Marketing

Essential Marketing Skills for High-Tech Ninjas

September 13, 2011

How would you like to have a bunch of marketing ninjas to carry out super powerful, targeted marketing campaigns for your product?

Then grow them by training them with the right skills!

Most young marketers join a company with some general marketing and advertising management knowledge they learn from school, internships and their first few jobs. But your marketing department is where they are going to truly learn these incredibly important skills, especially if you are measuring them by results (as I have mentioned in my last post on setting the right goals for performance and impact). So by investing in them early on and letting them learn from their mistakes, you are setting your marketing team up for greater endeavors in the future.

So what are the must-have marketing skills of the technology industry today?

1. Solid email marketing capabilities

Email marketing has become a cornerstone of both B2B and B2C digital marketing, and email communications techniques have also become increasingly sophisticated to keep up with the needs of the market. Today, email marketing is no longer about just sending regular customized emails to a list. There are many dials to turn in terms of frequency, time of the day, time of the week, title wording, email design, etc., to optimize this powerful medium and marketing channel.  A good marketer should master and utilize email marketing in most situations.

2. Exposure to search marketing

Search engine traffic continues to be the best source of inquiries and ultimately customers for technology companies. Tech businesses have some advantage because of the relatively rich amount of content they regularly make available online, and thus the opportunities they create for optimization in both organic and paid search. However, with continued updates to Google’s search algorithms, everyone on the marketing staff should have a good idea of Google’s overall system and the basic tenets of paid/organic search so that they can benchmark other channels against the search engine traffic.

3. Be at home with social media

This is a definite requirement. Social media will be THE canonical marketing channel of the future, and while all companies “participate”, not many are truly excelling in this. Thus we emphasize “at home” because being savvy and effective in using social media is a key requirement of the marketing manager’s job for the future.

4. Web analytics

As with search engine traffic, web traffic logs are also quite underutilized beyond cursory funnel reports and lead source analysis. There is a lot more to uncover, and a good marketer needs to utilize basic and advanced analytics tools, from Google Analytics to KissMetrics to the Omniture suite, to both measure and optimize their company’s online presence in many different angles.

5. Managing freelancers

With the inexorable rise of content marketing strategies, having a scalable outsourced content development process is fast becoming a requirement for online marketing dominance, especially in jargon-heavy and technical markets such as software and internet startups. This requires strong communication, project management and really effective leadership skills.

Further reading:

Now that’s a lot of skills for one person to learn, but it’s still not all.  There are a few more quality skills that should also be on the young marketers’ career roadmap, which I shall cover in a later post:

  1. Market research
  2. User research/experience
  3. Event management
  4. Database management/Data Quality Management

Furthermore,  there have been a few great blog posts on this topic, and although this post represents my sole perspective on the young marketer’s skill set, I would recommend these resources as well for further reading

Please share your thoughts on what are the essential marketing skills in today’s technology world below.

Thumbnail image by: Jeyhun Pashajev

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.