Marketing is not a “nice to have” thing – it’s essential

I was browsing through a variety of news today to see what I should talk about. Must have been a slow news day with Apple’s gigantic earnings report a few days ago, so lets talk about an item that I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while.

Marketing is ESSENTIAL to the success of your business or product… it’s not a “nice-to-have” thing… it’s not a “we should think about this after we build the product”… and it’s definitely not “let’s just spend a bunch of money” type thing…

Marketing (and really, I’m talking about good marketing here) is ESSENTIAL!!!

This begs the question, what is marketing? I think this is the question that drives a lot of technical founders (or co-founders) crazy.. it’s tough to define. Like good design (equally elusive to some technical-minded people), good marketing is hard to nail down because you need to separate the outcome from the activity.

Outcome is having your website registrations (ie. user acquisition) numbers skyrocket after being featured in a key article and it was retweeted and FB shared thousands of times….

Activity is getting posted in a bunch of online blogs and doing “referral marketing” when, really, the vast majority of your new uniques are coming through because of a single event… if you had the right metrics set up in advance, you’d be able to measure the effectiveness of your “marketing activity” and match it to your “marketing outcome”.

Personal Story:

Currently I work on a product team at a publishing company. I work on a variety of tasks.. I suppose the best description of what I actually do is a “product manager” – I don’t code (yet – learning…) but I have a really good idea of how this product should work and function (I also worked at the company in their sales division for 4 years) and write feature specs, do QA testing, manage most of the content (4 main websites, to help provide educational resources for kids from ages 0-12) There are two other key people – a technical project manager and a creative lead.

The real issue I want to illustrate is that even among our team, we have many spirited debates on how to approach building new features… on one hand, we have the technical lead who insists that the question we should ask ourself is “how should it be built?”… the creative lead on the other hand is more concerned with “how it will look?”… I often approach the same task from a completely different direction, asking “what problem is it supposed to solve?“…

There are lots of different ways to approach problems, but I think one of the largest mistakes you can make in ANY capacity (even if you’re a technical lead, even if you’re on the creative side, even if you’re marketing, even if your a developer) is to assume that you KNOW what the problem is… there is NO WAY you can know for SURE what the problem is, until you’ve sat down and measured it.. looked at the data.. figured out the right benchmarks.. come up with a solution that can be measured… validate that solution in the market with an MVP… What you have is a hypothesis – nothing more.

This entire process – ideation –> hypothesis –> defining a solution –> validating it in the market –> measuring… this iterative process to product development is a very “marketing” approach to looking at solving problems… It’s not about solving the problem in a better way (technical approach) but it’s about asking and making sure we’re solving the RIGHT problem..

We’ll go more in depth on the importance of marketing, not as a job position or industry, but as a philosophy… a way of thinking… a process, and cover it from more angles.. For now, the big lesson is.. marketing is extremely important to the overall success (customer acquisition, adoption and eventually engagement) of your product.. It needs to be at LEAST as important than design (if not more important, really – customer acquisition comes before a user actually sees your product after all) and it needs to be at LEAST as important as development (a product that works is essential, but it’s just as essential as building the right product… I still think having a good grasp on the problem you’re solving is key – you might have a good product, but if it’s solving the wrong product and you don’t know what the right problem is, that’s not a company – that’s a company that won’t make it to their A round)…