Learning
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” — Benjamin Franklin
How to learn?
In today’s world, marketers no longer need to rely on external help from anyone else to help them.
You can take your own education into your own hands and find out how to do something.
Want to be able to design beautiful websites? Great, you can learn it.
Or, want to become fluent in Mandarin? Cool, you can learn that too.
Resources
Google/YouTube
It’s amazing how few people know how to use Google…like seriously.
Phrasing your question in certain ways to get the results that get you one step closer to a solution.
Think: How would other people ask or phrase this question?
And get comfortable with copying, testing and verifying the answers that you find.
And don’t give up after a few searches.
The best marketers I know spend go that 10% further and end up finding solutions.
Marketing is all about trial and error.
The cool thing is once you’ve found a solution once, you can use it forever.
But you do have to be willing to go through a lot of dirt to find what you’re looking for.
AI (ChatGPT)
As annoying as it's become on Linkedin and such. I can’t go without mentioning ChatGPT.
It’s an exceptional learning tool and becoming more succinct in explaining solutions than Google.
I’ve used it so far to learn:
- Write me full-functional JavaScript: See the button logic here
- Adjust code in a piece of AppScript
- Create the perfect Google Sheets formula
- Explain nuanced economics concepts very simply (inflation, debt-GDP ratios, etc.) that most experts gloss over with buzz-words
- Give me tax advice
Social Media
Another great resource, just bear in mind that a lot of content creators have ulterior motives, like getting you to click and grab your attention with FOMO techniques.
Just know that smart people give away 90% of the secret sauce to you for free on Social Media, learn from that before you go spending tonnes of money on courses.
Some good platforms to start, but there may be more niche ones/FB groups for what you want to do:
- Stack Overflow
- etc.
Some top picks:
- https://twitter.com/levelsio
Books
Largely irrelevant in 2023 for tactics & practical advice. But still relevant for high-level thinking!
As a Renaissance Marketer, I would still lean towards online resources, as these are more likely to be niche enough for the specific thing you are trying to learn.
Refer back to the section on Just-in-time learning.
Reverse Engineering / Copying Other People’s Work
Personally, copying is at the heart of how I learn.
Ever since my high school days, I always wanted to see the model answers for each exam question so that I could emulate them in my own answers.
I copy a lot to this day.
If a company is much larger than we are and has already invested resources into testing and optimizing a funnel, a landing page, a whatever, I’ll be there to reverse-engineer it, take the essence of what they have done and customize it to fit what I want to do.
Sue me.
I’m always learning. And you’re never really “done”, are you?
Here are some of the urgent things still on my “learn list”:
- End-to-End Data Pipeline management
- CRM management (Hubspot etc.)
- No-Code tools (Bubble)
- JavaScript/Appscript
- Google BigQuery
- APIs