Marketing for geeks: 3 easy steps!

If you are a techno-geek the word “marketing” brings to mind a smarmy guy telling lies or a high powered executive playing mind games with the masses. Marketing is a subject that you don’t want to touch, you don’t know anything about it and you don’t want to be associated with it. This article is for you. This will give you a definition of marketing that you can claim as your own. After reading this, in casual conversation you can mention your “marketing plan”.

Your marketing plan is all about your story. This is the brief statement of why somebody would want to pay you money. The three step plan is:

• Get your story straight

• Make your story true

• Tell your story

Get your story straight

The first step is to determine what your story is. Some criteria to apply in developing a story.

Truth

True stories typically work better than lies. Of course, there are also intangibles to consider.

Usefulness

The story you tell, the thing you offer, it needs to be useful to somebody. Being an expert video gamer is not much use. Knowing how to generate spam is not much use. Knowing how to design a data warehouse for managers to run their business… useful.

Profitability

Are there people who will pay for your story? Are there enough people who will pay for your story that you can find one of them? Are there places on the web where you can find such people? Can you compete with other providers?

To help answer these questions look at the job postings and rates on RentACoder and oDesk.

Distinctiveness

Don’t come up with the story that you are “generally a really smart coder”. Generally speaking, nobody hires generalists. People hire specific people who can do specific things to solve specific problems. So you need a specific theme for your story: database development, or maybe even database optimization. The more specific the story, the more memorable you will be. But don’t forget the need to be useful.

You may be afraid that a specific story will eliminate you from contention for jobs outside of that specialty. That is true. But it is better to remain a noteworthy contender for some projects rather than be lumped into the indistinguishable pile of people who are not particularly well suited to any job.

Passion

There needs to be some passion in your story. The story needs to be about a topic that you care about. Maybe it won’t inspire others, but at least you need to be interested in it. The reason you need to care is because your passion will saturate what you say in many subtle ways; ways you won’t even be aware of. This passion will attract people to your story.

Richness

Real life things are rich in details and substance. Maybe the richness of your story is the breadth of your different work environments you have been in. Or maybe it comes from the depth of your experience.

There are other ways to enrich your story. Maybe there is a personal detail that you can weave into your story, not as a centerpiece, but as a highlight. Consider Microsoft. Part of their overall marketing is the tale of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The fact that Bill is generous is not a central aspect of deciding to buy a Microsoft product, but it does add a touch of flavor to the overall story.

Don’t go overboard with this idea. Most people don’t have a really interesting personal story to mix in. On average it seems that most people are about average. But maybe you do have something to share, maybe you were bored and spent a summer cycling across the country and you can weave this into your story.

Arc

Your story needs an arc. This is a thread that is played out through all the parts of the tale. These are the stories that are told across the episodes in 24 or many of the other soap-opera like shows from the latest television fad.

For example, if you are a development manager the the arc may be one of steady growth in software development leadership skills. This arc may be told through many small episodes: started working as a developer, led team of three people, project manager of three teams, then head of a software development department. The arc is the story of increasing leadership responsibility across many episodes.

Make your story true

Do things that make your story true. Or more true. Or more completely true. I don’t mean that your original story is a lie. Maybe a key theme of your original story is that you are a unit testing fanatic. That may be true, but it may also be true that you don’t do it very well. It may be true that there are gaps in your experience and understanding. So let’s take that example. What could you do to make the story more true:

• practice doing it a lot so you get better
• contribute to the development of unit testing framework
• explore an area of automated unit testing you don’t have experience with (e.g. web page testing)
• track down the history of the practice to give depth to your understanding
• study a related topic (e.g. learn about James Bach’s Rapid Software Testing

Tell your story

Telling your story is not saying to someone “I am an expert in blah…”, rather it is telling them by making it obviously, visibly true to them. To continue the previous example, you could tell your story about being a unit testing expert by:

• blogging about unit testing
• publishing online videos that demonstrate the practices
• publishing reviews of tools
• building a testing gizmo and making it available
• volunteering to speak at local user groups about the topic

Look back over those lists and imagine a project sponsor looking to hire a developer who was passionate about automated unit testing. When they stumble on your resume or web page it will be obvious to them that you are what they are looking for.

I presented the steps in this order because it is a logical order, but often the first step comes last. Instead of deciding on a story to tell, we look back and in retrospect understand our story. And really they are not distinct steps at all, they are all part of a more complex process. For instance, the very fact of doing something is often the best way of telling people what you do. Similarly we go through cycles of deciding what to do and doing it. Which leads to my final point.

The story you are telling is really just one aspect of your life story. And, for better or worse, you are one of the principal authors of your life story. So not only do you need to look back at what you do and sell that, but also look forward to the story you want to tell and make that story come true.