Technical Marketing II: the SQL

In my previous post, I discussed the importance of becoming a full stack marketer: familiarize yourself with various subjects relating to your work, and unlock limitless avenues to flexibility and success. A huge component to being a full stack marketer is an elevated technical proficiency, gaining skills typically uncharacteristic of a marketer to attain the role of "technical marketer." According to Jamie Steven of Moz, every marketer should strive to both generalize and specialize. With our general knowledge of business already established, the best way to specialize as a marketer is to gain tangible technological skill. Following that logic, a wise path for marketers to tread is gaining the ability to work with one of the most significant tools for data driven technical marketers, SQL.

SQL for Marketers

SQL, which stands for structured query language, is the most prominent tool in modern business for working with data bases, extracting valuable data from a seemingly infinite reservoir of stored recorded observation. As Vault Analytics puts it, using SQL contrasts to the use of an excel spreadsheet. Excel is a useful tool for analyze smaller data files, whereas SQL mostly deals with big data, massive amounts of data that can be manipulated, filtered, gathered, etc. from query processes. From my perspective, one of the overall goals for a marketer should be to understand their target market as much as possible. Using SQL provides consumer insight, as well as the data to back it up.

A few other benefits to using SQL are improved efficiency and increased effectiveness. Although technical marketers typically don't need to go TOO deep into SQL, performing the actual construction of queries and such, they can still save plenty of time by learning to acquire and interpret SQL output by themselves. This way, an employee's use of time is more efficient, since they don't have to take their problems to the developers, waiting on a solution. Accumulating data with SQL provides a different data perspective on a target market, since big data systems collect almost every record-able interaction between consumer and business.

Learning SQL

Continuing my effort to become a full stack marketer, specifically a technical marketer, I decided to spend some time learning the SQL basics from CodeAcademy. Here's a comparison between my first moments and my completion of the introduction.

No experience with SQL

About 2 hours of SQL practice

After completing the Code Academy introduction to SQL, I realize just how useful the technology can be for a company. The tutorial had me creating queries to extract information from a data base, manipulating and calculating data, and finding links between variables on separate tables. Through SQL, an ocean of big data becomes malleable, conforming to the request of the searcher to render relevant results. The syntax of the code itself was relatively simple, easy to pick up for any employee, or for a non user to glean some amount of understanding at least. The most important feature of SQL, however, is the ability to connect two variables across different tables. The key to meaningful insight is finding a pattern that is unlikely to exist, and hopefully, through the same data, discovering the cause to such peculiar phenomena. Essentially, that is the function I performed in the above example. In the practice SQL data base, two tables contained information on music artists and artists' albums. By drawing data from both albums, and selecting variables to match, I was able to link up albums with artists names, along with the year of release. Obviously, in an example, artist names and albums are intuitively matched in our brains, so the findings are that astounding. In a different contect, however, the discovery of a link between two variables can prove to be quite a significant finding.

So where can marketers apply their SQL skills? Which companies are looking for them? And what types of positions do they offer?

Based on a quick Google search, there is plenty of demand for marketers specifically with skills in analytical tools like SQL. Most companies are looking for a marketing analyst that can work with data to provide results and conclusions for a firm. Although these types of job options are popular, and are surely heavy in analytical software usage, it is important to note that this type of position does not reflect the expectations companies have for all marketing positions. The value the industry has for technical marketers lies on a spectrum, with some companies preferring a lot of tech experience, and others placing no emphasis on the subject. However, technical marketing is a growing trend, and every aspiring marketer should consider adding SQL skills to their tool belt.

Positions offered by companies emphasizing SQL use