3 ms·

There is one more possibility (relevant to solo devs) - lack of trust that marketing professionals can deliver results. Personally, I do realize how important m

There is one more possibility (relevant to solo devs) - lack of trust that marketing professionals can deliver results. Personally, I do realize how important marketing is and how inadequate my skills in marketing are. But at the same time, my experience contracting out marketing taught me that there are very few good pros and i am much more likely to at best hire someone who has about the same level of experience as I am. If someone has tips on how to weed out pretenders (who themselves do not realize they are pretending) - I would love to learn about it. Unfortunately, my budget typically is too small to keep hiring until i hit the gold.

ghaff 5y ago
In general, contracting something out can be useful if you have some specific task to perform. We use a bunch of agencies and other outside firms. But it's almost always for something specific like running a webinar series on $X or providing social media tooling or other things like that. Marketing also covers a very wide spectrum. For a small operation, the person you might hire to create content and/or messaging for a product is probably different from the one you would hire to create a digital demand generation program.
- hippich 5y ago
  As a solo developer, one part of the reason to contract marketing is not exactly knowing what i do not know. While I try to keep focus narrow (i.e. optimize "this PPC campaign") I also explain that I know very little about it and hope to leverage experience of the firm doing just that, and if there is anything else that needs to be done - please let me know, don't be a robot executing program exactly as given. So far I did not have much success doing it this way. Each time I have to learn about specific area and only after some understanding, trial and error, I can hire someone who will just follow the steps.
magicroot75 5y ago
I can take a shot at a tip on weeding at pretenders as a marketer: Ask them to describe, in technical detail, what the software does. Ask them about challenges the end user may have going through the process of using it. A bad marketer is all about creating a scummy sales pitch to get a quick buck. A great marketer is there on the frontlines understanding exactly the functions of the software and how they solve the customer's problems in implicit or explicit ways.

ghaff 5y ago

In general, contracting something out can be useful if you have some specific task to perform. We use a bunch of agencies and other outside firms. But it's almost always for something specific like running a webinar series on $X or providing social media tooling or other things like that. Marketing also covers a very wide spectrum. For a small operation, the person you might hire to create content and/or messaging for a product is probably different from the one you would hire to create a digital demand generation program.

hippich 5y ago
As a solo developer, one part of the reason to contract marketing is not exactly knowing what i do not know. While I try to keep focus narrow (i.e. optimize "this PPC campaign") I also explain that I know very little about it and hope to leverage experience of the firm doing just that, and if there is anything else that needs to be done - please let me know, don't be a robot executing program exactly as given. So far I did not have much success doing it this way. Each time I have to learn about specific area and only after some understanding, trial and error, I can hire someone who will just follow the steps.

magicroot75 5y ago

I can take a shot at a tip on weeding at pretenders as a marketer: Ask them to describe, in technical detail, what the software does. Ask them about challenges the end user may have going through the process of using it. A bad marketer is all about creating a scummy sales pitch to get a quick buck. A great marketer is there on the frontlines understanding exactly the functions of the software and how they solve the customer's problems in implicit or explicit ways.