Engineering Your Way To Marketing Success is an interesting post for people like me – technical people who need to market themselves and their business(es) more.
I’ve been looking at marketing options for my businesses in 2010, and have to admit I didn’t really know where to start. The link above has given me some options (and the best thing is that I’m already doing some of them – I just need to refine, and do those things more often and better).
I found this interesting:
the revelation we had in the last couple weeks has been: we have a surplus of engineering cycles and a deficit of marketing effectiveness; it's time to find ways to reallocate. This doesn't mean hiring/contracting marketing. It means finding ways for engineers to improve marketing outcomes.
Say that to any engineer and they’d likely panic. They’re engineers, they don’t want to market! However that’s not what’s being implied – the positive thing (for people like me) is to reinforce that marketing doesn’t have to involve hiring a sales guy or an ad agency. Sure, those things might work, but there are other means, and some can involve engineering time without driving your staff to quit.
I also found which is especially relevant to my business:
I am, for the fleeting time being, sold on the idea that everyone should just write their own CMS (just start with Rails or Django hello-world with a static site and go from there). There are a bunch of things that we were/are able to execute quickly on our custom CMS that we'd have a much harder time doing in a pre-built CMS
This is what we’ve done over at Ignition Development, where we built the Site Foundation Framework for exactly these reasons. At times I did stop and wonder whether writing our own was a good idea, but it’s worked out very well so far, and reading comments like the above reinforces the decision.
Another relevant comment:
A "real" CMS comes with many hundreds of developer hours put into making admin and workflow "pretty". Wow is our admin/workflow not pretty. Who cares? Your CMS is more agile than a general-purpose CMS because you don't have to put a penny into stuff that doesn't matter.
While I wouldn’t call our Admin UI “ugly”, we certainly haven’t spent a huge amount of time with it – the paragraph sums up our approach to our offering very well, because all the effort has gone into the stuff that matters to us or our customers right now. If customers have different needs down the road, then no problems – we’ll simply adapt to suit. Agile, yeah!