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Comment by shostack | Hacker News Reader

As a fellow experienced marketer I would implore you to not use the term "marketing guru." The word "guru" has a really bad connotation with all of the info product snake oil salesmen and wannabe marketers out there.

The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as it is to help people trust we're not all scammers (particularly a technical audience such as this one) and that there are in fact good marketers who have ethics and deliver results.

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The problem with finding great marketing people is that there's no barrier to entry into the profession. Anyone can (and does) say that they're a 'marketing expert,' a 'growth hacker' or a 'marketing guru' [gag]. To be great at it, yes, people need to have technical ability. But they also need a sort of sixth-sense intuition (visual sensibility, language skills, an understanding of psychology) that can't be taught or bought.

In my decade in the field I've observed almost zero correlation between marketing-specific education and ability. Experience yes, but education no.

It's a frustrating profession to be in sometimes because often only great marketers can spot other great marketers. Meanwhile sh*tty ones ruin the field's rep for everyone else.

Most solid digital marketers I know are entirely self-taught because when they were getting started there was no real digital marketing industry. "Digital" was just the new channel people had to try out.

And yes, I agree it takes a great marketer to spot others. It would be a like a designer interviewing someone for a coding position. They might say lots of technical jargon type stuff and you'll have no idea what is made up, what is buzzwords, and what are signals that say a person is good at what they do.

I wonder if companies would pay for a marketing consultant to help them hire.

As a programmer I'd be really interested in knowing what kind of coding skills are useful to marketers. Could you give me examples of use cases and useful tools / languages ?

The other response pretty much nailed it.

Basic working knowledge of how code works on the web, and how data flows from Point A to Point B is a bare minimum in my mind.

Then you're often dealing with a data warehouse, BI tools and the modeling hell that comes with it, etc.

Beyond that, there is using code to improve performance directly. Speeding up page load times directly impacts SEO these days with Google. Knowing where and how tracking breaks (ad blockers, cross-device cookies dropping, messed up UTM params, cross-domain tracking setup, cross-channel attribution, etc.) and the million "gotchas" that come with any analytics platform is also quite technical.

Then outside of the tracking there's things like media and ad buying. There's some crazy work that goes into bid algorithms used by all the big search and display platforms.

The other poster's point about getting it into all the nooks and crannies of your marketing channels is spot on. Involving marketing and adding tracking to every single new feature is a requirement for product development. Linking all marketing systems under one roof and determining a SSoT is critical, but often Sisyphean, task.

In terms of a basic tools/languages list, I'd say...

- HTML, JS, CSS - Whatever stack you're working on...so common ones probably have some PHP or RoR - Google Analytics and/or Omniture, or some other solid analytics platform, as well as their respective APIs for dealing with events and other goodies - Other pieces in the marketing stack such as data warehouses (Redshift, etc.), email platforms, CRMs, bid management platforms, ad servers, tag management systems, CMS's, etc. These all need to be linked together in an ideal world.

Feel free to ping me if you have any other questions. Contact info is in my profile.

Anything web. You're going to be dealing mostly with rest APIs and whatever CMS or custom site setup you have. You also need strong data/SQL skills and knowledge of message passing stuff like queues.

You will eventually need to write stuff to connect a bunch of different systems together and aggregate data in special ways. Basically classic integration and database work. Similar to enterprise programming in a lot of ways.

What happens quickly with marketing is that you need tracking. Not soon after you need custom tracking because you need to track customer interactions like phone calls, page visits, clicks, form filling, appointments, emails, sales(and how much)... It really goes on until you've integrated the sales pipeline into every corner of your companies interaction with customers. It's very unrealistic to find a piece of software to integrate all this stuff for you so that's where code comes in.

The ultimate data driven marketing system tracks every interaction with every person your company ever talks to(or visits your site) and assigns a value to each one of those people to get you an estimated ROI you can feed back into your advertising channels to see how much money you make from X campaign or advertisement relative to him much it costs.

Some companies achieve this nirvana, most with a horde of people and a thousand spreadsheets, and a few smart ones automate it entirely

It's true, but on the other hand I can't think of a term for "good marketing person" that hasn't been ruined :).

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