To build a career as a successful marketer, one needs to balance creativity with technical skills. You need more than a clever engaging copy - You must know how to reach and engage the right audience at the right time.
That's where technical marketing skills become crucial.
Reports state that there's been a 20% increase in skilled managers' recruitment over the past few years. Surprisingly, few of these modern professionals hold a conventional four-year degree.
This trend reflects that every manager, regardless of educational background, must focus on developing skills specific to their domain. Besides, it affirms that companies are prioritizing professional skills over plain credentials.
In this post, we will discuss the top 8 technical skills that marketers should develop. First, let's understand technical marketing skills and their significance.
What Are Technical Marketing Skills?
Our post, The What, Why, and How of Technical Marketing, shares everything about technical marketing. It speaks about how technical marketing applies a technical and analytical approach to the creative marketing process.
That’s because data is the new currency for businesses aiming to supersede revenue goals. Hence, technical marketing skills should allow marketers to manage this data (product, customer, competitors, campaign performance, and more), bring it together to a central repository, and develop insights from it.
Thus, technical marketing skills should allow marketers to deal with the technical aspects of marketing -
- Fetching data from various channels to a central processing house
- Setting up analytics platforms that can crunch and stitch this data together
- Setting up marketing ROI dashboards based on business goals and campaign KPIs
- Leveraging advanced analytics to identify opportunities for growth
- Leveraging data-powered insights to create and implement relevant marketing plans
- Leveraging data effectively to create awareness about distinctive product features and address real user issues through relevant content
Significance of Technical Skills in Marketing
SaaS marketing revolves around data. Marketers leverage industry and customer data to reach target audiences, create innovative marketing campaigns, and turn prospects into loyal customers.
Therefore, SaaS marketers must acquire technical marketing skills to make sense of the huge volumes of data available to them.
According to Gartner, 58% of the workforce requires developing new skills to accomplish their goals. In fact, skilled professionals can earn career opportunities with higher pay packages than others.
The US Bureau of Labor affirms that skilled marketing managers earn $80,500 more per year than marketing specialists.
The crux is technical marketing skills are pivotal for long-term career success.
Soft Skills versus Technical Skills
When it comes to marketing, soft skills involve emotional intelligence, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving. On the other hand, technical skills in marketing comprise data handling and processing, data analytics, and more.
Both skills are equally crucial for technical marketers to deliver peak performance.
8 Essential Technical Marketing Skills Every Marketer Should Develop
#1: Market Research and Competitive Analysis
Market research helps analyze the feasibility of SaaS products and services for the target audience. In addition, competitive analysis involves researching competitors' information, including their product marketing strategies, professional strengths, and others.
Learning these technical marketing skills can help marketers:
- Create market research plans and product positioning strategies.
- Understand the competitor's technical marketing strategies and capabilities.
- Analyze customer demographics and identify the ideal customer profile (ICP) to sell SaaS products.
- Conduct a gap analysis to improve SaaS product specifications.
- Build an asset of data-backed marketing materials for SaaS product promotion.
- Assist sales team with pricing and product specifications.
Thus, a technical marketer should invest time in understanding the market and competitive scenario by working on their analytical and numerical skills and attention to detail.
#2: Marketing Campaign Management
Marketing campaigns are strategic initiatives that marketers take to achieve their brand goals. For this, marketers leverage distinct digital marketing channels, including social media, websites, and other online platforms.
A technical marketer needs to ace the art of marketing campaign management - planning, executing, tracking, and analyzing a marketing initiative built around a product launch or event.
Learning this technical marketing skill can help marketers
- Build relevant and effective marketing campaigns that drive conversions.
- Monitor multiple campaigns and KPIs to measure their effectiveness in marketing. This allows the team to make informed decisions and validate returns on marketing spend.
- Optimize campaigns by leveraging the insights derived from product/ campaign/ market data. This helps in increasing campaign effectiveness on different digital channels.
#3: Advanced Marketing Analytics
Advanced marketing analytics involves examining customer, product, campaigns, and SaaS-specific industry data. The insights can help them identify what’s working and what’s not, building effective marketing strategies.
Learning this technical marketing skill can help marketers:
- Stay updated on the SaaS market trends, customer needs and pain points, and the competitive landscape.
- Track KPIs across digital marketing channels by leveraging advanced analytics tools. For instance, technical marketers should know how to use basic and advanced tools. On the one hand, they may need to work with Google Analytics or Google Search Console, and others, with advanced analytics platforms powered by prescriptive and predictive analytics algorithms.
Working with such tools can take a lot of work off their back, allowing them to focus on the creative aspects of marketing. Advanced analytics tools offer in-depth insights to marketers, allowing them to make data-driven decisions that directly impact revenue goals.
- Optimize marketing strategies and earn a better return on investment.
#4: Marketing KPI Management
A technical marketer clearly understands and keeps track of all the marketing KPIs that evaluate the impact of their marketing activities. They strive to deliver long-term business goals by predefining the relevant KPIs and targeting them consistently.
Thus, a technical marketer must effortlessly monitor marketing KPIs, be it social, email, content marketing, or any other online marketing campaign.
For instance, every technical marketer should be aware of and track metrics like cost per acquisition, cost per lead, sales target/ growth, ROI, customer lifetime value, website traffic to lead ratio, MQL to SQL ratio, cost per click, and more.
