💎 It’s a hand-picked collection of resources for solving practical marketing tasks, such as:
- finding beta testers
- growing first user base
- advertising project without a budget
- scaling marketing activities for building constant revenue streams.
We faced these question when we made our first product (a tool for iOS engineers). It took us almost 2 years to learn how to market our project. 😤 During this time we read, tried and bookmarked many useful things: articles, videos, spreadsheets, podcasts & tools. These resources helped us a lot! Please, learn, adapt and test awesome marketing hacks from our collection & experience. Good luck!
Lisa & Ahmed, founders of Flawless App, tool to verify iOS app according to the design
🛠 How to Use and Contribute
For getting needed advice, please:
- Go through our Table of Contents. To help you navigate, we`ve added brief overviews of every marketing category. Also, content titles are displayed as clearly as possible (so it will tell you the context and how you can benefit from it).
- Search for a keyword or phrase (for example, “Product Hunt”, “Facebook”, “Blog”).
- Ask Lisa on Twitter.
If you have found some great marketing content or tool, please, contribute to Marketing for Engineers collection. Simply submit a Pull Request with respect to our Contribution Guidelines. We would love you to see your suggestions!
📚 Table of Contents
🔎 User Research
User research gives you an answer for whom is your product. Analyzing potential users & customers will help to:
- understand users' needs, pains, motivations and decision-making process;
- outline product roadmap, key features, UI design and UX scenarios for interacting with your product;
- define the right marketing message (positioning) and choose marketing channels to spread this message;
- make your marketing & communication strategy.
I hope that I have convinced you that user research is very important. After learning these materials you should be able to make user research, create basic Persona and validate it on real people:
A marketing persona, or buyer persona, is a way to segment target market by common characteristics. It is used to guide media campaigns to target the right audience with the appropriate messaging. Buyer personas usually comes from market research. ... If marketing persona is focused on the WHO, a UX persona is more about the HOW. A UX persona, or design persona, can include all the information in buyer persona, but with additional emphasis on the task-oriented user behavior. What a UX persona wants to uncover is all the steps a target user will take to go from point A to point B.
You need to reach your potential users and validate your Persona & hypothesis. You can get real users insight through surveys, interviews, online & offline meetings, chats, Skype calls, checking existing analytics (Google Analytics, social media data), analyzing competitors' customers, ethical googling your users' emails & names and researching them on social media:
- 9-min video on creating a Persona, when you already have something to analyze: website, followers for your product on Twitter\Facebook, first users or paying customers.
- Simple blueprint for conducting a thorough buyer's journey study. It's a bit old article, but it has a nice plan for making user research interviews (study) with current or potential users.
- Asking the right questions during user research, interviews and testing will be in use when you actually start talking to the potential user (😤 you must do this).
👆 User research is an initial part of the customer discovery process. You should not only research your potential users but also test if what you want to build is needed on the market (it’s called Product Market Fit). If you are not familiar with the Lean Startup approach, I advise you to check these resources. It's more startup-oriented, but still relevant for newbie product makers:
📌 Useful tools:
- Google search (here you will find how to make clever googling with advanced search).
- Twitter Advanced search and comprehensive guide how to use it.
- LinkedIn search and brief article from the LinkedIn team on how to use their new search (it's very easy!).
- Pipl helps you to find information about email's owners.
- The Buyer Persona Word Doc Generator from HubSpot can help you to make the first hypothesis for your persona.
- TypeForm is an easy-to-use, mobile-optimized form-builder that's great for gathering online surveys. You also can use Google Forms for making online surveys.
:mag_right: Market Research
How is your product better than other solutions? What is unique about your side project, open-source tool or mobile app? What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
You should have answers to all these questions. Market research will help you out! Personally, I define Market Research as a combination of User Research and Competitor Analysis. The first part we discussed in the section above. And these guides will explain how to research your competitors, catch trends and validate market opportunity:
:pushpin: Useful tools:
- Google Advanced Search Operators is a competitive audit tool to help you find exactly what you’re looking for :slightly_smiling_face:
- Twitter Advanced search is an easy way to search anyone on Twitter.
