New job as marketing manager - what do I do?

In My Humble Opinion
1

To the most esteemed academicians and intellectssimas of the Straight Dope Message Board,

I work for young Chinese start-up company that makes test preparation products. (So as to avoid accusations of trying to advertise it, I will let it go un-named.) I joined the company as a content manager, and did a pretty decent job of it. After six months of long, hard work, we have finally hit our targets and have officially launched our product.

Now that we have a product to sell, we have come to more tertiary questions about its operation - namely, marketing, and especially marketing to the Americans that we want to buy our product. Of our five-foreigner team, I am the only one with any serious inclination towards marketing (I have a business degree, though not in the subject itself), and our board of directors is impressed by my ability to write appealing and attractive free verse. I had previously contributed a lot of the copy on our website, introductions to our products, and the like, and they appreciated it so much that now there is serious talk of making me our fledgling firm’s marketing director.

So here’s my serious question for all readers, especially those with experience in the field: how do I even start this? I know how to write a basic marketing plan - identifying key demographics and figuring out how to reach them - but beyond that, I have exactly zero practical experience at this. If my company gave me, say, $10,000 tomorrow and said, ‘market this product,’ where do I even begin?

All assistance is appreciated. I’d be happy to talk about the more precise ins-and-outs of what we’re doing if it comes to that.

2

This is better suited to IMHO, to get posters’ opinions on your question. I’ll zip it over there.

3

Well, that’s where the marketing plan comes in - once you have identified how to reach them, you do exactly that. I am not really sure what else you are asking for - what are the ways you have identified? Trade shows? Then you’ll need to explore how to best market your presence there - booth, event, etc. Ads in trade magazines? Now you need to sit down with some creative design people. Have you figured out your branding? Everything should tie together, imagery, colors…

Does that help at all?

4

It’s a massive field that you’re looking at -

As mentioned - the very first step is to identify exactly WHO you are looking at selling this product to, and why.
If you can develop this - most other answers will flow from there.

You’ll certainly be wanting to look at adwords at the very least -
Perhaps partnerships with private tuition or prep centres might be an advantage as well

5
  1. Hire somebody who knows how to market.
  2. Hire somebody who knows how to market your product.
  3. Hire somebody who knows how to market your product to specific customers.
    regarding point number 1:
    Hire an expert.
    You have a product, but you have no customers. You are in danger of losing everything,and you are helplessly trying to guess how to avoid that. With so much at risk, don’t try to guess. Hire an expert who knows how to sell.

regarding point number 2:
Hire an expert --not just one who knows how to sell, but one who knows how to sell your product.

regarding point number 3:
Hire an expert–not just one who knows your product, but one who knows your customers. Somebody who speaks their language fluently, knows their culture, knows what motivates them, and knows how much money they have to spend, and where they spend it.

Marketing your product is the only thing that counts—no matter how good your engineers are, how good the product is…it is useless if nobody buys it. Work harder at marketing than you did in the design of the product. You had good, experienced engineers to design it, now you need good, experienced marketing people.

6

Much as we would like to go hire a professional, there’s unfortunately no money in the kitty for that. We operate under Chinese-style management, meaning that everything has to be done as cheaply as possible - and hiring an actual marketing professional, to say nothing of bringing our product directly before a specialized marketing company, is out of the question for budgetary reasons. It has to be someone either already on the inside, or somebody who’s willing to work for one of our (sub 30k/year) insider salaries. We can get reasonable professionals to market the product in China, but we could never afford a specialized agency to market it in America.

From my perspective, my choice is simple - either I try to do this myself, and do however well I do, or I watch one of the other content engineers try and do it themselves, for however well they do.

7

My consulting fees are very reasonable.

8

But suppose that neither of you do well.
Will you still have a job? Will your startup company still exist?

9

Find a more compelling description for your products.

10

OK so I’m a marketing consultant and you should really hire me. But failing that, (and sorry, but chances are you will fail if you really don’t have much experience or steady hands to guide you) you should start by considering a basic SOSTAC model (check out the Smart Insights website for lots of templates and tips). This should cover:

Situation - basic SWOT analysis, competitors, PEST analysis, target market understanding

Your target market. Find out as much as you can about their demographics attitudes, needs, problems, buying process, barriers to entry, competition/subsitutions etc. Developing personas can help here, particularly for both media placement as well as:

Your brand positioning - look for a deep, universal insight into your target market, and identify how you solve to this. Ideally you can express this in a single sentence which will form the basis for all your messaging, and brand development. Needs to be clear water - i.e. not necessarily unique to you, but a space you can own, that no competitors are actively promoting. Needs to then work visually (i.e. brand identity, logo etc), and have a tone of voice developed. You may have this done already. This is kind of an agency space, but some of the legwork can be done internally and as marketing director you need to really have a vision for how this works.

