Marketing and its malcontents

There is a lot of bitterness around marketing, especially among indie hackers. And I understand. It has failed you and you have every right to hate it.

But what is marketing? When I say "marketing" you probably think of an Instagram account, a Facebook ad and maybe a landing page. But that's not marketing. Those are only channels and when applied, techniques at most.

I don't want to make a theocratic or academic definition of marketing. But still, we need a common ground. So here is a simple, non-exhaustive definition:

Marketing is all the practices that help you understand and acquire a market. It is how you define, understand and talk with your customers to achieve a specific result.

So, it is not exactly buying ads here or creating accounts there. It is;

• where your customers are,
• how your customers talk like and how you should talk with them,
• what a post should look like,
• are you ready to deploy some ads and should you,
• should you make this a video or a post,
• how you could enable sales,
• how you acquire and nurture a lead,
• and most importantly how you orchestrate all your efforts to align and focus.

It is a very complex and, unfortunately, complicated function. Because the deeper you dig, the more interconnected it becomes. It is probably one of the most cross-disciplinary process-centre in a business. But unfortunately, this complexity and complication are not visible to most.

The Marketing We Have

A lot of you have bad experiences with marketing. You ran some ads and created an email list and nothing happened, right? But that well-known marketing blog said you would have “10× results.”

Since it is relatively easy to broadcast now, it is extremely hard to be heard. So just throwing stuff at the world does not work anymore. Unless you have great brand equity and millions in ad budget.

That’s why the SaaS world created an oddity called growth hacking. Maybe because early startups did not have the clout to draw in the traditional marketing talent after the dotcom crash or maybe that was the “only logical approach” to marketing for technical founders.

But in the end that “movement” created a hack-centric environment in which the current digital marketing grew. An environment where the orchestrated focus is non-existent and all tactics deployed like throwing spaghetti at a wall.

That's why "marketing does not work." Because that doctrine is flawed at its core. It might insure some returns. The stress of that sentence is on the word “some”.

But it will never work in the long run. And everyone will blame the marketing for it. But the problem is not marketing as a whole. The problem is bad marketing.

Erroneous efforts will result in poor results. Or, garbage in, garbage out.

What you need is solid marketing.

The Marketing We Need

In an ideal world, there is no friction.
The moment you launch your product your ideal customers should be aware that the perfect solution they were waiting for just arrived and is ready to fix the problem they have. But that's not the world we live in.

Marketing is the bridge that connects the non-ideal world to the ideal situation. By understanding the customers, identifying the problem, defining the perfect solution, going where your customers are, and speaking their lingo.

If you are not utilizing the marketing toolkit even before you started developing your product, you put the cart before the horse.

If your product is not shaped by the market, if it wasn't priced according to market research, if your persona document is filled out in an evening by you on a template downloaded from a blog, your marketing efforts started too late and on the wrong foot.

The marketing system should be built on sturdy foundations and should be informed by market research and cold hard data. Every activity should be filtered through critical thinking to ensure it can be the best it can be. Every piece of creative should be created for the customer you are trying to reach and for the exact channel that it will appear in.

I know, it sounds like a lot of work. And it is. Because like every other thing that is worth doing, marketing too, is worth doing well. So, dear indie hacker, when you talk and think about marketing, please talk and think about solid marketing.

Not the bad marketing that we all are so tired of.