Let’s get Technical

Once upon a time it was enough to be either a Generalist or a Specialist. Generalists, usually in a management role, knew a little bit of everything and took a holistic approach to business. They probably couldn’t the do actual work as well as the Specialists though, the people who knew how to do a particular thing really well. Today, according to Moz, this system no longer works like it use to. With leaner budgets and faster cycles companies can no longer afford to hire both types of people instead they want one person to play both roles. The Generalist Specialist.

 

 

So what does this mean to marketers? Well its not longer enough to only understand marketing. You’ll be expected to be technical as well. I touched on this idea in my first blog post with State of Digital Marketing Talent which talked about the talent gap. This gap was educated marketers that lacked the technical skills that employers were looking for. This included many skills but today I want to focus on SQL or Structured Query Language.

According to Webopedia: “SQL is a standardized query language for requesting information from a database.”

Why should we care?

Being able to write your own queries as a marketer can be very valuable for a number of reasons:

1. You no longer have to wait for someone else to write them for you which means getting work done faster.
2. You have the opportunity to learn more from your database if  your in there running the queries yourself
3. More of the marketing process can be done by one person which is very valuable to smaller companies. Case in point.
4. Running any kind of analysis is much easier using SQL

Overall knowing how to writing queries increasing the pace at which you can work. The people over at Udemy report that their marketing team can now operate two to three times faster than they could without SQL knowledge.

With this overwhelming  evidence that marketers need to be technical I wanted to learn some SQL for myself. I went through a few of the lessons at W3 Schools.  Some of the material remained me of using Microsoft Access and picking up the basics wasn’t too hard. Just looking at the basic rules and syntax I started to get a feel of just how powerful this stuff could be.

So are companies really using SQL in marketing?

Yahoo uses SQL to better understand their customers and their behavior online. They use this information to better target advertising so that it feels more like a suggestion than an ad. With this information they can more effectively sell ad space to clients. Since using SQL Yahoo has experienced improved campaign performance and greater ad spending over all.

 

At eBates they describe their SQL position as such: ” The Database Marketing Analyst is a fountain of data and knowledge about our members and their behavior and works across numerous business lines to ensure we are making data-driven marketing and business decisions that improve member experience and lifetime value.” They seem to fully understand the power of SQL and apply it to all their marketing and business decisions.

 

Even banks know whats up with SQL driven marketing. At Huxley Associates their SQL marketing team “extract[s] data from the banks core data warehouse,[and] manipulat[s] this data to provide analysis to enhance marketing business decisions.”

 

As well as Auto part suppliers. The marketing team at Transamerican Auto Parts uses SQL for “Develop[ing] insights on various customer segments and behavior (i.e., customer profiles), and provid[ing] analytics that will help identify opportunities and improve campaign targeting” among a many other things. 

 

This is a wide representation of businesses that all use SQL to enhance their marketing. There seems to be no debate, knowledge of SQL is important in marketing today and will only become more important in the future. Data is only growing and the demand for data analysis is growing with it.