Jordan Hammond
I’m a digital product founder who is principally a software developer. And my product needs to grow. I do NOT want to learn about marketing. I just want to design and code all day! But I had to because I need to get more users to Dorothy and because the boss made me (me, I’m the boss). So a few months ago, I dug in and really started learning about marketing.
If you’re like me, you want to maximize the time you spend learning anything. That’s why I wrote this article: to pass on the things that have helped me the most as I’ve learned about marketing.
Let’s start with: what is marketing? Why do you need to know anything about marketing? What do you really need to know about it? Well, I’m not going to say I’m the expert on answering these questions but I will give you MY answers:
Marketing is a mechanism to grow your product. Why do you need to know about it? Because growing your product will increase your revenue. And what do you need to know about it? You need to know what’s going to help your product grow.
Those sound like obvious answers but you really need to know how I define marketing before you decide to read how I think you should learn about it. My goal is to do the bare minimum of marketing necessary to increase my revenue.
Now that we know my primary goal for having learned about marketing is to do the bare minimum to increase revenue, you can keep reading if your primary goal is also to increase revenue in a time-efficient way.
You’ll probably notice something fairly quickly which is that most of these resources are not really technical. And I think that’s something people really need to know about marketing. It does NOT have to be technical. Yeah, there are some technical tools to learn about and some concepts but for the most part, you as the product owner, software engineer, startup founder, UX designer, etc, probably don’t need to learn many of the technical aspects at all.
So without further ado, here are the 7 best resources I found for learning about growing your product:
1. Read 1000 True Fans
If you only read one thing about marketing, it should be this article. It’s one of the few things that really clicked for me. I think that’s because it’s not technical and instead, it’s just intuitive.
2. Read this amazing article on audience research
If you also just follow the links in that article around the site, you’ll learn so much:
3. Watch this video: Growth for Startups
This video is intended for people like me (i.e. people who aren’t marketers) so it does a good job of explaining when marketing is needed. I think learning what problems marketing is supposed to solve is incredibly important to the learning process. For me, I like to know why I should do something before learning how to do something. Starting around 17:06 is where the stuff that would be relevant to you comes in but the whole video is fantastic if you want to learn when not to do marketing.
4. Watch this video: PR + Content for Growth
This is another video from the same channel. Watch it from about 3:48 all the way to 19:08. It’s a good video for explaining how to use writing to grow a company.
5. Learn about SEO
This is a paid course but would ABSOLUTELY be worth the money if you’re serious about learning SEO:
If you don’t have the money for that course, read Jeff’s free articles he’s written:
You can learn almost all you need to know about SEO from him.
6. Read some of Ryan Kane’s posts on LinkedIn
He has really good insights on marketing and writing content to get lots of traffic. Just read some of his posts and you’ll probably learn a few things that you can do or just how smart people like him think about marketing.
7. Watch this video on how to implement Google Ads
This is probably the only technical thing you need to learn if you even need to learn it at all. Most people don’t need ads, but if you do, this is likely the only video you need to watch. If you do go this route, here are my pieces of knowledge to pass on:
- Your first month is your worst month. You’re going to pay for it.
- Be realistic about your expectations. As in, think about how many more users you want entering your site via certain keywords, every month. Maybe, it’s just an extra 10%. Keep the expectations low. Then track it all.
- Start with a very small budget. Like ~$100/month.
- Advertising, in all forms, is just going to amplify the inefficiencies or efficiencies of your business
- Each ad group should only be for one keyword
Google Ads has helped immensely with my audience and marketing research. Here are some things I learned that have been helpful in my overall planning for Dorothy:
- The primary age range of people searching for “Spaced Repetition” keywords is mostly 18–44.
- The clickthrough rate and conversion rate are highest amongst 25–34.
- The clickthrough rate is much higher on desktop computers than on mobile phones.
- The age range of 18–24 (the college student age range) isn’t converting.
What about social media, going viral, Facebook ads, etc?
These are all things that are wonderful for growing your product. But having been around a lot of marketing people much smarter than me, you really should only focus on 1–2 “channels” (a channel is Facebook ads, writing blog posts, email newsletter, TikTok influencing, etc) for growth as a product owner. I personally didn’t take much time to learn about social media, other types of advertisements, etc, because I already knew something about SEO and Google Ads and knew I could grow through those channels. So I don’t have any specific resources to recommend for learning about marketing through these other channels.
Each product will have channels that are best for them. However, regardless of what channels you think are best, you should only focus on 1–2 at a time.
And that’s it. There were a lot of other articles I read and other videos I watched but I think the above 7 will give you 80% of what you need with 20% of the effort.