team needs to be doing this.
A sales executive would probably be more useful at this point.
Pretty much. Get a good sales exec, and worry about marketing once you have your sales team in place.
Re:Marketing Product (Score:5, Insightful)
We actually have people who check certain forums and do their best to make us aware of issues that crop up on these forums, and then we bend over backwards to make sure that the customer's issue gets resolved. Unless they're just bent out of shape because we couldn't do something that was basically impossible (although we're pretty good at that too...).
Re:Find angel investors. (Score:5, Insightful)
Find a so-called "angel investor". They'll want an equity share, which is good at this point: their pay is tied to their performance. They should come with business background, a big network, and hopefully a couple of battle scars.
he's got a product, fledgling, sort of meaning it's already developed and viable - THE FUCK DOES HE NEED AN ANGEL INVESTOR FOR? he needs perhaps a partner marketing investor - a sales guy. he'd be better off with a sales guy with tied pay from sales.
ok, angel investors are sort of the same thing as a partner - but practically, no.
they're "angels" because you don't see them often and they don't do things often and he apparently needs a decent fulltime sales manager.