The learnings of a programmer who turned marketer

Not a long time ago i was a programmer . I loved the code i wrote and found thrills in seeing the lines of code I wrote translate into a product that people enjoyed using.

A little over a year ago I was given a chance to change the career path i was taking. I was given the reins of a Nascent Marketing Team of a business workflow product that just started showing traction. Marketing was by no means new to me, I had done an academic program on International Business and Marketing previously, and had also done some bit of growth hacking while building TourMyApp a product i co-created in my previous stint. Nevertheless i would have to admit that what I possessed was ‘textbook knowledge’, and I had no practical, full time experience in the nuances of Marketing a B2B SaaS product.

Here are the key learnings from the work I put in, the last year and a half. If you are a tech geek, who wants to move to marketing here are some things you should know

1. Marketing is not just about being Creative. You can be the most creative person on earth and yet suck at marketing. Creativity is unstructured, unorganized and instantaneous. Marketing is not. Marketing requires your efforts to be structured, organized and consistent.
2. Being consistent and organized alone, again, wont do. There needs to be in you a flare to communicate to your potential customers, what your offering can do to improve their lives. You should believe in your offering and your communications should ooze with extroversion.
3. Measure what you say . You should always mind your language. Your compulsive need to communicate should not make you sound pretentious. Its not about coming up with fancy language to describe what you are promoting. It’s about empathizing with your potential customer, Understanding their needs and talking their language.
4. Say what can be measured. Marketing is not surprisingly about numbers. When you say something and there remains no loss in meaning between what you say and what your audience understands, then your content is put to test by the results it generates. If you communicate without having first decided on a clear measurable call to action, then you will have no way to know whether what you say “works” with your audience or not.
5. Always test what you say. Many times what you think will “work” with your audience, ends up having no effect at best and a negative detrimental effect at its worst. You will never know, until you test your content variations on your audience and measure its effects. I have seen a 70% increase in conversions by just changing one word.
6. Finally, Dont loose your logical mindset. The greatest advantage of coming from an engineering background is that you have developed an inherent talent to attribute an effect with a determinate cause. Moving to marketing, you will realize that not all parameters that affect your success can be determinate and controllable. Nevertheless try to always attribute an effect to a logical cause, where ever possible. Anomolies are just under investigated incidents.