To track all these KPIs, marketers often rely on advanced tools that make the process easier, faster, and more effective, thus improving marketing data management mechanisms.
#5: A Thorough Understanding of the Marketing Concepts
Here’s the thing- you could be an expert at managing data and using the most advanced tools. But if you have a poor understanding the basic marketing concepts, you’ll be lacking as a technical marketer.
A marketer aspiring to master the technical aspects of marketing should have a foundational knowledge of the essential marketing concepts, namely market segmentation, customer acquisition, customer journey, and more.
You don’t need a marketing management degree to understand these terms. Work through an online program or boot camp to learn the subject.
#6: Familiarity with the Common Marketing Technologies
Marketing tools and technologies have exploded over the past decade. Besides paid and organic traffic, a marketer must be familiar with email marketing, social media marketing, and the associated tools for native analytics.
As a technical marketer, you must get comfortable using tools like Google Adwords, Google search console, advanced analytics platforms, social channels, and more.
#7: Project Management and Reporting
As a technical marketer, you will be a part of various projects involving forecasting, data analytics, and more. You will need to coordinate with the marketing team, product team, engineers, and sales and business development professionals on various projects.
Hence, to keep things in order, you need to master project management skills. You’ll also need to create real-time marketing dashboards highlighting top marketing trends.
#8: Creative Thinking
Though analytical skills are critical for technical marketers, they also need to support the marketing team to develop out-of-the-box solutions and patterns that set them apart from the competition.
Hence, a technical marketer should be able to brainstorm ideas and collaborate with teams when involved in strategic planning, campaign development, branding, and predictive modeling. They should be creative problem solvers.
Tools to Strengthen Your Technical Marketing Game
Here are a few vital tools to help technical marketers achieve revenue goals without hassles.
#1: Campaign Management Tools
Campaign management tools help SaaS marketers track crucial metrics (data) to justify any decisions and make adjustments that can help improve the campaign's ROI.
For instance, with tools like Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, marketers can create and share well-timed ads (via desktop and mobile) among the target audience on search engines. As a result, your business will appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) when your ideal customers are looking for SaaS products and services like yours.
This way, campaign management tools help marketers reach the target audience at the right time and accelerate conversions.
#2: Analytics Tools
Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etc help marketers understand customer journeys and derive insights to improve marketing campaigns' ROI.
For instance, with Google Search Console, a free-of-cost website analytics software, tech marketers can track crucial KPIs, such as clicks, impressions, keyword rankings, CTR, and more. Besides, it offers a URL inspection tool that provides tech marketers with crawling, indexing, and serving information about website pages.
Sharing these insights with the marketing team can help optimize website performance and rankings in Google SERPs.
#3: CRM Tools
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools, such as HubSpot and Salesforce, provide a real-time view of the entire sales pipeline on a visual dashboard.
Besides, they offer detailed reports on customer history, buying patterns, interests, and more. Integrating CRM tools with marketing automation can help tech marketers track vital customer insights and identify new growth opportunities.
#4: Project Management Tools
Project management software, such as Asana or ClickUp, help marketing teams to organize, collaborate, plan, and execute day-to-day tasks on a centralized platform.
With these tools, marketers can keep track of all projects, collaborate with fellow members, share crucial files, and more, thus streamlining marketing processes and workflows.
#5: BI Tools
Business intelligence (BI) tools, such as Tableau or PowerBI, enable marketers to analyze and visualize large volumes of the market and customer-related data.
With BI tools, tech marketers can understand their target audience, identify customer behavior trends, measure marketing campaigns' effectiveness across all channels, and uncover insights on competitors.
Though these tools can help SaaS marketers manage various aspects of marketing, one tool can replace it all, avoiding the need to deal with and jump between multiple tools.
Revlitix - The Ultimate Revenue Marketing Platform
Analyzing vital insights from the above-shared platforms, such as CRM, project management software, BI tools, and others, require countless hours and effort for accurate analysis.
Hence, SaaS marketers need a comprehensive one-stop tool that can effortlessly and accurately stitch data from multiple platforms and channels, enabling them to track crucial campaign KPIs within minutes.
That's where the ultimate revenue marketing platform - Revlitix helps.
With Revlitix, marketers can -
- Fetch data from multiple marketing platforms and integrate it effortlessly.
- Visualize accurate data and insights on a centralized, clean dashboard with a seamless UI.
- Analyze thousands of crucial KPIs that directly impact revenue.
- Leverage predictive and prescriptive analytics recommendations to take actionable steps. This is where Revlitix scores over an outdated BI tool that only focuses on descriptive analytics and offers data visualization.
Today’s smart marketers need actionable insights that make a difference - not just visualizations.
- Prove a marketing strategy's impact on SaaS revenue and achieve long-term objectives.
All-in-all, Revlitix helps marketers sharpen their project handling, time management, and decision-making skills. It ensures that technical marketers perform their job and reach revenue goals.
Conclusion
With data becoming central to businesses worldwide, the role of technical marketers is gaining a lot of significance. No wonder there’s a huge demand for marketers who can think logically (yet creatively!) and leverage data to inform decision-making.
The information shared in this post will guide you as you develop your expertise in the technical aspects of marketing, allowing you to position yourself as a smart marketer.
