Develop adjacent skills to become a better operator
The best marketers might call themselves marketers... But they are secretly strong in other disciplines.
Over the past 12 years, I’ve been asked many times, “How can I become a better marketer?”
My answer has changed over time. But one thing has stayed constant: only focusing on marketing is not enough.
By all means, read the classics and contemporary work about marketing. If you ONLY do that, though, you’ll back yourself into a corner. Your box will get smaller and smaller.
Instead, get good at adjacent disciplines. The adjacent disciplines will give you the je ne se quois that expands your lateral thinking. They make you a sharper, savvier, more nuanced marketer.
The best marketers have expertise in adjacent disciplines.
Under the hood, they are a salesperson.
Or a product person.
Or a designer.
Or all of the above (and then some).
These adjacent disciplines become a marketer’s special sauce. This allows you to create work with texture.
You’ll become a “marketer plus,” if you will.
If you want to level up, here’s a list of marketing adjacent topics I recommend:
Negotiation
Negotiation is a dance and much of it is about what’s unsaid, reading between the lines, and taps into visceral, subconscious reactions. Your customer wants you to build value and not accidentally give up power/concessions. You want that too. So learn the negotiation basics, then go deep. You’ll start to see negotiations happening everywhere. It will help you sharpen your messaging, pricing, and everything in between.
Learn about this:
Power dynamics
Alternatives your customers have
Alternatives you have
Understanding incentives
Giving concessions
Building value
Not accidentally giving up power
Sales
You can’t nurture leads and build brand awareness forever. Eventually, you have to sell something. Sales teaches you to keep your eyes on the prize: closing sales. This helps you stand out as a marketer and will make you more influential within your organization. The closer you are to bringing in revenue, the more central you’ll be to important company decisions.
Learn about this:
How people make decisions
Buyer’s remorse
The role of fear in purchasing decisions
Psychology that shifts depending on low cost or expensive items
Deniability
Tension (when to resolve, when not to)
Rationalizing your decisions
Becoming impatient with BS and time-wasting
Ruthless focus on results and outcomes
Thinking flexibly
Choosing marketing tactics to support short-term vs long-term sales
Business analysis
You can work with data but not be analytical. You can be analytical without working with data.
Shockingly, I’ve worked with financial planners and paid acquisition managers who work with numbers all day, but did weird things like add percentages or celebrate raw numbers without checking the percentages.
I’m fortunate to have started my career as a business analyst at Gap Inc. Over ten years ago, I was part of a rotational program where they invested a ton into training us with both formal training and on-the-job shadowing and mentorship. It’s made a lasting mark: The principles I learned there shaped how I think about numbers, interpreting data, and making defensible claims.
You can learn these concepts on your own, too. It’s not really about numbers. It’s about your ability to think clearly and interpret information. Also, it’s about calling B.S. and developing a spidey sense for when numbers seem “off” and too good to be true. Check out the topics below.
Learn about this:
Levers (price vs volume)
Making inferences
Pointing out faulty logic or logical stretches
Raw numbers versus percentages
Percent contribution
Trend lines of change over time
Patterns and pattern breaks
Gut checking numbers
Healthy sense of paranoia
Precise and accurate language, i.e. using words that reflect your level of certainty
Stating assumptions explicitly
Making defensible claims
Creating “standalone” claims that don’t need your voiceover
Explaining your rationale
Psychology/Influence/Behavioral economics
“Influence” and “persuasion” sound slimy. I don’t want to be “influenced”... I don’t think you want to be either. But studying the ways slimy people take advantage of customers will help with what not to do.
I believe there are ways to utilize these concepts to put your best foot forward. You want to control for factors that might be working against you, so customers can see you for who you really are—and be able to make an informed decision.
Plus, there are tasteful ways to execute these concepts. The brands you love probably use these concepts on you, while being respectful and on-brand. When you master these concepts, you can mix and match and stack them.
Learn about this:
How people are irrational
What we say vs what we do
Common motivations
How we process information
Unconscious biases and how they play out in daily life
Inception, i.e. planting ideas in people’s heads
Cognitive dissonance* (one of my favorite unconscious biases)
Placebos* (another favorite)
Recency bias* (okay, lots of favorites!)
Reciprocity
Loss aversion
Lies we tell ourselves
Practical ways to incorporate influence and persuasion
Psychographics versus demographics
Copywriting
You will go far in your life if you can write well. You might have good intentions or a brilliant idea, but if you can’t express them… No one cares.
