Here’s the thing about: Raising the Bar of Technical Proficiency for Marketers

Written By Jell Khongkraphan

Happy Q4!

In a blink of an eye, month 10 of 12 is now upon us, and it has me reflecting on how fast the world post-pandemic has been for me personally and professionally.

I reckon a lot of it has to do with the ever-evolving world of tech and the pace at which we are Leroy-Jenkins-ing ourselves into the future. Along with an increase in productivity now that we have the flexibility of working from the comfort of our own homes (or beach clubs…potaytoes, potatoes.)

Losing three total commuting hours from my Monday-Friday has gained me 15 additional hours weekly that I have reallocated to what I call “R&D“, Research and Development,” time to improve my soft and hard skills that will help me grow in my career.

The more articles, books, podcasts, courses, conferences, and conversations I am consuming, the more I realize that, as a marketer, there is a lot of room for improving our technical skills.

A few things I want to touch on today:

  • Why should you improve your technical skills?

  • What skills a well-rounded marketer should possess?

  • What skills to develop to ensure long-term success in your marketing role?

The thing is:

Your competition is always evolving.

While we are all very friendly here in the marketing-verse, at some point we could be competing against each other for that one role at our dream organization.

If you were the hiring manager for an email marketing manager role, would you hire someone who could:

  • A) code, send, and analyze emails

  • B) write copy, design content, code, send and analyze emails, understand SEO, understands event tracking, can engage with the engineering team, product managers, and growth marketers?

I am not saying you must be the master of all but, to be a contributor in any marketing org, the best thing to do is to learn the basics of how the various channels interacts and work with each other in order to optimize your own channel with all available data, knowledge, and resources.

Here are a few examples of things you could do as an email marketer given you have a basic knowledge of how other parts of the organization operate.

  1. You can create a multi-variant, multi-channels campaign when you understand the framework put in place by engineers that are supporting your marketing automation platform.

  2. You can create hyper-personalized segments because you can identify all your customer data sources and destinations.

  3. You can create an effective automated re-targeting campaign by leveraging your paid and organic channels audience.

  4. You can visualize the entire user journey and identify which action you would like to attach an event to. So you can make a request to your engineering team that you want this event to be ingested into your MAP (marketing automation platform) to be used as a trigger or conversion event for your new campaign.

As an email marketer, these skills may not be the first to come to mind for executing in your role, but they will undoubtedly help you become an even better communicator. This will ultimately gain you the trust and loyalty of your consumers, and the fact that you will make your resume stand out among others is a rather obvious bonus 😎

The other thing is:

Skills to help you future-proof your marketing career.

Marketing and marketing technology is in a constant state of evolution and especially so in the past few years as we are coming out on the other end of a pandemic lockdown.

When our world physically went into hibernation, our digital media engagement and consumption entered into a new realm of growth. Trends and technologies emerged and permanently changed the way we interact with customers, prospects, and each other alike.

Still, there are essential skills that stand the test of time. No matter who you are, an individual contributor, a manager, a director, a VP or a C-Suite executive, you need to master these marketing skills to ensure your growth at each level.

Hard skills in marketing.

These are more technical and proficiency-based. These skills are often quantifiable. e.g, Knowing how to code a landing page using programming languages is a hard skill.

  1. Data analysis.

    • Unlike traditional marketing from the days of yore, where you could not attribute purchases to how many people walked by your billboard, digital marketing is highly measurable.


      So it’s no surprise why this skill is at the top of my must-have hard skills. As highlighted in my very first article many weeks ago, data-driven marketing is a crucial component of your business growth. Regardless of where you are in your marketing organization, you must be able to measure and analyze your campaign to prove the success of your strategy.


      For example, I can tell how many of you are reading this article of a daily basis. When you are reading it and in what region of the world are you reading it from. This will help me understand if you find a certain topic more relatable and helpful so I can curate more of that type of content in the future.

      This method can be applied across all marketing channels given that we have the data to analyze our consumers’ engagement and activities.

  2. Technological proficiency

    • Marketing automation tools (MAP).

      1. Depending on your experience in the field, you probably have a history of various marketing automation tools that you have used in your career. If you have not had a chance to do so, get familiar with your own MAP now.


        A marketing automation platform can automate time-consuming tasks for you to help your marketing efficiency, allow you to create cross-channel automation strategies, and generate more targeted leads that will enable you to craft personalized customer experience across all your marketing channels, from email, and social media to ad campaigns.

    • Search engine optimization (SEO).

      1. This is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance, and link popularity so its pages can become easily discoverable with more relevant and popular keywords for user search queries.

        Search engines are tools used to find data based on a particular input. Whether researching a product, looking for a restaurant, or booking a vacation, search engines are a common starting point when you are looking for information. For business owners, they offer a valuable opportunity to direct relevant traffic to your website.

        Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of orienting your website to rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) so that you receive more traffic. Rankings start at position number zero through the final number of search engine results for the query, and a web page can rank for one position at a time. As time passes, your page’s ranking might change due to age, competition in the SERP, or algorithm changes by the search engine itself.

        The goal is to rank on the first page of the search engine to provide the most relevant answers or information to your target audience. So, SEO is as much about understanding the wants and needs of your audience as it is about the technical nature of configuring your website.

    • Social media marketing.

      1. You are probably most familiar with this form of marketing which leverages the power of popular social media networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, etc.


        Social media marketing requires you to maintain and optimize your profiles, interacting and engaging with your audience via comments, shares, likes, videos, and live streams while monitoring your reputation across these channels.


