As a modern day marketer, it’s comical to think that Don Draper’s skills were on the cutting edge of marketing at one point in time. Fortunately for us, modern marketer skills have progressed.
It used to be all about big splashy ads, larger than life branding, and interruptive marketing. Advertising and marketing were one and the same and John Wanamaker’s quote rang true – “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half”.
Thanks to the web, the number of tools and data we have access to is almost overwhelming. Don Draper had a team of designers, copywriters, and account managers to build his marketing and advertising empire (I’m not sure marketing analysts and data scientists existed in that era!). By getting to know a few design and technical skills it’s possible for a small marketing team, and even an individual, to have a killer toolbox to build their own marketing empire or become the linchpin of their company and marketing team.
Skill #1: HTML/CSS
Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the building blocks of a web page. HTML is also used to construct email templates. Do any businesses or organizations exist that don’t have a presence on the web or send email? Hopefully you get my point.
It doesn’t matter if your business uses a common content management system (like WordPress, Blogger, or Squarespace) or it’s a custom built site, you’ll be infinitely more effective and valuable with even some basic HTML and CSS knowledge.
Recommended learning resources:
W3schools.com – A free resource site along with decent learning tools
Codecademy – Structured learning plans available for free along with paid options that provide access to additional content and live help
Treehouse – Available as a monthly subscription, Treehouse offers a nice interactive learning environment plus instructional videos
Skill #2: Data Analysis
The blessing and curse of digital marketing is the amount of data available to measure pretty much whatever you want. Cookies, clicks, pageviews, events, taps, scrolls, forms, shopping carts, emails, in-app notifications, well, you get the idea. All of this behavioral activity can be combined with visitor and user attributes to create powerful insights.
The key to using all of this data is knowing what to measure, how to look at it, and what tools to use. This is why improving your data analysis chops is a must for you to be an effective marketer. With this skillset you’ll always know how 100% of your advertising is working, plus be able to answer just about any question you want about your business and your customers.
Recommended learning resources:
Google Analytics Academy – Using Google Analytics as the tool, Google provides free lessons on everything from analytics fundamentals, to ecommerce, to mobile apps
Segment Analytics Academy – A free basic course on analytics from the data connector company Segment
Coursera or Udacity – If you’re ready for a deeper dive, these two sites provide online learning courses on data analysis
Skill #3: SQL
One of the common tools used in more advanced data analysis is SQL. Structured Query Language is a programming language used to pull information from a database. It can provide incredibly powerful insights to your business beyond what’s available with most standard reporting in single purpose apps.
Virtually every marketing tool on the market offers some kind of analytical capability. The problem is that analysis and corresponding data sits siloed in specific tools. There will come a time in most businesses where you can gain massive advantages by answering more complicated questions than can’t be answered by out-of-the-box analysis tools included in your apps.
Two examples from our own business include Zendesk and Stripe. We use Zendesk to manage incoming support tickets and they offer tools allowing us to see the average response time and other metrics about the quality of our customer support. We use Stripe to manage payment processing and can run reports to see how many charges there are in a day, or how many customers are on the Basic or Premium plan.
However, if we want to know, for example, if providing high quality customer support affects how long a customer subscribes to Rafflecopter, we can’t easily answer that because the data needed to answer that question is sitting in two different places. With the right database setup this is a pretty easy question to answer using SQL and combining the data from both sources. Think about the kind of customer insight you could have by combining all the information you have about your visitors, prospects, and customers.
Recommended learning resources:
W3schools.com – You can go through a certification in SQL and also use this site as a reference for SQL syntax
Codecademy – This site has four units to their SQL course and includes quizzes along the way to gauge your progress
Treehouse – There are three core courses on SQL that include instructional videos and a “SQL playground” that lets you practice side-by-side to the videos
Skill #4: Graphic Design
The web has become a very visual medium. There’s a good chance that any business website with images were created and/or edited using Photoshop or a similar tool. The header images you see on most Rafflecopter blog posts were created and edited using Pixelmator, a similar tool to Photoshop.
Using some pretty basic tools in Photoshop you can create more compelling images that grab your visitor’s attention. The longer they stay on your site, the more likely they are to read your content, sign up for your mailing list, buy your product, etc. Wouldn’t that be worth a little time investment to learn how to create better images?
Recommended learning resources:
Photoshop – Go straight to the source and learn Photoshop from it’s creator
Pixelmator – This is a less expensive version of Photoshop, but still very powerful, and they have great tutorial videos
Canva – This web based design tool has a drag and drop interface plus lots of layouts to use as a starting point
Lynda.com – This is a popular online learning platform and includes training on both Photoshop and Pixelmator
Skill #5: Copywriting
Writing was a valuable skill back in the Don Draper days too, but today you want to be able to write compelling copy in various formats: a landing page to get visitors to click on a call-to-action, an email that guides a reader to take action, overlay copy on an image for Instagram, an effective Tweet or Facebook post, or a script for a video ad on YouTube. Even writing a description for a prize giveaway! As visual as the web has become, writing effective copy is still crucial to being a successful marketer.
Writing can be incredibly powerful. A well written email or landing page can make the difference between making or losing money on a campaign. It can make the difference between having a successful or unsuccessful business. It can even save lives ;)
Recommended learning resources:
Everybody Writes – This is a great go-to resource from Ann Handley that’s becoming a must read for anyone who writes as part of their job
MarketingProfs University – There is a ton of free content on writing at MarketingProfs.com, but if you want to step it up a notch, then check out the courses at MarketingProfs University
CopyBlogger.com – One of the best content marketing and writing resources out there with both free and paid options
Skill #6: Conversion Rate Optimization
So far we’ve described individual components you can use to be a more effective marketer. All of the above skills are ultimately helping you compel a visitor take some kind of action, aka, a conversion.
The combination and implementation of these skills to get more conversions can be described as Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). CRO is broader than just the above skills and also includes a bit of psychology, User Experience (UX) design, and User Interface design (UI).
The more you improve on each of the above skills, the better you’ll become at CRO.
Recommended learning resources:
ConversionXL – This site has a ton of free and paid resources plus the people at ConversionXL put on a great conference on CRO
Don’t Make Me Think – A true must read book and a classic on user experience design by Steve Krug, plus it’s a fun read
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What did we miss? Are there any other skills you think are a must for the modern marketer?