- SimilarWeb provides detailed info on different sites & overview of their marketing strategy. A free version is pretty good.
- Alexa is one of the oldest web analytics tools out there, but it’s still a great option with strong free version.
- Social Mention is a nice free tool, which provides real-time search on brand mentions.
- With Buzzsumo you can find the most shared content for a given topic or competitor. In a free version you will get the full page of content with many filters.
- Siftery and AlternativeTo allow you to find alternatives to any product.
:triumph: Marketing without Budget
You will find here a collection of free marketing channels for getting the first users. Most of them will take a lot of time & effort, but it will not cost money to do it yourself. Some channels, like Content Marketing or Influencer Marketing, are comprehensively explained in its own directories below. So, get fresh ideas from these real-life stories and think of what could work for your users:
- Do Things that Don't Scale by Paul Graham. He is a co-founder of Y Combinator, a computer scientist, investor, and entrepreneur. Paul shows how such popular companies as Stripe, Airbnb or Facebook got their first users. It's a more philosophical read for helping your brain to think in the right direction.
- How to Grow Your Startup on a $0 Marketing Budget by Hiten Shah. It highlights a bunch of different ideas to try.
- How We Got Our First 2,000 Users Doing Things That Don’t Scale by amazing Ryan Hoover, co-founder of Product Hunt.
- How we got from $0 to $75,000 MRR with zero marketing budget by Sergei Gusev. They sent free products (designer fragrance) to the market influencers and got video reviews. It grew their sales dramatically!
- How We Got Our First 100 Paying Customers in 24 Hours by Alex Turnbull, founder of Groove.
- Comment Marketing: How to Earn Benefits from Community Participation by Rand Fishkin. You can gain attention to your company by sharing meaningful opinions and thoughts. Rand Fishkin made an excellent 9-minute video on using this technique 👌.
- How to create Online Courses and Webinars to get users for your product. Very clever marketing tips in these The Startup Chat podcasts!
- 5 Places to Find and Poach Your Competitors' Customers. Sapph shares many smart ways to find leads and pitch them.
- Hacking the Press: Clever Ways to Get Free Press Coverage with Zero Budget by Tucker Schreiber from Shopify. The post is focused on an online stores industry. But the principles of getting free press attention are applicable to any market.
- How to Get Press Coverage for Your App: a practical guide from Dan Counsell, indie developer & agency founder.
- Referral Marketing and Mobile Referral Marketing can give you word-of-mouth growth. For inspiration check 51 Best Referral Program Examples of 2016. These useful guides were prepared by Brandon Gains from Referral Saasquatch.
- 5 Low-Cost Guerrilla Marketing Tactics via Braveen Kumar. :monkey: Direct offline exposure via foot traffic would suit physical products and brave founders.
- Use free tools for lead generation when you have a difficult software product with many use cases. It's a great way to show the benefits of your main offering and increase brand awareness. This post shows how to sell Clearbit API-solution via free easy-to-use tools. You can invest your time and make some free stuff as well — UI kits, browser extensions, funny games or open-source tools.
:bowtie: We used many free marketing channels. To be honest, when we started Flawless App we didn't have other ways. We wrote cold emails, talked to influencers, manually recruited users at events, posted at Facebook groups, worked with developers & designers via Twitter and did many other stuff. These gave us our first 1000 beta users. So it worth trying out!
💎 Content Marketing
Content marketing is about promotion via content. You can run a personal blog, guest blog or write at platforms, like Medium (or combine it). Focus on how you can help your users with your content. You don't have to be a professional writer for making cool articles. Just give yourself space to be creative and share your expertise.
I encourage you to start doing content marketing by yourself. Outsourcing it can be very tricky, especially at the beginning.
🤔 Firstly, think how your blog or content is you going to stand out. There are plenty of cool blogs in every industry. How are you going to be different? What unique value can you offer to your users? How can you build an engaged readers community? And the most important question is how you will convert readers into leads. With all those considerations, you should create a content strategy:
Тщательно отобранная вручную коллекция статей, руководств, видео, подкастов и инструментов по маркетингу, которая помогает инженерам и независимым разработчикам научиться продвигать свои продукты.