With digital marketing being listed as one of the hottest jobs by LinkedIn, it’s not surprising marketing analytics roles are in high demand. With the need for marketing analysts increasingly rising in job postings, we’ve scoured the web for the most essential skills one should have before applying for these jobs.
What Does a Marketing Analyst Do?
What makes a successful marketing analyst exactly? First, marketing analysts determine what services and products are best to sell for maximum profit. Then, they study what other competing companies are doing while looking at the market conditions and keeping track of their customer’s habits.
In order to be a marketing analyst, you must be able to have a handle on market research, marketing communications, brand marketing, digital marketing, retail marketing, B2B marketing, and traditional offline marketing.
You must find out what parts of your project require the most budget and time. This can mean creating custom dashboards to track your work, deciding what’s worth your energy and what to cut back on, and looking for the correlations in customer spending. All of this requires a special type of worker, which is the marketing analyst.
Job Requirements for a Marketing Analyst
Here’s a simple list of job requirements we’ve found in marketing analyst job postings:
- Heavy data reporting skills
- Knows the ins and outs of marketing
- Knows importance of KPIs for measuring each tactic
- Identifies opportunities to increase efficiency and size of the marketing program
- Builds measurement strategies for performance marketing
- Ability to report on multiple channels
- Designs A/B test that surpasses match’s built-in capabilities
- Analyzes the results of the testing
- Measures customer acquisition costs (CAC) and keeps track of how it changes throughout the day
And here is a more complex list of skills needed as mentioned by actual marketing analysts working today:
- An advanced understanding of statistics and data analytics to use data for predictive analytics, forecasting, significance calculations, and data for modeling.
- Ability to work with data from various different channels but also have a specialty such as earned media analytics, owned media analytics, or paid media analytics.
- Using attribution modeling to know the right questions to ask and how to find the answer. Knowing how to use multi-touch attribution (counts all touchpoints in between customers and companies and assigns fraction credit for a conversion), last-touch attribution (tells you the last interaction between company and customer for a conversion), and first-touch attribution (counts first interaction between company and customer as most valuable).
- Designs A/B tests with the ability to create a test group, control group, ability to run the experiment, and compare the results.
- Builds dashboards and reports on them. You need to be able to turn a ton of data into useful information, and there’s no way around it. This can be done by creating dashboards to keep track of marketing activities, knowing the most significant trends and reporting on them, and addressing key metrics to your marketing manager.
- Use predictive analytics and your statistics skillset to make predictions about the future of your business. This can be done by using predictive modeling (foreseeing what your customer will do) and forecasting (predict big trends that will occur over time)
- SQL coding to take data from the data warehouse, and be able to pull said data on your own
Dive Into Marketing Analytics Today
This all may seem intimidating at first read, but it gets easier after taking the first step of your journey. Just analyze each step one at a time, and you’ll already be well on your way. Explore the Marketing Analytics Nanodegree to gain foundational data skills applicable to marketing. Collect and analyze data, model marketing scenarios, and communicate your findings with Excel, Tableau, Google Analytics, and Data Studio.