Objectives - what exactly are you trying to do over the next 12 months-3 years? Consider market share, volume, customer satisfaction, cost, sizzle etc

Strategy - strategically how are you going to achieve the above?

Tactics - specifically what are you going to do to deliver to those strategies (this is where your ‘marketing plan’ probably comes into place, this will likely be a single sheet, calendar style going into what you will do each month, along with an assumed budget and targets.

Actions - who will specifically do each thing on that chart? include areas where things aren’t resourced properly internally, also include agencies where required, and assume that you will need them - these include design agencies/graphic designers for branding and layouts, ad agencies to create campaigns, media agencies to plan media (although chances are your budget will be too low and you might have to plan and book your media yourself), digital teams for apps, websites, SEO and SEM, and PR and content teams to develop all sorts of content to share and engage.

Control - measure, measure, measure.

As a marketing director I’d also assume you would be responsible for processes - defining the steps for how approval processes work, analysis, creative audits, social media policies, agency management, supplier negotiations, dashboards, reporting upwards, competitive reviews, assisting with sales and customer service training etc (things can go very wrong with marketing if it ignores it’s role as feeding the sales and service beast and those teams aren’t ready to catch).

Once you have that, then you’re looking at execution - what’s your content strategy, what campaigns will you run, how do they fit the overall business objectives, writing creative briefs, defining propositions, reviewing agency work, agreeing media schedules, ensuring dispatch.

Best of luck, PM me if you have any specific questions always happy to help.

11

I have this thread in my bookmarks folder, so I figured it might be worth it to check in - the company has since tanked, and it was all a moot point. The bosses had absolutely no idea what they were doing, they refused to listen, and anybody with talent (and myself also) walked away. Whole firm closed up shop on Friday.

But I’ll remember this advice for the future!

12

This thread males me want to take marketing.

If you knew how much of a shift that was, for a technical writer…

13

Oh good to know (or bad to know, depending on the perspective) - was wondering how you were making out. So where does that leave you, are you jobless?

14

For the moment, but I’ll find another one soon enough. It came at a good time; I needed a lot of time to find a new apartment and to move into it.

But anyway, the lesson that I learned from this whole debacle - expertise is a real thing, even for stuff that seems easy, and people should respect it.

15

Really? That’s surprising, given that they put someone in the position of Marketing Director who had to ask anonymous strangers on a general message board how to perform his role.:wink:

As a Marketing Director? Now that you have experience.:smiley:

You sound surprised. As someone with a background in engineering (structural) who has since moved into business, there is something I find particularly offensive about the whole “fake it til you make it” mentality that seems so pervasive in the business world. Particularly when it comes to technology or startups.
Everyone thinks they want to work at a startup because they believe they will be employee number 7 at the next Google or Facebook. In my experience, a lot of times you just end up working for some nutjob and his cronies from business school or some management consulting firm. A lot of times you don’t even grow with the company really, for the reasons you experienced. Maybe you can fumble your way through being Marketing Director of a $5 or $10 million company. But as the company grows, they will need someone who actually knows what they are doing at a much higher level.
Or you can just Google “how to implement a marketing plan” in the future.:smiley:

If it makes you feel any better, marketing is mostly BS anyway. At least the sort of marketing that a $10k budget gets you. I worked for a tech startup awhile back and I was shocked that our marketing team literally had no idea what our product did.
Some Dilbert comics on the subject:

http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-10-20

http://dilbert.com/strip/2014-12-18

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-07

16

Forget bout the marketing debacle for a second, your skillset intrigues me with respect to Chinese manufacturing. You are (I assume) a Chinese national and you write flawless, idiomatically correct English. I would have thought a skill like that would command a king’s ransom in the ever growing Chinese manufacturing and marketing tech sectors, but you’re saying the most they are willing to pay is around 30K a year even for someone with your bi-lingual skills?

17

You could start by collecting information on the cost of different marketing techniques to provide to the home office. Even if you budget allows no expenditures it’s useful information for a marketing plan to address future strategies. In a similar vein statistics about the cost of customer acquisition in your market and the marketing budgets of competing companies will be useful information. I assume when you get down to it you’ll need to stick to low cost Internet marketing to start with, there should be plenty of information online that is useful for that strategy.

Your first step here is research, find out all you can about marketing for your type of product, then disseminate that information and look at the feedback. From that you’ll have to do the really difficult part in creating a short-term plan and implementing it, but you need to do your homework first.

While your at it, look for contacts with other marketing managers, there may be formal or informal associations that will help, magazines (are there still magazines?) and websites, maybe even marketing message boards. Talk to your peers if you can find them, a lot of them are going through the same things you are.