The top 5 things Marketers should know about

Learn #1: your company’s data model

What to know : the basics of how your company’s data is organized.

Why it matters : whether you’re in product marketing or lifecycle marketing, there’s one constant in your life, and that’s data. Understanding the basics of your organization’s data will help you both analytically – being more data driven, doubling down on which campaigns are working – and also operationally – understanding why the wrong fields are syncing to Hubspot, and whether you can personalize a launch based on what a user has done in the product previously.

How to learn about it : a data model isn’t a discrete thing, like a nicely formatted Google Doc, that someone can just send you. It’s the sum of the answers to a few questions like: when does a new user get created? Which tables do different funnel events sit in? Which filters should I apply to which tables to remove deactivated users? And the best way to get the answers to these questions is to, well, ask them of whoever owns data at your company.

But asking is only part of the equation: you need to put in your own work to query that data, familiarize yourself with it, and continually check that you’re pulling the right numbers. Consider working backwards from common questions you’ve been curious about, like why a “lead” is defined differently in two places. And keep in mind that data models change over time, so you’ll need to stay curious.

Learn #2: how your marketing website gets built and deployed

What to know : how the bones of your marketing site work. Where the code is, where the code runs, and what it takes to make changes to it.

Why it matters : we’ve all been there. A seemingly simple copy change or basic new landing page for a campaign takes weeks to get help from engineering on. These kinds of “clerical delays” can completely deflate the momentum of a launch or campaign and doom your team to sitting around and waiting. Knowing the basics of how your marketing site works will help you unblock your team when things get stuck, and work towards being able to make incremental changes yourself.

Larger organizations use a CMS like Contentful to populate parts (or all) of their marketing sites. In those scenarios, it might be easier to make that copy change or add that landing page; but if you’re working at a small startup, this is a ways away. And even in the CMS universe, bugs and issues are a given. There’s always value in understanding the tools you work with better.

How to learn about it : a great place to get started is to sit down with your engineering team and get a lay of the land around how the marketing site works. What repository does the code live in? How do they make changes to the site? Are there any tests that get run? Framing the conversation around learning – instead “we want to start spamming you with poorly written code” – will give you a higher chance of success with most engineering teams.

Here’s an example from Supabase; it looks like the team is using Vercel to deploy the app, since the Vercel bot commented on the PR with links to deploy previews.

Look: it’s not likely that you’ll become a whiz frontend developer overnight and start unblocking your whole marketing team. But you can educate yourself on the basics of how your marketing site works and start to make small, incremental changes on your own (think: a headline change for the holidays). Literally anyone can learn how to make a small copy change in GitHub and get it live. And over time, with experience and experimentation, you’ll be surprised at how much you can accomplish.

Learn #3: how to use an internal tool builder

What to know : how to use a no/low-code internal tool builder like Retool to stand up useful, specific internal tools for your team.

Why it matters : marketing has a massive surface area. With all of the different tools across the stack and all of the different data moving around, little pockets tend to emerge where it would be useful to have some sort of internal UI for getting a task done. Relying on engineering to get these built will take a while, if you can even get it prioritized; but if you can get it done yourself, you’ll move your team faster and more efficiently.

A quick example: at my last job we had several different email workflows in Hubspot for different types of campaigns, and there was no easy way to unsubscribe a particular user from all of them at once. So I found some basic APIs from Hubspot and built a very simple app in Retool that let you do it with the click of a button. It saved our marketing ops person a few hours a week, and only took me about an hour to make with minimal, 101 code.

How to learn about it : the best place to start is finding a starter project. What little “paper cut” task do you or your team have to do on a semi regular basis that might be worth automating? From there, start with a tool like Retool and learn the basics. A few hours of investment here should pay dividends down the road. One thing worth noting: you may need to consult with your engineering team to make sure you have access to the data you need when building these kinds of apps.

Learn #4: Technical basics 101

What to know : Outside of your company’s codebase, you need a basic understanding of how apps, data, and infrastructure work. Beyond being able to code, a conceptual understanding of what pieces come together to build applications is table stakes.

Why it matters : A lot of what your developers tell you will sound like complete nonsense without the right technical foundation. And whether you know how to code or not, you’ll want to know what your developer means when they say they can keep this feature to a “frontend change only.”

How to learn about it : There’s no teacher as valuable as experience. The reality is that knowing how to code—specifically, how to build apps that relate to your company’s stack—is the best way to be more technically literate. But that takes a long time, and simply isn’t for everyone! Thankfully, there are some shortcuts you can take in the meantime: reading engineering blogs, looking up _everything _you don’t know, and finding developer friends on the outside. You can read more about them here.

Learn #5: technical SEO basics

What to know : how the SEO knowhow you already have translates into your company’s website, blog, and whatever else you’re working on.

Why it matters : a lot of marketers today have a decent handle on best practices for SEO, but when it comes to actually implementing those things, rely on engineers who are not quite experts at this themselves. Understanding things like which tags your site needs and how to tell if it already has them will help you get your content out there faster and more effectively.

A good example: cross posting with another company’s blog. Most content marketers know that having two identical pieces of content on the web plays badly for search. But fewer know the exact tag to add to the blog, which blog to add it to, and how to actually do that in practice. In the example below, I’m using a meta tag to tell Google that there’s a crosspost of mine on Vercel’s blog, and it should treat that one as the main one.

Marketing teams often hire entire SEO audit agencies to just tell them what a subscription to Ahrefs and some basic technical knowledge could have done in a day.

How to learn about it : you can get started by taking a look at your marketing site today. What meta tags does it have, and what do those mean? There’s a lot of noise here, especially with how complex frontend frameworks have gotten today, so it’s a good learning experience to run through each tag and Google what you don’t know. If your site is young and there isn’t much there, check out your competitors, or companies a few stages ahead of you.