Ask HN: Is there a marketing-related topic you'd like an article written about? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a marketing-related topic you'd like an article written about?

3 pointsswores6 comments

I've been wanting to get back to blogging about marketing strategy, ideas, etc., for a little while now. Although I write quite a bit and I've worked in marketing for major tech and gaming brands for a couple of decades, I rarely make time to write on that subject for an audience looking for marketing guidance.

So, tomorrow (Sunday) I plan on working on one, maybe two depending on how it goes, articles or blog posts!

I've got a few ideas already of possible subjects, but I thought what could be more interesting is to see if there are any suggestions from HN readers of what you would specifically like to read or learn about. Both to find any subject ideas that might be better than the ones already in my head, and to know that if I can write the article, I've already found my first reader!

Obviously, I can't make any promises, and there'll be any number of areas in which I'm not qualified to write about, but my experience spans everything from multi-million dollar media buys through platforms like Google and Facebook, as well as single-site campaigns, print and TV, etc., to PR and consumer events, to business rebranding, community management, influencer marketing, etc.

So, if there's something you've been wanting to understand, or learn about, and it's not something you can already get the perfect write-up from 30 seconds with a search engine, please let me know!

You can either just give me the article headline you want to see and let me go from there, or an in-depth question, or list of points to consider, or... whatever you like.

And hopefully, if anyone's interested enough to leave a comment here, I'll be back at my desk in the morning (EU time) to start planning & hammering away at my keyboard!

(I'll also put more effort into it than I did with the writing of this post, which was a 3 minute draft followed by a quick proof-read!)

edit: On the off chance this thread picks up and gets more than a couple of comments (or even for the one comment already posted) - if anyone reading this thinks they could write a great article about one of the requests, feel free to jump in and offer, I won't be territorial :)

I work with university professors that develop high-tech solutions (all types) and one of the biggest problems they have is in market research. I think this is similarly true of many software startups. They can’t afford to pay a market research company thousands of dollars to write or provide a vague, useless report. They can’t afford to pay Google thousands of dollars for fake “impressions” that might suggest market interest.

So, what should these folks do? What is a no-BS process for doing decent market research that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars?

Thanks.

Hmm that's a really good question, I'm going to have a think about it before bed and see if a good night's sleep can help, but I'm not too optimistic I'll be able to write a particularly good article to answer that.

The brief thoughts off the top of my head are that the two options are either to spend money (which doesn't help the people in your question lacking money to spend on it), or to have someone(s) with enough experience in the broad area to be able to combine their gut feelings with some fairly light research.

So perhaps the best budget option would be to find someone you could hire for a couple of days of consultancy who can bring their gut feeling, though a) that's obviously not free and b) if you don't already have the right connection it can be hard to know whose gut to trust.

But it's an article I'd really like to either write or see written, so let me get back to you tomorrow, and if I can't think of enough useful guidance to make an article from it I'll ask some friends and colleagues and see if maybe someone else could.

p.s. Would be grateful of a thread upvote to help get more suggestions :)

edit: Am I right to infer from what you wrote that you're primarily thinking about market research in terms of figuring out if there is a potential product market fit, or also market research in a wider sense in terms of things like understanding competition, figuring out potential pricing, etc.?

More of the former than the latter.

Idea/Problem -> Innovative Solution -> Commercialization??

I'm afraid I don't think I've got an article in me about this, sorry :(

I've got pretty good instincts when it comes to figuring out likelihood of PMF when it comes to products for gamers, but I'm not sure I could articulate my process well even for that one area, let alone figure out how to broaden it out to get to a good guide for tech more widely.

The next few times I'm working on this sort of thing for a client I'll try to pay attention both to how I approach it and more importantly to how my partners do (I'm probably the least experienced of us when it comes to market research generally), because it's getting me down to realise what significant blind spot (relatively speaking) this is for me! So just maybe you'll see a HN submission about this from me in a year...

+1 to this I've struggled with it in the past and never saw a good guide before

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37022243

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