Coding For Digital Marketers and Why You Should Learn How

By Steve Safarowic

This was originally posted on https://xccelerate.co/blog/

Gone are the days when traditional print advertising dominated the marketing landscape. We’ve entered the 21st century where businesses without an online presence don’t get noticed, and almost every user prefers to check out their favourite shopping outlets or stores online for new launches — before even deciding to pay them a physical visit.

The statistics back this up and as a digital marketer, upping your game is the minimum step.

If you’re a digital marketer, you might’ve asked this question to yourself at some point — “Do I really need to learn coding?”

If that feeling nags you constantly, the answer is — yes. But it’s not just because of hunches, you actually need coding experience as a digital marketer to see the big picture and thrive.

Let’s get into the why and how below:

You Make Your Presence Known Online

Big Data is big for a reason — it gives you unit insights, things you’d never notice once you learn to study and analyze it. As a Digital Marketer, yes, learning about SEO and landing page optimization are important but mastering the use of analytics tools and algorithms to scrape and clean data will take you miles ahead. Python is a framework that’s used in various data science projects for creating data visualisations and is easy to pick up for beginners. The second aspect is when you learn to code and understand how analytics mechanisms work behind the scenes, you can better incorporate your marketing campaigns to your website so that they perform better. Using analytics tools, you can pinpoint your target demographics and learn who is visiting your page, why, and how to effectively reduce bounce rates.

You Can Communicate with Your Development Team

Knowing a bit of coding jargon and how things work on the web will help you better communicate with your development or tech team. For example, you could build your own prototypes using scripting frameworks like Pearl or Bash and test how your internal organizational tools. This will save time, money, and you’ll be able to provide extensive feedback to the team for better support.

For Data Analysis, it’s fundamental you learn SQL and Excel since these are used for data manipulation and control. Learning about how to write your own macros in Excel and query SQL will help you create more sophisticated queries and clear up any data collection blocks you’ve run into previously. You’ll also be saving your budget since you won’t need developers to do basic data cleaning tasks as you’ll be able to do it yourself, making you more valuable to the team. In addition, you’ll be more in-demand in the industry as there’s a rising growth trajectory in careers related to technology positions in Data Science and Analytics.

You’ll Be Able to Cut Through The Clutter

Developers sometimes tell you what you want to hear and not what the truth is. This is rare but it does happen in the workspace. Or maybe, they don’t tell you the whole picture. When you have basic coding experience and know how to visualize and clean up raw data, you’ll be able to cut through the clutter and see if your developer is telling the truth. Even while interviewing prospective candidates, you’ll end up making better hiring decisions by asking the right questions and not feeling like a clueless amateur.

Test Out Your Campaigns Efficiently

Understanding programming concepts and their applications in various tasks will help you launch campaigns more effectively on your website and apps. You’ll be able to show stakeholders real-time results of A/B testing, multivariate testing, and show off your findings using data visualizations from SQL and scripts. You can convince your team then to test out your results using the cleaned-up data and see how it works. And here’s the best part — you don’t have to call in your tech team for every little detail. If your images look too oversized, no problem — you’ve got the power of HTML and CSS. Same thing for automating Google AdWords and email marketing campaigns. JavaScript also lets you optimize the layout of your webpages and you can use Google Tags Manager to place in the code for tracking.

You can use scripting to automate various tasks in-house and embed feedback forms which get triggered when a user navigates to specific sections of your website content.

Conclusion

While you don’t have to be become a full stack developer to reap the benefits of technology for marketing, learning the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL can go a long way in making your life easier and more productive. And you’ll be in higher demand as a professional too whenever you show your portfolio, which is obviously a plus. Once you’ve learned Python, don’t stop. Technology is constantly evolving and the more coding frameworks you know, the easier and more efficient your digital marketing work will become.