My Master Plan to Learn Customer Acquisition

My aim is to learn the process of acquiring customers. The technical term is a full-stack marketer, or a customer acquisition expert. Most of my points in this post are from the previous two links, go read it if you haven’t yet.

To do this, I’ll be doing a lot of research and simultaneously implementing what I’ve read to get hands-on experience. Afterwards, I’m going to document the entire process to build my portfolio which I’ll use to market myself in the future.

Basically, I’m going to create my own company so I can ultimately work for a company I truly desire, and to establish passive income streams along the way.

What about getting a MBA?

Having to pay large sums of money and two years of my life just doesn’t appeal to me. My opinion is that marketing is something you just can’t learn in school. The best employers in today’s market will want to see examples of what I have done. Real world experience is quicker and more effective. 

“You will not learn digital marketing and customer acquisition in college. The realm of digital marketing is changing extremely fast, and the rate of change is accelerating.  Universities/colleges are too slow to adapt.  There are some foundational things you will get from college courses… but even those you can get in other places faster and cheaper.”

– Brian Balfour, VP of Growth @ HubSpot

This is how I’ll do it

There are a bunch of skills that a full-stack marketer should have. To avoid becoming a generalist, I need to have a strong understanding of many marketing channels, but to be an expert in just a couple. I will need to develop a “T-shaped” skill set.

How will I know which skills to focus on? Honestly, I don’t know for sure yet, but I do have a rough idea.

I understand what my inherent strengths and weaknesses are. So I’ll focus on channels that leverage the skills I’ve obtained from my educational background, and previous work experiences.

To be safe, I’ll pick two marketing channels to focus on: a proven channel, and an emerging channel.

1) A proven channel

Based on my strengths/interests, I think email marketing would be a good fit. Mainly because it depends entirely on understanding how to drive customer engagement and how to reconnect with customers – using email. There’s a lot of experimentation, data analysis, and optimization involved. Sounds like my cup of tea.

2) An emerging channel

If I was to make a bet on one of the main emerging marketing channels, it would be online video marketing. I’ll go into why in a different post (which I’ll post here once it’s done) but I’ll sum it up with this quote from the Forrester Research Group, “If a picture paints 1,000 words then one minute of video is worth 1.8 million”.

Which companies do I want to work for?

The companies I’m targeting are entirely based on getting as much exposure to the influencers/experts in growth marketing. People like:

• Brian Balfour (Hubspot)
• Andrew Chen (Uber)
• Noah Kagan (Sumome)
• Gary Vaynerchuk (VaynerMedia)
• Alex Turnbull (GrooveHQ)
• Alex Schultz (Facebook)
• Justin Mares (Traction)
• Hiten/Neil (Kissmetrics)
• and a few others…

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