        Social media marketing can help humanize your business, drive traffic, generate leads, increase brand awareness and build relationships with your customers.

    • Business intelligence (BI) tools.

      1. Business intelligence tools collect, process, and analyze large amounts of structured and unstructured data from both internal and external systems.


        Data sources might include user activities such as account information, purchase history, payment details, documents, images, email, social media interactions, files, and more.


        BI tools find this information through queries, which can present the data in user-friendly formats such as reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs.


        With a BI tool, you will be able to present your campaign findings to stakeholders, revise your business and campaign strategy, identify areas of opportunities, make predictive analysis and get ahead of market changes.

    • Basic coding languages.

      1. Coding may not be a requirement for your role in marketing, but with a foundational understanding of the two most common coding languages like, HTML and CSS, you will be able to tweak your landing pages and email campaigns by adjusting font sizes, colors, padding, swapping out images and more. Or maybe you want to install a Google Analytics tracking code, and your developers are not around.

        Learning HTML/CSS shouldn’t be a problem if you’re already doing menial tasks in Excel. So head over to Code Academy or W3Schools today to start learning the basics of these coding languages.

    • Events tracking.

      1. I’ve already written an article on this topic, where I talked about the importance of event tracking, why you need a tracking plan and how to create a tracking plan.

  3. Writing.

    • I realized, many years into my marketing career, that I needed to improve my writing skill because it is crucial as a marketer that you can clearly articulate your message to your readers. This is the very reason that I started writing.


      Thus, this blog emerged as a channel for me to sharpen my writing proficiency.

      The obvious selling point for improving this skill is so we can optimize our campaign messaging across all channels—emails, blog posts, headlines, tweets, you name it. Additionally, SEO relies on writing that effectively and seamlessly includes specific keywords and phrases to boost content in SERP.

      Lastly, not only do you need to be able to create content and copy for your brand’s audience, this skill is crucial when trying to communicate within your internal teams across your organization.

  4. Project management.

    • This should go without saying, but project management is an essential piece of every marketer’s daily operation.

      It is guaranteed that you are, more often than not, juggling multiple campaigns, clients, or projects at any given time. A robust set of project management skills will help you meet deadlines, prioritize your work and keep track of stakeholders’ contributions.


      Be ruthless about prioritization and stay focused on your agreed-upon success measurements. Get comfortable with negotiating suitable alternatives when you’re proposed with projects that are just too big with too little time.

Soft skills in marketing.

These are your more abstract skills and are generally emotionally based. These are skills you use for handling stressful situations, your work ethic, or how you interact with others.

  1. Adaptability.

    • In my decade in the digital marketing world, I have had a handful of job titles and a laundry list of responsibilities.

      With each new role, company, client, season, and a slew of other worldly unforeseen developments (cough pandemic, anyone?), you will need to be able to quickly adapt to ensure your success.

  2. Attention to detail.

    • Are you sending an email to an extensive list of customers? Are you writing a headline for your new LinkedIn ad?

      Your work will be seen by many eyes. Accuracy ensures your company’s image is maintained, and your audience receives the correct information.

  3. Curiosity.

    • Remember how I told you tech is ever-evolving? You MUST be hungry to learn emerging trends if you are looking to be brilliant in this field.

      • Subscribe to your industry’s leading contributors’ newsletters.

      • Listen to relevant podcasts.

      • Read—a lot.

      • Ask questions.

      • Connect with your industry’s peers.

    Be relentlessly curious. It is the only sure way to stay competitive.

  4. Customer-centric.

    • Your customers are also changing with time. Your campaigns, which worked five years ago, may not work so well these days.

      Evaluate the data you are able to gather and make an educated analysis on how you can solve your audience’s pain points.

      Repeat the process often. Seasons, technologies, and competitors’ offers are among countless reasons your customer’s behavior could alter over time.

  5. Creativity.

    • No idea is a bad idea. (Usually…)

      Creativity drives innovation and progress. Spend some time analyzing your customer data, so you understand what is working or not working right now. Then you can begin to consider solutions from a fresh perspective and different angles.

      Rinse and repeat.

The last thing I will mention today:

Resources to help you beef up your skill set.

There's no shortage of resources out there for learning just about any skill these days. Whether you're looking for paid or free options, there are plenty to choose from.

Here are a few recommendations that I have used or that have been recommended to me.

Improve your coding skills

  • Code Academy

    • Free coding lessons they offer: HTML & CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Angularjs, The Command Line, and more.

  • Free Code Camp

    • Free coding certifications they offer: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, data visualization, DevTools, QA testing, Node.js, React, jQuery, and more

  • Coursera

    • Free coding courses they offer: Many (far beyond your basic coding/computer science topics)

  • edX

    • Free programming courses they offer: Java, C#, Python, AWS, cybersecurity, machine learning, and many more.

  • Codewars

    • Coding challenges they offer: CoffeeScript, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java, Clojure, SQL, Haskell, and more.

Improve your data analytics skills

Improve your social media marketing skills

Improve your writing skills

Bonus books to help with your copywriting as recommended by my friend Pranav over at @gtmdigest

DEEP BREATHS

My god, that was a lot. This is why I am posting later and later in the week because I get writing, and then there’s a ton more I want to keep packing into one little post because I have very little self-control.

That said, I hope you enjoy this week’s topic & come tell me more about which skills did I miss?

Let’s 🌮 about it

  • Jello

Jell Khongkraphan
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