You’ve heard it said before that learning how to code is a beneficial skill for everyone today. But maybe, as an online marketer – SEO expert, SMM expert or PPC/SEM expert – you probably don’t think that applies to you. Surely you can do your job just as effectively without having to know the basics of web development, right?
Wrong. Having even the most basic knowledge of CSS and HTML can make a significant difference to your career. It’s not just for web designers and developers or other tech-inclined people. In truth, everyone can benefit from having a little coding knowledge, from small business owners and sales managers to event coordinators and even magicians. Provided you use the Internet to conduct some of your business – and that’s virtually everyone over the age of five.
Below are twelve areas you can apply your coding to your marketing career:
Designing Unique Email Correspondence
Email marketing is one of the most important tools in an online marketer’s repertoire. With just a little web coding skill, you can improve your emails, making them engaging and beautiful to look at, something your subscribers will look forward to reading. Using HTML and CSS editors available in most email marketing suites, you can uniquely style and organize your online correspondence and improve your read and response rates.
Designing Unique Corporate Newsletters
The most important thing about writing a corporate newsletter isn’t actually writing it; it’s formatting it in such a way that people enjoy reading. Otherwise, what’s the point of creating it in the first place, right? You can use HTML and CSS coding to customize your newsletter templates and layouts in order to reflect your corporate identity as well as your unique style. That way, recipients will always look forward to the next one.
Tweak Your WordPress Blog/Website
Did you know that WordPress is the most popular content management system on which corporate blogs and websites are built? This is good news if your company is one of the many, as you can easily tweak elements and layouts of templates on WordPress to make them more outstanding and unique, bringing out the hidden beauty of your website. In addition, you don’t have to hunt down the already-overworked design team each time you need to make small changes or add content to the website, which occurs very often in a corporate setting.
Bragging Rights and Training
Imagine being that person on the online marketing team that knows HTML and CSS. Not only will you earn the respect and admiration of the others on the team, you can train your colleagues and even boss to reduce the pressure on the design team. This will reduce the quarrels with the design guys for being late with that content update yet again. Everyone on the team will be able to make easy updates on the newsletters, email and website, so that nothing grinds to a halt when you’re away.
Winning Over the Technical Team
Nothing endears you faster to the tech guys than speaking like one of them. In the average web development company India, the tech and marketing teams are always at loggerheads because no one seems to appreciate the job of the other. With a little coding knowledge, you can be the middleman between the developers and marketers. You can communicate your desires more specifically, even if you’re not able to carry them out yourself, and you’ll understand their concerns, limitations and possibilities and be able to convey them effectively to your team.
Fine-Tune Your Tumblr Blog
You can easily set up a Tumblr or WordPress blog or a simple website to show off your side hustle things, so that you can get more out of your side hustle, whatever it may be. In this world where the Internet rules, potential and current clients should be able to be directed to your online profile where they can see some of your work – this builds you up in their heads as a trustworthy source. So go ahead, learn a little coding so that you don’t have to spend your hard-earned money each time you want to update your online photography or graphic design portfolio. You can take the simple free Tumblr and WordPress templates and turn them into stunning layouts according to your creative whims.
Setting Up Your Resume Website
Resume websites are becoming a more popular tool to market oneself to potential clients or employers. You can do more than just building a customized blog; you can actually code your entire website from scratch, especially as you advance your CSS and HTML knowledge. Sounds almost surreal, but it is actually possible to build a simple site from nothing using CSS and HTML. And picture the look on the employer’s face when you tell him/her that you did everything yourself, not to mention the glowing pride in your own heart!
Increasing Your Skill Repertoire
If you are fairly good with Adobe Photoshop, you can even create fancier things, like turning your website mock-ups into actual websites. You can belong to the almost-extinct group of designers who know how to code, and reap the best of all worlds: design, build and market websites effectively.
Learn More and Earn More
Given that the Internet is built on the thin shoulders of HTML and CSS, knowing these two languages sets the stage for you to learn other web programming languages, like PHP, Ruby and JavaScript. The more of these you know the easier it becomes to learn the rest, and pretty soon you’ll have more jobs at your disposal than you care for. It’ll just be about taking your pick.
