[Skip to the bottom if you just want the top 5 list]
Over the years that I have been in digital marketing and analysis, I have been constantly shocked by the gaps and deficiencies that I have found in not only my own, but the entire industry's skill set. When I first began as a lowly search specialist, I came in with nothing more than a decent understanding of how organic search engines worked, a basic familiarity with Excel, and a passionate, though amateurish, interest in statistical theory. Within three months, my relevant knowledge base had expanded exponentially, but still I felt that I lacked useful skills, and frankly, that most people in the industry did as well. I have been trying to rectify that situation ever since.
Right off the bat, I was amazed at how little rigorous statistical analysis was being applied to SEM and other digital media buying and planning channels, given the volume of available data that was being (or could be) collected. This was manifest not only in the proportion of data analysts to account team members (which was very low at the time), but also in the absence of fundamental conceptual understanding of statistics held by the marketers themselves. It was naive of me to think that every account team would have a dedicated analyst (though I had assumed as much before my first day), but even at the time I thought that some rudimentary education on the theory and practice of utilizing data sets should be a prerequisite for a digital marketer.
Even more simply, I realized quickly that my Excel proficiency was not where it needed to be, or at least not at a point that my work couldn't be substantially improved by getting better with spreadsheet applications. What I thought I had known about Excel (still one of my all-time favorite human inventions) was a drop in the bucket compared to what I felt like I ended up needing, but as I developed those skills I was once again shocked by their conspicuous absence from the average marketer's tool kit. The number of people in our office who really knew Excel, and could maximize the efficiency of its capabilities, was limited to single digits, even though it is the bread and butter of any search marketer. From there, overly large data sets led me to need to use MS Access, a program which even fewer people were qualified to use, causing all kinds of missed opportunities and bottlenecks. While most people in every office that I have ever worked in tend to just seek out those who have that knowledge when they need it, very few companies require, or even encourage, widespread acquisition of information and skills that are borderline critical to the work their employees do.
When tagging and tracking issues came up (and they always do), I found myself frustrated by the gate-keepers and communication disconnects that exist between marketers and IT/website maintenance teams, so I realized that I would have to understand (at least at a rudimentary level) HTML, and then JavaScript. I had to learn more principles of SEO at times, which also required understanding of those basic web development languages. I had to understand other marketing channels to really see interactions, I had to understand offline sales processes to gain insights into lead generation marketing, which meant that I had to first learn about CRM pipelines, and then CRM platforms like Salesforce and Hubspot. As the lines between social, paid social, content, and SEO blurred, I had to approach each subject in turn; in order to understand any one of them I had to understand all of them. To understand what my data meant I needed to know all of the data that was collected, so I had to learn about databases. In order to make use of the databases, I had to learn SQL. I'm so far from where I started, and yet still so much further still from where I need to be. I will never have enough knowledge and understanding to do my job as well as I think I should.
But at every step in my career I have been surprised to see just how many people in the industry lack not only the skills that I have been seeking, but even the awareness of the roles that they should play, within the agency world and without. For so many years everything was siloed in terms of labor division that marketers (and really, everyone in business) came to believe that the world outside of their specific responsibility was segmented this way as well. There is this common theme in the industry today that those walls are finally breaking down, that channels are at long last interacting and that the ecosystem has finally become diverse and highly dependent, but this is a false concept. The ecosystem has always been complex, and the fact that we are finally starting to recognize it doesn't excuse us from responsibility for the gaps in the past, nor the continuing specification of skills moving forward.
A search marketer can't get away with simply knowing the AdWords and Bing platforms anymore, or at least shouldn't be able to in your workplace. Would you want someone in charge of a campaign that doesn't understand how the tracking codes work in a jquery library? Do you want someone presenting to clients or superiors not only raw information, but conclusions and insights, who doesn't understand sampling concepts, or how to differentiate between correlation and cause? How can a marketer assess the value of a user action without understanding the offline sales process, or the difference in the consumer journey for B to C versus B to B?
For so long digital marketers were like Oz, we claimed to be wizards and got away with it because no one looked behind the curtain. People finally looked behind curtain and found that in fact, it was all done with machines, and they were actually fine with that, because we said we were running the machines expertly. The problem is that now digital marketers are often demonstrated to simply be the people standing next to the machine, with no more understanding of how it works than those who were on the other side of the curtain. In order to stay relevant, we all need to not only be able to read the outputs, but understand and interact with the inputs as well. The world is changing fast, and education, in any form, is the only path to relevance.
So to sum this up into a top-five list (because that's what the internet wants), here we go:
Top 5 Skills for Every Data-Driven Marketer
1.) Microsoft Excel (custom sorting, formulas, pivot tables)
2.) Basic Statistical Theory (samples size & significance, correlation vs causation, variance & standard deviation)
3.) CRM Process/Offsite Interaction (digital is not a separate realm, it is part of the broader business we engage in)
4.) Minimal HTML, JavaScript knowledge (metadata tags, H1s, how API calls work, tagging intricacies & common problems)
5.) SQL/RDB Querying (pick one, MYSQL, PostgreSQL, even NOSQL, it doesn't matter; maybe learn R or Hadoop if you want to get fancy)
