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Hiring for marketing is incredibly tough. I’ve yet to work with a marketer I would recommend. Re your situation I’m not sure there is much you can or should do

by nedwin 9y ago

Hiring for marketing is incredibly tough. I’ve yet to work with a marketer I would recommend. Re your situation I’m not sure there is much you can or should do with $300. It’s too small an amount to make a dent in any paid channels for sure. Hire a marketing/growth coach is probably the most cost effective way to spend a budget like that imho

libertyEQ 9y ago
The way you and your parent comment are discussing "marketing" I would think would be more accurate to discuss as promotions/promoting. This is an example of killing the language, and it minimizes the nuance involved. Advertising and promotions are a subset of marketing. Edit: To be clear, I work in the area of addressable market/ /go-to-market strategy/ product definition/ competitive analysis and I have never had anything to do with outbound, promotional messaging.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Not sure why this is being downvoted. Marketing involves a lot more than advertising. At my current job I mentioned my surprise that no one from marketing was embedded with our dev team and got a querulous response that “why would we someone from advertising or PR in our dev process?” My response was that marketing encompasses both designing and selling products that meet customer needs. We needed a product manager who does the customer research to help us determine our target customers and to build the right product to meet their needs and wants, and who will design a marketing plan with the relative priorities of advertising, PR, promotions, and various sales channels (direct, reseller, etc) to most efficiently reach target customers with an always limited marketing budget. As an aside: What can be a thousand times more efficient than Google AdWords or any advertising ever? Good PR. No one should ever spend a dime on advertising without first considering whether they have a compelling story that media outlets will publicize for free, with just the cost of a dedicated or even part time PR resource. I spent $1,500 on a PR contractor for my 2nd app, with 3 months I had positive reviews in PC World, CBS Marketwatch, etc, and my highest sales ever. In the end I’d estimate his efforts produced at 20-40x his cost in revenues. I’m dumb enough that I never did it again.
  - ac2u 9y ago
    How would one normally go about finding a freelance PR contractor? Are there any particular online directories? I ask because from your description they seem like they've different tactics to the typical freelance marketer.
freehunter 9y ago
$300 buys a lot of gas or train rides. You could even buy a new pair of walking shoes, and get out the door to talk to customers face-to-face. It's scary out there, but actually speaking to people to get signups is cheap/free, and something really only a startup can do since you're not going to get huge numbers from it. I'm struggling to find a single startup concept where you couldn't be served by walking through your city and finding a potential customer. If one exists, they're probably targeting the wrong customers.
- danenania 9y ago
  I think it depends a lot on your product how effective this will be. I did a lot of this while EnvKey[1] was in beta, setting up in person interviews/meetings via my network, and while I did learn a lot from it, it didn't lead to getting many users. This was primarily an issue of timing: EnvKey is a tool for managing configuration and secrets, so the most natural time to adopt it is when you're starting a new project. It has an import feature, but convincing someone to import an existing project is just a much higher bar than convincing them to try it on something new. The problem is: what percentage of companies happen to be starting a new project now or even in the next few weeks? There are plenty of them out there, but the odds of getting someone at the right moment when reaching out one by one in meatspace are too low to make it work. In this situation, I've found that a hybrid approach works better: use organic marketing, meetups, and conferences to cast a net that is sufficiently wide that at least some of the people that see it and like the concept are in a position to adopt it right away, then keep in touch to find out how it's going and what the blockers are. This has been effective for getting our first batch of happy production users. 1 - https://www.envkey.com https://www.envkey.com
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Yeah, just walking into a supermarket and expecting to find a B2B connection is unlikely, but like you said, walking into a convention where your likely customers are is a great opportunity. Even coupling that with the other guys suggestion of just taping fliers everywhere outside the convention or dropping business cards on tables in the entryway lets you skip buying tickets to the convention but still get some boost from it. $300 will get you pretty damn far that way, enough to get a customer or two that you will hopefully be able to provide good enough first-class service that they'll help you from there.

by nedwin 9y ago

libertyEQ 9y ago

The way you and your parent comment are discussing "marketing" I would think would be more accurate to discuss as promotions/promoting. This is an example of killing the language, and it minimizes the nuance involved. Advertising and promotions are a subset of marketing. Edit: To be clear, I work in the area of addressable market/ /go-to-market strategy/ product definition/ competitive analysis and I have never had anything to do with outbound, promotional messaging.

valuearb 9y ago
Not sure why this is being downvoted. Marketing involves a lot more than advertising. At my current job I mentioned my surprise that no one from marketing was embedded with our dev team and got a querulous response that “why would we someone from advertising or PR in our dev process?” My response was that marketing encompasses both designing and selling products that meet customer needs. We needed a product manager who does the customer research to help us determine our target customers and to build the right product to meet their needs and wants, and who will design a marketing plan with the relative priorities of advertising, PR, promotions, and various sales channels (direct, reseller, etc) to most efficiently reach target customers with an always limited marketing budget. As an aside: What can be a thousand times more efficient than Google AdWords or any advertising ever? Good PR. No one should ever spend a dime on advertising without first considering whether they have a compelling story that media outlets will publicize for free, with just the cost of a dedicated or even part time PR resource. I spent $1,500 on a PR contractor for my 2nd app, with 3 months I had positive reviews in PC World, CBS Marketwatch, etc, and my highest sales ever. In the end I’d estimate his efforts produced at 20-40x his cost in revenues. I’m dumb enough that I never did it again.
- ac2u 9y ago
  How would one normally go about finding a freelance PR contractor? Are there any particular online directories? I ask because from your description they seem like they've different tactics to the typical freelance marketer.

freehunter 9y ago

$300 buys a lot of gas or train rides. You could even buy a new pair of walking shoes, and get out the door to talk to customers face-to-face. It's scary out there, but actually speaking to people to get signups is cheap/free, and something really only a startup can do since you're not going to get huge numbers from it. I'm struggling to find a single startup concept where you couldn't be served by walking through your city and finding a potential customer. If one exists, they're probably targeting the wrong customers.

danenania 9y ago
I think it depends a lot on your product how effective this will be. I did a lot of this while EnvKey[1] was in beta, setting up in person interviews/meetings via my network, and while I did learn a lot from it, it didn't lead to getting many users. This was primarily an issue of timing: EnvKey is a tool for managing configuration and secrets, so the most natural time to adopt it is when you're starting a new project. It has an import feature, but convincing someone to import an existing project is just a much higher bar than convincing them to try it on something new. The problem is: what percentage of companies happen to be starting a new project now or even in the next few weeks? There are plenty of them out there, but the odds of getting someone at the right moment when reaching out one by one in meatspace are too low to make it work. In this situation, I've found that a hybrid approach works better: use organic marketing, meetups, and conferences to cast a net that is sufficiently wide that at least some of the people that see it and like the concept are in a position to adopt it right away, then keep in touch to find out how it's going and what the blockers are. This has been effective for getting our first batch of happy production users. 1 - https://www.envkey.com https://www.envkey.com
- freehunter 9y ago
  Yeah, just walking into a supermarket and expecting to find a B2B connection is unlikely, but like you said, walking into a convention where your likely customers are is a great opportunity. Even coupling that with the other guys suggestion of just taping fliers everywhere outside the convention or dropping business cards on tables in the entryway lets you skip buying tickets to the convention but still get some boost from it. $300 will get you pretty damn far that way, enough to get a customer or two that you will hopefully be able to provide good enough first-class service that they'll help you from there.