As a marketing leader, you might be familiar with the range of technical skills that can help your team thrive in a fast-paced environment. For example, web-development and front-end skills like HTML and CSS can help marketers be more agile with website updates, while SQL and Python can help your team make the most of sales and marketing funnel data, simplify their workflow, and thrive in the era of marketing automation.
To help you and your team get started on the educational journey right away, we’ve outlined how these technical skills can benefit marketers in their day-to-day functions. Plus, we’ve included recommendations for specific courses to help your team upskill.
Web development
Basic web development skills can help your team move faster — enabling them to troubleshoot and make updates to web pages and blog posts without relying on developers.
Learning HTML and CSS, specifically, empowers marketers to take on front-end initiatives like changing up an email template, updating the format of a landing page, and adjusting website parameters in response to data. When marketers can make these tweaks on their own without relying on engineers, it helps remove bottlenecks and leads to faster iteration.
Here are a few courses that can help your marketing team hone their front-end web development skills:
- Code Foundations: Learn to write your first lines of code with an introduction to basic programming concepts.
- Learn How to Build Websites: An introduction to HTML and CSS, which teaches learners how to build a website with Github Pages.
- Learn HTML: An introduction to HTML, the foundation of all web pages.
- Learn CSS: Learn the basics of styling web pages with CSS, including how to create attractive layouts, display and position elements, and typography.
Data analysis
There’s so much data available at every stage in the marketing funnel, and it’s becoming increasingly important for marketers to take advantage of this information to glean insights and continuously improve their efforts. The ability to leverage data can lead to more targeted, focused marketing which ultimately leads to more business opportunities and inbound leads.
Learning SQL can help marketers make the most of their data through specific tasks:
- Querying databases: Quickly and effectively search through large datasets to gather the most relevant information.
- Analyzing data: Recognize and interpret patterns to create actionable data, and conclude where to focus optimization efforts.
- Validating A/B test results: Monitor the effectiveness of different marketing tactics for driving conversions and use these insights to inform future efforts.
Here are a few SQL courses to help your marketers make the most of data to remain competitive, understand customers’ needs, and drive informed decisions:
- Learn SQL: Learn how to use SQL to access, create, and update data stored in a database, and advance into more complex queries.
- Analyze Data with SQL: Gain a thorough understanding of SQL, one of the most popular tools for analyzing data.
- Intermediate SQL for Marketers and Product Managers: Learn to work with data and frameworks to investigate user churn metrics, interpret usage funnels, and analyze marketing attribution methodologies.
Marketing automation
Digital marketers might find themselves performing repetitive tasks in their day-to-day, which take away from other important priorities. Python and JavaScript are both languages that can be useful in helping marketers automate routine tasks.
JavaScript
In addition to implementing rudimentary automation, JavaScript can help marketers make their current out-of-the-box automation platforms more sophisticated. Here are a couple of ways to take marketing automation to the next level:
- Build on an existing system that uploads Salesforce data to a spreadsheet and use JavaScript to reformat the sheet and reject invalid inputs.
- Use JavaScript to write Google Adwords Scripts to automatically change bids, pause ad groups, add/remove keywords for ad campaigns.
- Build a script using Google’s premade Google Adwords code snippets to create custom triggers for each of your ad campaigns.
- Add additional actions to your Zapier workflows, like extracting specific data from large text files.
- Integrate with Marketo’s JavaScript API to track known and anonymous leads from website visitors.
- Add more customization to your professional Wix website and set up a backend to store and interact with data.
For an introduction, check out our Learn JavaScript course.
Python
Python is a versatile language that marketers can use to automate routine tasks with short and custom scripts. Here are a few examples of tasks that can be automated to save time and effort:
- Renaming or cleaning multiple files
- Collecting answers from data forms and populate a spreadsheet
- Running through customer data to perform an RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) analysis
- Transferring and reformatting data from one system to another
- Checking and fixing broken links
With a fundamental understanding of Python, marketers can automate their repetitive tasks and simplify their workflow. For an introduction, check out our Learn Python 3 course.
Upskill your team
Codecademy for Teams is a Codecademy for Business offering that helps organizations provide technical training and education for their employees. We launched this product to help organizations — across all industries — unlock their potential by elevating technical skills across their teams.
Ready to elevate your marketing team’s technical skillset? Learn more or request a free 2-week trial here.