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Hey, thank you for chiming in. I'm not sure how you got the impression that I insisted we "don't do any marketing." - sorry if I wasn't clear. What I aimed to s

Hey, thank you for chiming in. I'm not sure how you got the impression that I insisted we "don't do any marketing." - sorry if I wasn't clear. What I aimed to say was that product was the main reason for getting to 10k, and marketing tactics and strategies I described each contributed further.

blumkvist 12y ago
I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success. It also leads to inventing terms like "content marketing", "inbound marketing", "growth hacking". Oh, the irony with the last one. A marketing term, to trick people who hate marketing, to do marketing... I'm sure it pans out great for people like Rand Fishkin, Dharmesh Shah and Sean Ellis. The problem is, the people who fall for these neologisms get disconnected from the much, much larger marketing community. They get inside of an echo chamber. Instead of reading thorough articles, by authors which credentials are checked, claims are investigated and arguments - reviewed by peers, they get moz.com and quicksprout and kissmetrics, unbounce and optimizely. Well, I guess people get what they ask for - something easy, which does its "magic". My last line in the previous post was a cheap shot and uncalled for. I'm sorry about that.
- goodJobWalrus 12y ago
  this is actually great advice. what would you recommend reading?
  - blumkvist 12y ago
    ISSN: 1573-059X; 0022-2437; 0022-2429; 0732-2399; 2164-3970; 1520-6793. https://www.informs.org/ https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site. ama.org Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.
- philod 12y ago
  I'm sensing a marketing academic. I agree with some points and the echo chamber is very real However, while I wish there were more people reading peer reviewed journals and debating the full spectrum of marketing, the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online (we are talking about SaaS here). Research and empirical work takes time but consumers move quickly, especially online, so by the time reports and data are published it's out of date. The only half decent way to keep up with developments is to buy into some of these "neologisms" or you will be left behind.
  - blumkvist 12y ago
    > the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online Did you come down to this conclusion by yourself, or did you read/heard it somewhere? Also, I'm not an academic.
- shostack 12y ago
  Marketer here. What exactly is wrong with data and insights from a variety of sources that might include Moz, Optimizely, etc? These are marketing technology companies and have a unique bird's-eye perspective of raw data across numerous companies. Further, people like Rand Fishkin know their shit. You might disagree with it, but I guarantee if you had a conversation with him and voiced your arguments, he'd be able to cite plenty of data to back up his claims and have an honest debate about it. Marketers who take what they read as gospel concern me, and I fully agree with that. People need to do their due diligence and figure out how things apply to their business. They should also read broader respected industry news sources (ie. searchengineland, searchenginejournal, etc.), and be active in communities of people tackling similar challenges with similar experience to trade notes. I agree with the other comments though on the fact that building a great product isn't necessarily marketing. Informing great product design through solid market research could come from marketing, but that is very different than physically building a product. The "build it and they will come" fallacy is a dangerous one. Communicating that you have a product is the act of marketing. Even placing it on a website with content is marketing because you may get organic search traffic, or referral traffic if people link to you, etc.
  - blumkvist 12y ago
    I don't doubt Rand Fishkin as a marketer. I just don't like misleading people via inventing new terms for already known concepts, like "content marketing" for PR. It disconnects his followers from a lot of knowledge and they keep on reinventing the wheel. Or optimizely's A/B testing, which depending on your definition is anywhere between wildly imprecise and outright fraud. And this is by design, because they know their customers just won't put the effort into learning experimental design, sampling, normalizing, distributions, hypothesis testing and validating. It's just much better to charge clueless people a monthly fee for what is essentially a redirect script with a WYSIWYG editor, while telling them what they are doing is scientifically sound. And off to the echo chamber they go. Changing a button's color improves CTR by 90%. You can read that on pretty much any blog. Moz, ConversionXL, unbounce, kissmetrics, SEJ, any blog/publication which passes for "industry authority". Sorry, I just don't have the time to sift through all of this self-serving bullshit.

blumkvist 12y ago

I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success. It also leads to inventing terms like "content marketing", "inbound marketing", "growth hacking". Oh, the irony with the last one. A marketing term, to trick people who hate marketing, to do marketing... I'm sure it pans out great for people like Rand Fishkin, Dharmesh Shah and Sean Ellis. The problem is, the people who fall for these neologisms get disconnected from the much, much larger marketing community. They get inside of an echo chamber. Instead of reading thorough articles, by authors which credentials are checked, claims are investigated and arguments - reviewed by peers, they get moz.com and quicksprout and kissmetrics, unbounce and optimizely. Well, I guess people get what they ask for - something easy, which does its "magic". My last line in the previous post was a cheap shot and uncalled for. I'm sorry about that.

goodJobWalrus 12y ago
this is actually great advice. what would you recommend reading?
- blumkvist 12y ago
  ISSN: 1573-059X; 0022-2437; 0022-2429; 0732-2399; 2164-3970; 1520-6793. https://www.informs.org/ https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site. ama.org Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.
philod 12y ago
I'm sensing a marketing academic. I agree with some points and the echo chamber is very real However, while I wish there were more people reading peer reviewed journals and debating the full spectrum of marketing, the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online (we are talking about SaaS here). Research and empirical work takes time but consumers move quickly, especially online, so by the time reports and data are published it's out of date. The only half decent way to keep up with developments is to buy into some of these "neologisms" or you will be left behind.
- blumkvist 12y ago
  > the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online Did you come down to this conclusion by yourself, or did you read/heard it somewhere? Also, I'm not an academic.
shostack 12y ago
Marketer here. What exactly is wrong with data and insights from a variety of sources that might include Moz, Optimizely, etc? These are marketing technology companies and have a unique bird's-eye perspective of raw data across numerous companies. Further, people like Rand Fishkin know their shit. You might disagree with it, but I guarantee if you had a conversation with him and voiced your arguments, he'd be able to cite plenty of data to back up his claims and have an honest debate about it. Marketers who take what they read as gospel concern me, and I fully agree with that. People need to do their due diligence and figure out how things apply to their business. They should also read broader respected industry news sources (ie. searchengineland, searchenginejournal, etc.), and be active in communities of people tackling similar challenges with similar experience to trade notes. I agree with the other comments though on the fact that building a great product isn't necessarily marketing. Informing great product design through solid market research could come from marketing, but that is very different than physically building a product. The "build it and they will come" fallacy is a dangerous one. Communicating that you have a product is the act of marketing. Even placing it on a website with content is marketing because you may get organic search traffic, or referral traffic if people link to you, etc.
- blumkvist 12y ago
  I don't doubt Rand Fishkin as a marketer. I just don't like misleading people via inventing new terms for already known concepts, like "content marketing" for PR. It disconnects his followers from a lot of knowledge and they keep on reinventing the wheel. Or optimizely's A/B testing, which depending on your definition is anywhere between wildly imprecise and outright fraud. And this is by design, because they know their customers just won't put the effort into learning experimental design, sampling, normalizing, distributions, hypothesis testing and validating. It's just much better to charge clueless people a monthly fee for what is essentially a redirect script with a WYSIWYG editor, while telling them what they are doing is scientifically sound. And off to the echo chamber they go. Changing a button's color improves CTR by 90%. You can read that on pretty much any blog. Moz, ConversionXL, unbounce, kissmetrics, SEJ, any blog/publication which passes for "industry authority". Sorry, I just don't have the time to sift through all of this self-serving bullshit.