Marketers already have a lot of skills up their sleeves. They’re responsible for the design, content, and promotion of products or services. With marketing professionals, businesses can communicate their message to the world in many ways, including through social media, television, radio, print ads, and more.
However, there’s one skill that marketers don’t often think about: coding. In this article, we’ll explore how coding and web development are essential tools for any marketer who wants to make an impact online.
What Is Coding and Web Development?
Coding is the process by which you create computer programs. It involves using a language like JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, etc., to write instructions for a computer to follow. When you code something, it tells your browser what to do with certain information (like text, images, video, links, forms, etc.) when someone visits your website.
Web development, on the other hand, refers to creating websites. A website is a collection of pages that people can visit via a web browser. The pages may include text, images, videos, audio files, interactive elements, etc. For web development, you need to know HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and Javascript.
Why Should I Learn Coding and Web Development Skills?
Although coding and web development seems like very different fields from marketing, they complement each other quite well. Here’s why:
1. You Can Build Better Websites
When you build a website, you’re essentially building a digital brochure for your company. The site should be visually appealing, easy to navigate and contain all the necessary information visitors want to see. Learning how to code allows you to build better sites because you gain insight into how to design them properly.
For instance, if you’re working on a landing page, you might want to use specific font size, colour scheme, layout, etc. If you learn web development, you’ll understand what fonts work best for certain situations, what colours convey certain messages, and so forth. This knowledge will help you build better sites as a marketer.
2. You Can Create More Innovative Marketing Campaigns
Learning how to code can lead you to develop innovative ideas for marketing campaigns. Through coding and web development, you can gain insight into how to improve existing marketing strategies. For example, when you’re doing market research for a new product launch, you can analyze data to determine what kind of products customers prefer to buy.
You can also use analytics software to track visitor behaviour and discover patterns that could indicate future trends. Using coding skills to analyze these insights can help you develop creative marketing campaigns that target the right audience at the right time. As a result, you’ll have more success reaching your goals.
3. You Can Automate Your Workflow
One of the biggest benefits of learning coding and web development is that you can automate some of your workflows. As a marketer, you already spend hours every week doing administrative tasks. However, if you could automate those processes, you’d save a lot of time in the long run.
Automation tools are available for a variety of tasks. They allow you to schedule repetitive tasks or perform complex calculations without manually entering data. With coding and web development skills, you can create simple programs that can help you send emails automatically, update customer records, or even generate reports.
4. You Can Easily Advance Your Career
Coding and web development are two of the most in-demand skills in today’s workforce. If you learn these skills, you acquire valuable transferable skills that can easily advance your career. Marketing nowadays has shifted to digital platforms, which means it takes more than just traditional advertising methods to reach potential clients.
If you know how to code, you can create websites optimized for search engines. Coding apps also make it easier for people to find and access your services. When you combine this skill set with marketing expertise, you can become an expert marketer who understands how to leverage technology to succeed online.
5. You Can Communicate More Efficiently with Other Departments.
Marketing is not all about creating content. It’s also about communicating effectively with other departments within your organization. By learning coding and web development, marketers can communicate with developers and designers more efficiently.
When you collaborate with other departments, you can share information quickly and efficiently. This allows everyone involved to be more productive because they don’t need to waste time searching for information. Since you already know the technical side of things, you can better understand their needs and work together to solve problems.
The Bottom Line
Although coding and web development aren’t the first things that come to mind when thinking about boosting your marketing efforts, they provide great opportunities to grow as a marketer.
There are so many ways to integrate these skills into your current strategy. With some coding and web development expertise, you can easily improve your marketing campaigns for better results.
Check out: 5 Reasons to Consider Collaborating on Your 1st Coding Project
Author: Bash Sarmiento
Bash Sarmiento is a writer and an educator from Manila. He writes in the education, lifestyle, and health realms. His academic background and extensive experience in teaching, textbook evaluation, business management, and travelling are translated into his works
