ramblings on my view of marketing

and the first 90 days of my time at torc:)

90 days down and boy has it been a ride! i wanted to take a minute and highlight tangible things my team has rolled out but I also want to vibe out for a second and talk to you about my thoughts around marketing and even more so developer marketing since that is my niche.

traditional marketing is dead…well kind of…

my career has been an odd one, i started as a traditional recruiter for YEARS and then morphed into this growth/marketing/community dude who produces a ton of content. but what i’ve realized during this journey is that marketing is just listening to what your customers ACTUALLY want. in my experience most companies never truly listen to their audiences. over the years it has become obvious to me what people want, and that’s meaningful content around their job search or developer skills (in my case). i think it’s hilarious that everyone these days watches youtube tiktok instagram reels, but yet very few businesses are actually using those as mediums to get their customers attention. legit i saw some stat recently that youtube has even passed netflix in terms of watch time SO WHY ARENT YOU PUTTING OUT CONTENT ON YOUTUBE. instead everyone just sends out emails and blog posts.

this role at torc is very much developer marketing and my goal is to try to meet people ‘where they are at’. so what does that mean? that means creating content on the platforms that are consumed the most by developers which will be youtube. we will also be distributing content across all channels but there are nuances in using tiktok vs instagram vs youtube shorts but that’s another email. my girl briana holmes is very much doing a lot of the traditional marketing activities and she is a PRO at it. but I don’t think the future of marketing is massive teams doing traditional activities. i think new marketing teams are a mix of individuals who have built communities/influencers, video editors, social media coordinators, meme specialists (yes you read that right), and copywriters. and that’s exactly what we are building at torc.

okay the 90 day update…

if you want to read the long post I did on this topic on linkedin wednesday check it

if you want the tldr then here you go…

platform team -

• this team is focused on purely top of the funnel bringing people onto the torc.dev platform. while engagement and community is important we really need to be a ‘people first’ business so I formed this team that pulls from my recruiter roots. this team is solely responsible for dm’ing people and getting people on the platform through linkedin recruiter, telegram, whatsapp and other community channels. big shout out here is our team mainly my guy lucca who hit an all-time latam growth high for the month of october

community team -

• this team is a little different because this team isn’t super focused on top of the funnel numbers. these individuals are more focused on engaging individuals and making sure folks who join the platform/discord have things to do. we have a bunch of things going off now in our discord daily and will continue to have other initiatives where folks have zero excuse to get plugged in. we are actively creating a google calendar so you can overlay it with your calendar so you can pop into different events we are doing!

content team -

• my vision for torc is to become the barstool sports of technical and job search content. not necessarily the raunchy content;) but the way they distribute content, every podcast has their own characters/voice, and get to operate the way they want to operate. the podcasts will be the content engine then we will use clips from all of the podcasts under the torc umbrella and use them for torc written/blog/email content. we are also designing all-new swag that is actually going to be legit to wear/own. i want us to be known for our swag and our content on a global scale:)

torc vlog release 004:

I had an amazing time speaking at all things open in raleigh for the very first time in my career. it was truly a blessing. this is pretty neat because it also highlights some of my team that came along! hope you enjoy and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss out on any content drops moving forward! but you need to subscribe to my substack to see it:) p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.0px 'Helvetica Neue'}

https://taylordesseyn.substack.com/

bits and bytes:

• if you haven’t joined our career platform, I would do so. we are doing a lot of communication for future happenings through our platform so get on there!
• if you haven’t done so already you should connect with my team: angelos, nikita, sushmi, lucca, jason, and briana
• we finally passed 2k on our discord!! come join in on the fun and meet some amazing folks!
• i just hired 2 new individuals. one of them is out of brazil and she will be joining our platform team and the other is out of mexico and joining our community team!! i will make intros very soon!
• we have two BANGER virtual streams coming up with some big names in the tech community so go check them out on our meetup page!

appreciate you reading through this email newsletter as always. if you need anything let me know! me and the torc community team are here for you throughout your career!

much love and welcome home,

-taylor