Welcome to the marketing department! It may look remarkably similar to your cubical, office, study, kitchen table or darkened closet. In fact, it probably looks exactly like the place where you do all of your development; the very same place. And that's a good thing, because there is a lesson there. Marketing really is not something you should separate from your development process; it should be what is directing your development process.

Don't think this is just about coding for the sake of making money. If you are a researcher for example, generating per license revenue may be of little interest. But that does not mean you don't have to market your software. Indeed, marketing is about the relationship between you (a company, a group of designers, or a lone coder) and your customer, and finding a synergy between your goals and desire fulfillment of your customer. Your goal might be to make oodles of money. Your customer's desires are... what? This is the beginning of marketing; and it begins before you actually start coding - with customer identification.

Who is Your Customer?

So who is your customer? If you have already created an application, you might be thinking "my customer is whoever buys my product." That's not always a safe definition because he who hands you money may not be the one who makes a software selection. There are a lot of corporate bean-counters who buy software for others: the bean-counter is paying you, but they didn't select your product. Your customer is whoever makes the critical decision to select your product over someone else's product. But again - who exactly is your customer? It is the level of detail and understanding of the details where marketing begins.

What do you have to know about your customer - exactly? Successful software companies create extremely detailed customer profiles. That is, they identify not only the tasks of a particular profession or group and industry preferred methods of accomplishing those tasks and price ranges, but get down to very personal details: national origin, location, age, gender and so on. Those personal details may seem more relevant when it comes to consumer titles such as games or learning titles; and they certainly have a greater impact on those titles, but they are not irrelevant to other kinds of products.

Let's look at graphics software for example. There are several types of titles that require navigation of a user's graphical content. The younger and more nimble of finger you are, you may experience less frustration in utilizing a single view that is navigated solely using a trackball interface. If you aren't all that nimble or come from a traditional CAD or architectural background (you took drafting on big tables with very sharp pencils), you may experience less frustration if you have an accessible option to use numerical points of reference that can be entered by typing in numbers. Understanding the preferences of your customer, you can design a user interface that will lower frustration and increase the instances of user satisfaction - definitely something to know before you start coding!

You may have heard a term called "lead generation" and that is the responsibility of marketing. Lead generation is creating a connection between you, a vendor, and a customer - a connection that in a corporate context usually means a connection of some kind for sales to connect with the customer and get them to happily acquire your product. Historically this meant leads a sales team could use to connect with a customer and close a deal, but it can equally refer to the combination of a website, email campaigns, and other more modern venues where you hope your potential customer will "self help" their way to a sale. And here's the rub of modern web-based marketing: you are less likely to actually talk to your customer in person (missing out on cues that in-person market research has access to) during this process and must anticipate their questions and concerns - you must know even more about your customer!

Self Knowledge and Marketing

Wait, did we forget company goals? No, they never went away, but when you are a small shop it is extremely easy to get lost in the funhouse of creating new features that make you happy. If you have a typical business, your goal might be simple: maximize continuous revenue streams from ever increasing numbers of customers and customer groups. This is where you need to be both honest as to your goals and true to yourself.

A little two man shop may have public aspirations of toppling Microsoft (or selling out to Microsoft), but may actually have the goal to be a modestly successful leisure company - that is, make enough money to cover daily needs and summer vacations, plus pack away modest amounts for retirement, but not much more. This shop will never acquire that employee base or marketing budget to topple the king, so shouldn't they develop a plan that is achievable with existing resources?

Be honest to your goals - set them and stick with it. You cannot identify your customers, build the right products for them, and fulfill their needs if your company isn't the sort and never will be the sort that can fulfill those needs, even if you have been able to identify a block of customers.

Be true to yourself - if the business, its products and marketing framework aren't what you want, then it's likely you will sabotage again and again, any meaningful customer relationships; all lead generation will ultimately result in failure.

The nutshell:

• Marketing is about maximizing the satisfaction of your customer so they select your product over someone else's; in turn, they buy more of your products and recommend your products to someone else.
• Marketing is about understanding exactly who your customer is, in minute detail and then delivering satisfaction in a way that keeps them coming back for more.
• Marketing requires self knowledge: understand where you really are going to go as a company, then build your marketing strategy so you can target and achieve realistic results.