10 Misconceptions Technical Founders May Have About Marketing

As someone who went to engineering school, I remember being shocked when I came across the tagline “Marketing is Everything.” Everything? How could marketing be everything? At the time I viewed marketing as the domain of those who wore nice clothes and went to big parties.

Years later I’d find myself working on a startup with all technical founders. Along the way, the founder announced he was having lunch with his marketing friend, and that he would go learn marketing for us.

Sure enough, he returned with a hastily written list of all his marketing learnings. The only one I remember is that any day you aren’t marketing your product, you’re falling behind.

That project fell behind, but led to more, none of which reached any measure of success. Was there more to marketing than I originally thought?

Even more years later I’d find myself wearing the marketing and PR hats, with my technical skills long-since repurposed as the technical person on the marketing team.

That list of marketing todos turned into books that I read, talks I went to, and projects that I worked on.

From all this, I’ve compiled a list of my top ten misconceptions technically minded founders may have about marketing.

1. Marketing Doesn’t Matter

Deep in many an engineer’s heart, they believe if they just build a good enough product, buyers will show up and buy it. It’s quite satisfying to think this- that hard work will pay off. It’s built into our inner psyche that mastering all the technical challenges will deliver success.

I can’t claim any of the startups I worked on were engineering marvels, but I believed if they were, they would gain traction. This simply isn’t the case. Products need buyers who might be interested in them. And even if they might be, they need to be made aware of them. And just because they know it exists, they need to be convinced to purchase them.

That process doesn’t usually happen just because there’s a product somewhere that someone might find interesting. In the world of digital marketing, any given landing page has around a 1–4% conversion rate. Many prospective customers might not know about your product, and most people who do, don’t become buyers.

The marketing machine needs to be in full swing at all times to keep a steady stream of potential purchasers coming your way.

2. Marketing Is Easy

While engineering coursework can be exceptionally challenging, marketing isn’t easy. In fact, many marketing campaigns feel more like an endurance race than a victory lap. Want to rank in Google Search Results? That can take months or years of painstaking effort. Trying to build a social media following? That’s a years-long project as well.

Or how about creating ads? Consumers love being entertained, but hate being sold to. Can you walk that line?

And in today’s day and age, in many ways marketing is engineering. Data science drives campaigns, analytics programs tell you about your audience behavior, and digital advertising is closely tied to frontend engineering. To succeed at marketing you need some degree of mastery over both marketing and engineering.

3. Marketing Is Social Media

Many engineers have the mindset that marketing is social media. If the Facebook or Twitter page doesn’t have a lively following, then the marketing is bad.

Social media has its place. Its place in marketing is when your audience is congregating there and you can engage with them. Sometimes your audience isn’t there, or sometimes there are other channels that are less costly to reach them.

Are people going to look up the Facebook page of their favorite restaurant? Sometimes, but many hardly have a digital presence at all. Should a financial business set up a TikTok account? It depends who they’re marketing to. If it’s a younger generation and their products can be compelling content there, then maybe. But there’s no rule that says all marketing departments should maintain all social media channels. They’re just one tool from which to choose.

4. Email Is Spam

We’ve all gotten an email from sales and marketing folks which was unwelcome. In years past this was heavily abused.

Oftentimes technical founders are more reserved and dislike interruptions from unknown sources. This may have led to a belief that all commercial emails are spam. Nothing could be further from the truth. Email is one of the best and most cost effective ways to reach someone.

The thing that makes email spam is if the person receiving it doesn’t appreciate it. An email to someone you don’t know is a chance to get to know them. Does the subject line grab their attention? Does the content reflect something they’re interested in?

If the lines of respect and relevance are observed, email becomes one of the most powerful tools in the marketing toolset.

5. Marketing Is Visual

Some of the most memorable marketing campaigns are visual. We’ve seen them in magazines, TV and newspapers throughout our lives.

But many parts of marketing aren’t visual at all, such as copywriting. Just because there’s no picture associated with your marketing campaign, doesn’t mean it’s not marketing.

6. Marketing Can Wait

The time to begin marketing your product is before it’s built. While I can’t claim to be a decorated market researcher, I know the sooner you begin to understand your audience and plan how you’re going to reach them, the better.

7. PR Is the Silver Bullet

Many people think getting their names and pictures printed in publications will cause a tsunami of customer interest. While this can occur, the reality is that PR is more typically a slow growth channel. Successful campaigns will continue to build interest, but they take time to show results. Those results may not always be immediately apparent in your analytics or sales reports.

8. PR Only Counts if It’s a Top Publication

Many CEOs have a shortlist of publications that they’d like their company to be in. Oftentimes these publications have broad, general audiences, like the NYT, WSJ, Forbes and similar.

While aiming for these publications is great, it may not be where your audience is. As often as not there are industry specific publications that have a higher concentration of readers who are interested in your products. When placements in such publications land, it’s often received like, “Whelp, we’ll get ’em next time.”

Even months later when the analytics show that the industry specific placements drove much more traffic, in many technical founders’ minds, only top tier placements count.

9. The CEO Is the Audience

Every CEO has been marketed to throughout their life. In fact, by nature of being a CEO, marketers are going to target them even more because they’re the ones controlling the budget.

As a result, CEOs may remove certain marketing channels from the approved list because they’ve been personally annoyed by them. It’s expected that all CEOs will have strong opinions about things. But if they remove access to good and useful outreach channels, they may hamstring their marketing team. A CEO may be tired of receiving unsolicited messages or seeing ads, but their audience may respond to them.

10. Marketing Has a Formula

There are a long list of failed companies. Just look at the numerous companies that Google tried to get off the ground. Sure not all of them were a result of marketing failures, but almost invariably some of them were.

Technical founders are accustomed to applying their intellect to mastering knowledge of systems so they can reliably leverage it. Marketing definitely requires much study and planning too, but the result of this doesn’t result in a clear fail-proof path to success.

Conclusion

Technical founders are at risk of their biases creating blinders toward their marketing teams. This doesn’t mean their marketing teams are universally right or that technical founders are universally wrong. But it does mean that technical CEOs might not be weighing all the information with the right degree of importance.