Is Coding the Future of Marketing?

The world of marketing is swiftly changing and adapting in this new decade. While colleges and vocational schools may not be keeping up with the demand, it is important as current marketing professionals, or as students, to be up-to-date on the trends if you want to be relevant in the industry. With the advent of social media and both Apple and Android apps, the marketing field has required a different skill set than traditional marketing has needed up to this point. Ad blockers, too, present a new type of problem for marketers. How do you reach your audience without alienating that audience? Additionally, what skills do you need to create ad campaigns or effective websites to market for your digital properties?

The ability to perform your own coding and create your own campaigns without needing a separate developer will set you apart from your peers and really help you stand out as the best. Whether you are in the middle of your career or at the beginning, picking up coding skills could make or break your future.

What Should You Learn?

To get ahead in your sales career, you’ll want to look into coding info that sales professionals need to know. This is not just talking in sales code or lingo, this means programming language. You’ll want to start with at least the very basic in HTML. Knowing how to format content, add images or hyperlinks, and in general manipulate the page will go a long way toward not having to wait on someone else to do that work. You’ll be able to control what your end product looks like even if you don’t have a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) interface.

To go even deeper than that, you’ll want to consider learning something like Structured Query Language or what is known as SQL. When dealing with marketing campaigns, having quick and easy access to large quantities is paramount. Being able to understand and manipulate SQL will give you the ability to talk to your database servers and sort and edit that information on the fly.

Lastly, you could take it one step further and get farther ahead by learning a general-purpose coding language like Python or Javascript. Which one you focus on mostly comes down to the environment you work in. If you are working for the finance field and need to crunch numbers and data for your marketing, then you’ll want to stick with Python. If you work specifically in digital marketing and have to interact with campaigns on webpages and apps, then Javascript will be a better choice.

Why Coding Skills Are Important

More jobs are expecting their employees to be well-rounded. The need for employees that are highly-specialized in one particular skill are going the way of the caveman. Impress your boss at your next sales meeting by learning coding and showing that you are able to automate certain tasks in the business. Using your skills to prove that you can design and implement marketing campaigns completely on your own prevents you from needing to rely on others to pull off your desired effect.

While having the ability to build your own sites, ads, and apps are great, being able to manipulate your programs, add tracking metrics, and collect data are equally as important. You’ll be able to enter any sales or pitch meeting with confidence if you can present the data and trends along with your finished product. Being able to present to your employer (or future employer for that matter) with a tried and true campaign that you have the data to back up will land you a job or a promotion.

Conclusion

To start your future as this marketing dynamo, consider taking online or in-person coding boot-camp courses. You can find these courses with a quick internet search and you’ll find that many of the in-person ones are held in the evenings at local schools. Once you have a basic understanding, don’t stop there. Invest in yourself and in your future. You may have to look into advanced or college-level courses, but coding skills could really bring your career to the next level.

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