I find most people agree on high-level strategies, but things fall apart in execution. They can’t translate their strategy into public-facing words and images that get customers to FEEL their intent. Strengthen your copywriting skills, and you’ll strengthen your execution.
Learn about this:
What makes you sound “corporate” versus human
Ignoring outdated grammar rules
Form/structure/composition
When to break grammar rules intentionally
Using words with emotional resonance
Non-obvious things like the visual layout of text
More non-obvious things like ending a sentence on an important word
Visceral reactions of certain words
Framing ideas
Sequence and priming your audience
Picking the right words/phrases to convey what you mean
Avoiding language that’s unintentionally dramatic, negative, or heavy
Fiction writing
I study the craft of writing fiction because it makes me a better marketer for non-fiction copy. This is different from copywriting to sell. The craft of fiction will teach you about how to get people to FEEL something. It teaches restraint and economy of words.
Also, you might sound unintentionally cold or distant. I have some friends who are the nicest people IRL. But when they send texts or emails, I think, “Do you hate me?? Are we even friends?” That’s because their warmth doesn’t translate to their copy.
Learn about this:
Believability
Motivations
Getting your audience to feel something
Show, not tell
Indirect ways to communicate
Whether a sequence of events make sense
Conjuring visual imagery
Highly-leveraged details and nouns
Word choice
Point of view (first-person “I,” second-person “you,” third-person)
Expanding or decreasing the psychological distance with your reader
Product
Product and marketing are intertwined. The marketing should be built into the product itself. In other words, you can’t build a great product if you aren’t simultaneously thinking about how it will be marketed and why customers will tell their friends. And you can’t tap into the best ways to market your product if you don’t understand how the product is built, who it’s for, and what it’s for.
Especially in tech, there’s an idea that product people are rigorous, sharp, and analytical. But marketers don’t get that benefit of the doubt. In fact, I think many people look at marketing as a fluffier discipline. This is ironic because the field of product management was inspired by brand management marketing to begin with.
My hope is marketers will one day get the recognition we deserve. I believe one way to accomplish that is to have a unified set of concepts/frameworks for talking about our ideas. This way, the outside world of non-marketers can understand our decision-making principles. The lists of sub-topics here are meant to be a start in this direction.
Learn about this:
How customers use the product
Unspoken needs
Looking at customer behavior, not words
User flow/user experience
Reading clues and making assertions
Product design
The construction of how things are made (yes, even for digital products)
Weighing cost/benefit of solving problems
Network effects
Getting people to do the thing you want them to do
Frequency/magnitude of a problem and how to solve
Whether to change the product or change the marketing
Design
Design will heavily influence whatever you create. If you have great copy, but it’s paired with terrible design, no one will read the copy. They’ll be too distracted by the design.
“This doesn’t look like a product someone like me would use.”
“This doesn’t look legitimate.”
“This looks cheap.”
In the macro sense, design is the fastest and most visceral way to send a signal about who your product is for.
In the micro sense, if you have poor design in your everyday Google Docs, you bet your boss and coworkers are judging you. Don’t send documents that are poorly formatted, with different font sizes, and hard to read. It’s distracting and makes you look sloppy, which undermines that good work you do.
Improving your design eye helps with both the macro and the micro.
Learn about this:
Visceral reactions from design
What do you want people to be reminded of when they see you
Using design to enhance your message
Semiotics and signals
Spotting common design flaws
Making sure design looks good enough not to be distracting
Using headers and subheaders, and other commonly available formatting options
Understanding why work looks messy
Creating work that looks clean
Showrunner/Production
Marketers on lean teams are showrunners who produce campaigns, events, and more. When you think like a showrunner, you think like a person who is accountable for making something happen. You have to think of the big picture and every tiny detail—because missing a tiny detail could ruin everything. This ability to take complete ownership to ship a project is a valuable skill, whether you’re managing others or a team of one.
Learn about this:
How to create a good spec so someone else can execute
What it takes to get something done
How to herd cats
How to say no respectfully and warmly
How to follow up properly
Seeing big picture and individual component parts
Project management
Getting what you need from different parties to make the show happen
Appreciation of airtight execution
“Maker mentality” of creating something that didn’t exist before
Finding low overhead solutions that are easy to implement and good enough
***
Read about these topics.
Practice them.
Take on projects that require these skills.
These marketing-adjacent topics will help you develop your sense of judgment. You’ll improve at making high quality, high velocity decisions—which will ultimately help you translate your intent into strong execution. What is it all for? All of this helps you bring your ideas to fruition, so your audience will feel the same excitement you feel about your product.