My objective here is to write a piece that helps engineers, developers, logical thinking, technical minded persons that want to reach an audience and make that audience aware of a product or service. I have noticed a trend overtime that has helped me stomach marketing enough to learn and practice it successfully. You can do so by simply systematizing your message.
Instead of an unclear marketing message that seems to be based on nothing obvious, you can use systematizing exercises that ends with a result. As a technically minded person, you believe that there should be a logical path to an end result. This is something that on the surface, doesn’t appear to exist in most marketing messages that we see.
Here are some real life examples that I want to share with you:
E.g. When learning how to pitch VC’s at the Founder Institute. I struggled until I learned to break my pitch into sections. Now instead of someone telling me, you have to speak from your gut (which means absolutely nothing to a logical thinker), you now know that you need several sections of text each addressing a specific child topic, that when combined and read as a whole will equal a pitch. The sections of a pitch are; Who am I, what is the name of my product, who does it help, how does it help them, how are we different from competitors, current wins, what are our next steps, who are our team members, how much we are looking for and how it will be used.
E.g. When learning how to write a sales page to sell my product at 30×500. I struggled until I learned to break the page down into sections. Now instead of someone telling me, you need to have a good sales page (which means a blank page to a logical thinker because the product is good), you now know that you need several sections of text each addressing specific child topics that when combined and read as a whole will equal a sales page. The sections of a good sales page are: Pain – an outline of the problem to be solved, Dream – a description of an ideal solution, Fix – an outline of an actual solution, benefits – how this solution helps, samples – examples, cost – price the product.
If you’re a developer, engineer, technical specialist, technical minded individual, you likely do not like anything about marketing. Marketing is sleazy to you. Marketing is boring to you. To you, Marketing is a lie. The people in Marketing only care about making money. If the product is great, marketing is not required.
You are right! However, there is one other thing that you know and that is that if you do not get your product or service in front of people – market it – then no one will know that your product exist. That’s right, as much as you dislike the thought of telling the world to come and look at you, you must in order to find that subset of those people that will actually find your product valuable.
