5 Technical Skills Every Marketer Needs to Learn

A common trope in the marketing world is that you should specialize as much as possible to enhance your career. Find your niche, double down, and become the ultimate authority in your subject matter.

While this can be sound advice for many, I don’t believe that specialization is the only path to success for today’s marketing professionals. As a lifelong generalist, I’ve found that adopting the Pareto Principle can be a useful, and productive, way to spend your time learning new skills. By focusing on the 20% of knowledge that gives you 80% understanding of a topic (or even the 5% of knowledge that gives you 50% understanding), you can become a better planner, strategist, manager and prototyper.

Which brings me to a common phrase that makes me cringe: “I’m not really a technical marketer, that’s not an area I want to spend my time on.”

Technical knowledge shouldn’t be treated as a specialists domain anymore. Nearly every marketer needs to be involved with technical projects, employees or elements to do their best work. Still, it can be daunting for a non-technical employee to try to cram a nearly endless flow of technical know-how while still staying productive in the short term.

We sit at a fork in the road: How does one become a more technical marketer without becoming a full-time technical marketer? Here are my top five suggestions to help you get started.

How Databases Work

This is a non-negotiable entry point into technical marketing. Databases play a critical role in so many different business functions that it’s amazing they aren’t taught in primary school yet. If you’ve ever used the following systems, you’ve interacted with a relational database in your career:

• CRM systems like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics and Zoho
• Marketing automation programs like HubSpot, Marketo and Act-On
• Accounting software like Quickbooks
• CMS or website platforms like WordPress

The list goes on. I encourage everyone in marketing (and business) to understand the core functionality and design of databases as soon as possible. While this rabbit hole goes much deeper than the others on my list, I recommend focusing on a few key questions to get the most out of your research:

1. What is a relational database, and why is it important?
2. When should you use a database versus a spreadsheet?
3. How should data be structured in a database?
4. What are the pros and cons of different types of data fields (fill in the blank, drop-down, checkbox, etc.)

While only scratching the surface, these four questions will help you understand the opportunities and limits of a database, and help you plan better data collection, hygiene and reporting features from the get-go.

How Websites Work

Look, I realize the above headline is kind of…stupid. The term “website” is a catch-all term, and there are many different underlying technologies that play together to create the modern web. But let’s not get caught up in the details and instead go back to basics.

It’s critical that marketers understand how basic tenants of the web operate so that we can understand what inputs are required to get our desired outputs. Changes that may seem simple can sometimes require a massive backend investment, while other changes can be completed with a few strokes of the keyboard.

For example – you may ask your development team for two simple changes: Change the font size of your default text, and have your site search sort by most relevant pages rather than chronological sorting. The first change is a simple CSS update that can be deployed in minutes. The second might require a wholesale investigation of how your database (there’s that word again) stores and retrieves data, and what algorithms have been programmed to determine relevance — a task that can take significant amounts of time and effort.

Keeping the same format as earlier, here are some key questions to dive into:

1. What are HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and what does each control?
2. What is the difference between front-end and back-end web development?
3. What are some other popular coding languages that you’ll encounter (i.e. PHP, Java) and what role do they play?
4. What is the difference between my domain, my hosting, my content and my CMS or Framework?

Learning how to do all these things can years of research and practice, but that’s not necessary. Focus on how these elements affect your projects, and trust that your development team can figure out the rest. And the next time you ask your devs for a “simple” change, take a step back and try to understand what will be required.

How Search Engines Work

Like databases, search engines play a critical role in our everyday lives. We use them to find answers, research the competition, drive new customers to our websites and even book our next flight. But aside from the basic formula of “type question, get links”, do you really know how a search engine works?

Luckily for you, this blog post has a cascading effect, much like the CSS you’ll learn about in the second section. Knowing more about how databases work and how websites are built will give you the foundational knowledge to understand how search engines crawl the web, organize information and serve the best results for each unique query. You can then use this information to become a master researcher, or to help your digital campaigns reach more in-market customers.

Here are some key questions to explore:

1. How do search engines find new and updated websites and pages?
2. How do search engines organize all the information they find in their index?
3. How do search engines rank and match the right content for different search queries?
4.  What are the different types of search results, and where do they come from (i.e. links, videos, images, rich media)

One of my favorite topics I stumbled upon when first learning about search engines was “search operators”, or custom commands to give you specific search results. I won’t spoil the fun here, but I encourage you to dig deeper into these commands to see how they help you master sites like Google, Bing, Reddit, Twitter and more.

How Microsoft Office Templates Work

This next topic really toes the line between technical marketing and cubicle-life basics, but I’ve included it here anyway. Why? Because without any real statistics besides my own anecdotal experience, I can confidently say 85% of the marketers I’ve worked with have no idea how to use Microsoft Office templates.

Office templates borrow a lot of concepts from web design (or maybe it’s the other way around?) in the way that they separate content from styles. Once you understand this relationship, you can develop a few core templates up front and never worry about styling a PowerPoint or Word doc ever again. If that last sentence sent a double shot of endorphins into your brain, I urge you to drop this post and skip right to your research.

Here are a few areas to start with:

1. What are master slides and themes in PowerPoint, and how can I use them to quickly create repeatable slides?
2. What is the Styles pane in Word, and how can I update entire sections of a document with it?
3. How does mail merge between Word and Excel work for creating mass customization?
4. How do I save a template into the quick templates area of Office apps for easily creating new documents?

I promise you I’m not overdramatizing when I say the following: Learning how to use Office templates changed my life as a career marketer. When you can focus all your effort on content and never spend another minute aligning text and bolding headlines manually, you’ll see what I mean.

How Typography Works

My last recommendation blurs the line between technical marketing and design. So why include it here? Because as marketers, presentation can make or break anything we do. Blame Don Draper and Super Bowl commercials, but everyone expects marketing to be both show and tell. And because of that expectation, it’s up to each and every marketer to know how to clean up our presentation skills.

I focused on typography because it lives at the core of nearly all we create – from printed materials to landing pages to pitch decks to investor reports and everything in between. Just look around you, and you’ll start to see the rules of typography at play.

Ever notice how books tend to have nearly identical spacing, alignment and margins? Or how text never touches the edges of a newspaper page? Or how most of the text we see is very dark gray on an off-white background? Or how headings tend to use a different size, weight and typeface than regular body text? Chances are, you subconsciously know many of these rules without every knowing you knew them.

Let’s restate the examples above in an easier way to research:

1. What is typography and why does it matter?
2. What’s the difference between good typography and bad typography? (Google Images can resolve this one in seconds.)
3. What are some basic rules for spacing, typeface (font), colors and contrast?
4. What are some popular header and body typography combinations?

Knowing the basic rules of formatting text can create a first impression that locks your audience in and keeps them focused on what matters most: the content.

Digging Deeper

While I believe these five areas are an excellent base, there’s still so many more areas that marketers must understand to be more effective. Video, web analytics, statistics, wireframing and other technical topics are open game depending on your organizations resources and strategy.

I hope this list helps you, and I look forward to hearing what technical marketing skills have helped you grow in your career.