What coding should marketers learn? 🤔
In your opinion, what are the simplest & most impactful marketing-focused techniques that require a bit of coding?
I'm not a dev & don't really want to focus on becoming fully-fledged. I'd rather land straight in the middle of learning something that would be really useful as a marketer & is fairly simple to do.
Things like:
- Querying a database
- Scraping article links from search engines by keyword
- Building a simple landing page
Software engineer who's dived deep into marketing here. Here are my thoughts on key knowledge to look out for:
Some things I'd expect you could do if you "said" you could code:
Marketing has a lot of inputs, make it more transparent and you can get non-technical marketers to do the hard outputs (blogs, backlinks, email outreach, guest writing, keyword research, etc...).
Why do you expect everyone who says they can code to be familiar with several AWS offerings? That's a very different thing. In my experience few marketers or small to mid-sized marketer-driven orgs are even on AWS... nor should they be!
Try to learn a scripting language like python or ruby can be used for improvising your work by automating.
learn basics of HTML,CSS,Javascript for landing page design and website scrapping.
learn swift and firebase is what I would do, both have ample resources and you will get further with that then going web. Web will get you farther in the end but will take 2-3x as long to learn. If your quick though go web. My strategy has been to find a tutorial that when complete does most of what you want, then modify it from there.
Learn how to build a landing page from scratch. As a marketer, you'll work with tons of landing pages and you'll want to change one thing here or there A LOT. Instead of having to ask a developer, being able to do it yourself will speed up your process.
Also, when you do NEED a developer, you'll be able to communicate a lot better. You can tell them what you tried and why it didn't work and maybe even have an idea of some avenues they could try. This will make them happier to work for you and make it much more likely they'll get the job done quickly.
This looks like a good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLnmg8twXlw
My advice: DON'T use a framework (especially Bootstrap). When you know the basics, you can work with ANY framework and realize why a framework works the way it does. After you understand the basics, you can know when it's going to be 500% easier to use Bootstrap and when it's going to be 500% easier to use something else.
Look into Microsoft power BI. This will give you an idea of the beginning of a data scientist. Data is a growth hackers food.
The things you mention are great skills to have. I made the transition from non-tech entrepreneur to engineer myself.
The other skills I found useful were generally becoming a power user of WordPress, simple scripting and regular expressions. Regex are immensely useful for scraping, finding variants of keywords and cleaning up poorly formatted data. I did these scripting tasks in ruby, but any very high-level language would work.
Most marketers get assigned to manage company website, eventually you'll start with HTML it move some text around or use that cool new form for your landing page.
Then on you'll see how PHP is basically HTML that can be generated. You'll stumble on CSS to change a button color or hide some elements on your page.
But if you can learn basic Javascript and especially jquery(simplified Javascript) to manipulate sections of a page. You'll be more powerful than 99% marketers out there.
In short - (HTML,CSS, Javascript+jQuery) if you can get these under your belt you'll be able to do rapid prototyping for your product ideas. Even though there are tools that automate all of this it will help to learn what happens in the background.
If you want to jump 'straight in the middle of learning something' instead of Python/PHP/Ruby i suggest picking a framework. You'll build simple apps instantly and can learn concepts along the way.
Go for Django (Python) or Rails (Ruby)
It might be really daunting to jump into a framework without knowing a language or having any previous expereince with one
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
That really depends on what kind of marketer you are.
Working on performance marketing (eg Adwords, Facebook ads) for a company with a massive ad spend and a technical team?
Then you'll probably want some SQL and maybe some python knowledge. HTML/CSS/JS shouldn't be too useful here.
Are you a solo marketer on a small startup team? Then you probably won't need to focus on manipulating data but it'd be useful to be able to throw up landing pages, pull in data from different APIs etc. In that case, some basic HTML, CSS and Javascript would be useful.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
This comment was deleted 7 years ago