Ask Slashdot: I Just Need... Marketing?

An anonymous reader writes "Over the years, Slashdot has had many stories of non-technical entrepreneurs in need of programmers. Now I found myself in an almost opposite situation: I am a programmer with a fledgling mass-market product that needs marketing. I know Slashdot's general sentiment towards marketing. Without being judgmental one way or the other, I must say that for a product to reach the widest possible audience in a given time period, marketing is a necessity. Short of doing everything myself, I see a couple of options: 1. Hire marketing people, or an outside marketing firm; 2. Take in willing partners who are good at marketing (currently there are no shortage of people who want in). With these options, my major concerns are how to quantify performance, as well as how to avoid getting trapped in a partnership with non-performing partners — I already have a tangible product with a huge amount of time, money, and effort invested. Budget is also limited. (Budget is always limited unless you are a Fortune 500 business, but for now that's more of a secondary concern.) So here is my question to Slashdot: how do you address these concerns, and in a more general sense, how would you handle the situation: technical people with a product in need of marketing?"

Comments

Perhaps DIY?

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

Without knowing anything about the product or market, it is difficult for anyone to give meaningful advice. So here's a few books to consider that might bring you up to speed. Your job will be to find these on Amazon, etc. You might not DIY, but it will give you insights into marketing and help you identify someone who will help. Think of it like a businessman who takes a programming course to better understand programmers and work effectively with them. There are lots of bad marketing people, and you need to know enough to be able to identify the good ones from the bad one.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries & Jack Trout - Start here.

Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson, Houghton Mifflin. - a how-to book on marking with a tiny budget. More local than national.

Advertising is a Waste of Money by Robert Ranson, HRD Press. Before you spend a dime advertising, read this.

Marketing Without Advertising, by Michael Phillips & Salli Rasberry, Nolo Press.

Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy, Vintage Books. In short - all marketing needs a feedback system so you can measure results. Yeah - web sites are great for this. Based on this book, I had a bunch of 1-800 toll-free phone numbers and every mailer had a different number. I could look at the phone bill and know which mailer was generating results. It is more important to know that something worked than to know why.