How to actually get started with marketing in tech

There's a lot of marketing advice on LinkedIn, but how do those just getting started in marketing, specifically in tech, get started? I'd try my best to give tips in this post, share some lessons from my career working in the technology industry and group them so they're easy to follow. This advice is also useful for those who are marketing experts elsewhere but want to transition or pivot their careers to work for technology companies.

Studying and Research

Learning about marketing principles and how to attract & retain customers is the primary goal of all the jobs in this space. Take time to follow companies whose products you use and see what they say, how they say it and what the website looks like. Think about why they would do the things they do and come up with a point-of-view. Scroll to the very beginning to see some of their early posts and watch how the brand was built on social media. Following that, talk to real life people about these things - friends, family, colleagues - "I see you use this app.. how did you find out about it".

Learning difficult and slightly technical things

Most jobs wouldn't require you to code but will require some technical understanding of certain concepts, practices and platforms as you work with product professionals, designers and engineers. Thankfully, there's free stuff on the internet. Pick one difficult thing to become good at and find your way from there.

• Meta has the blueprint platform for end-to-end learning of all Meta's business capabilities
• Google has courses, including courses about its platforms like Google Analytics. Please learn about UTMs. These are simple, useful tools.
• Mixpanel, Segment and Amplitude have programmes to learn how their platforms work for product analytics. Mixpanel guide to product analytics, Segment Academy, and Amplitude Academy.
• The wonderful people at Moz have a beginner's guide to SEO. You could also watch every single episode of their famous Whiteboard Friday series. I'd suggest you start from the very first one.
• HubSpot has a ton of courses on their website as well covering content marketing, social media and most importantly, how to use HubSpot.

Doing actual, real-life things.

My entire career has been filled with doing things I wanted to learn. The internet is largely permissionless. If you wanted to learn how to build apps - you would build apps. This analogy is the same for marketing - wanna learn SEO? Build a website and drive traffic to it. Wanna learn social media? Create a page or multiple pages. Wanna get better at app analytics? - find someone who has built an app and help them set up. Wanna understand Meta's capabilities for SMEs - ask a business owner. You get the point.

When I wanted to be better at SEO - I started a website and did everything I found on Whiteboard Friday until it grew to 1 million visitors monthly. When I wanted to be better at social media - I grew a Tumblr page to thousands of followers. When I wanted to know Wordpress - I built a Wordpress site. When I wanted to learn email marketing - I created a newsletter with Intuit Mailchimp . You're probably not going to get an internship after taking a course but you know what would work? When you apply for a position and SHOW what you have done. Please have some agency.

More learning and more thinking.

Learning never really stops. I want to be better at my work - so I spend a lot of time reading about new apps, downloading them, signing up, watching ads, visiting landing pages, reading from growth & marketing leaders, and being curious about new things. I find that I get many ideas when I immerse myself in the industry I'm working in. Working in fintech? Read the fintech blogs. Working in venture capital? Read the blogs. Working in SaaS? Please read all of the blogs. Every time you see a new app - ask yourself: How does this make money? Download all the apps too - if you cannot download them due to some restriction, ask a friend or watch the videos on YouTube.

Less job titles, and more job descriptions.

Except you know exactly what you like or don't like, focusing on job titles could be detrimental to your career - if you've not noticed, marketing job titles are all over the place these days and in tech, it's much worse. Instead, read job descriptions properly, decide if you like what you see and tailor your application to show that you're the best fit for the job.

So there you have it. I hope this short article is useful for you. If you'd like to read more from me, I've started a new publication to study how tech companies grow and have published 2 books on growth marketing.

Please like and share this with someone. If you've got any other tips, please leave a comment. Good morning!