Add to your Toolkit: Why Coding Skills are important to a Digital Marketer
In Digital Marketing, we as Marketers try to create the best content possible suited for our consumers, content that is relevant to their inquires that they can find in websites that are easy to navigate and interact with. One of the main goals of a Marketer is to create value for consumers, and he/she does so by having extensive knowledge on the product or service he/she is involved with; having complete knowledge of the process a product or service goes through is a huge advantage to communicate its value.
Now, when Marketers try to improve a website, it's a huge advantage if they understand the process it went through until its completion; I'm talking about how it was designed, the skeleton of a website, what makes it look so appealing to consumers, in short: understand how it's coded. Knowing how a website works gives us an edge to add value to it.
The Basics of Coding
Having recently done a couple of lessons in Code Academy on the basics of coding, I can honestly tell you that having extensive knowledge on how to add, modify or take away things from a website for its overall improvement is a huge tool in your repertoire as a Digital Marketer.
Code Academy has great lessons on the 2 pillars of building an effective website: HTML and CSS. HTML stands for Hypertext Makeup Language and it focuses on building the structure of a website, while CSS or Cascading Style Sheets takes care of the a presentation of a website. Digital Marketers need to understand both to go even more in depth on how create outstanding content for their consumers.
An article done by Charlotte Rodgers in Marketing Week called "Is coding a must-have for marketer?" reveals a debate by some Marketers saying that this is fact is a must have, the way the world is changing into a more Digital presence asks them to at least know the basics of coding, and if you ask me, this is completely accurate. Knowing at least the basics of coding gives you a change to get your hands dirty in a website so you don't have to depend on a developer.
