I-specialists (narrowly focused, highly telegram database download qualified in only one area) are being replaced by so-called T-shaped specialists, who have a deep understanding of one area and superficial knowledge of related areas. Thus, a text author learns to create visuals for his articles in Photoshop, a contextual specialist masters the basics of SEO, SMM and Programmatic, and a marketer learns programming languages.
Valentin Dombrovsky, co-founder of Learn Python courses
— Valentin, why should a modern marketer learn to program?
There may be different reasons for this:
It can be simply interesting and useful for self-development. In this regard, learning programming can be compared to any other hobby, when you can do something with your own hands and enjoy it.
You can start writing simple scripts to solve certain routine tasks. What is important is that you will start to see opportunities for automation in your daily activities - a small "brain turn" will occur towards how to increase the efficiency of work in one direction or another.
You will get the opportunity to speak the same language with developers and at least realistically estimate the timeframes for solving certain development tasks.
Well, maybe you will like programming so much and get hooked that at some point you will decide to change your field of activity or launch your own startup. By the way, the field of marketing technologies is very promising in terms of startups.
— What language do you recommend learning in this case?
I am a Python fan and recommend learning it first. They say that Python is the second best language for everything, which means that there may be a programming language that is better suited for a specific task, but overall Python is versatile enough to be used for everything.
Moreover, Python is really the best choice for analytics or creating machine learning applications. And finally, this language is quite simple and is considered by many to be the best first programming language for beginners.
Alexey Seleznev, head of the analytics department at Netpeak agency and author of the online course “R Language for Internet Marketing”
Today, knowledge of a programming language is not a mandatory requirement for a marketer, but it gives a great advantage and an increase in value in the labor market. Due to the fact that everyone is striving to automate everything, programming will become a mandatory skill for Internet marketers in the near future. In my practice, there was already a case when web analytics was replaced by the R language.
There are quite a few programming languages to choose from when it comes to working with data, but the most popular are R and Python. There are many discussions on the internet about which one is better, but in most cases, all these debates are pointless. It’s like arguing about which color is more beautiful, blue or green. I can say this: it’s better to know one programming language well than several, but superficially.
At Netpeak, we actively use the R language to automate data collection from all sorts of advertising and analytical systems and then use it when sending out various information digests and visualizing data in BI systems. But there are many options for using programming in Internet marketing: from quick exploratory analysis and data visualization to large-scale marketing research and the implementation of machine learning algorithms.
Sergey Tomashevsky, marketer, founder and director of the advertising agency "Birs"
— Does a marketer need to learn to program today?
No, no need.
- Thank you, Sergey. No more questions.
I believe that programming is a separate profession, not related to marketing in any way. A marketer should be well versed in new analytics tools and so on, and to work with data faster and more efficiently, a confident mastery of Excel and Power BI is enough.
Ivan Samokhin, director of the full-cycle web studio Pear Advert
A real marketer needs to learn programming when he or she is thinking about changing professions.
But seriously, it will be enough for him or her to know HTML markup, Python and PHP.Marketers often have tasks related to data analysis or obtaining information, in which case it is a huge plus and a kind of accelerator to perform routine tasks using simple programming languages. Another reason is the need to make emergency edits to websites. In order not to wait until a full-time programmer is free, a marketer can independently correct, remove or add the necessary elements.
The most optimal language for programming is Python . It was developed for students and has an elementary syntax, so it is easy to remember, it is intuitive even for a non-specialist. The main advantages are its simplicity, fast and easy learning, a huge number of ready-made libraries, and a fairly high speed of operations.