SQL for marketers

- [Brett] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips. I'm Brett Batesole and this week, I want to encourage you to consider learning SQL as a new skill. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. Simply put, it's a basic programming language that's used to retrieve data from databases. Now as marketers, we're curious. It's part of our responsibility to ask lots of questions. And most of these questions require data to answer, and that data tends to be locked away into a database. The faster you can get to that data, the faster you can adjust your marketing objectives. And this data-driven marketing mindset delivers far better results. And not only that, but data analysis skills are incredibly in demand, more and more job requirements for marketers, are starting to list SQL. So, to retrieve data out of a database, you'll typically use what's known as an SQL query. And this lets you outline what information you want and from where. Let's say we have these questions. We want to know what percentage of our users logged in last week. Or how many users visited once, but have not returned. Or even, who your top ten active users are. This data is likely not in Google Analytics, but instead in your database. So you'll want to create a query that asks the database for that answer. And here's an example of a basic query. You're essentially going to say "I want to get this piece of data "from this table, where the data matches these criteria." Now it's actually not incredibly difficult to learn the basics of how to get that data. And even if you're going to be using an existing reporting interface, such as Tableau or Cluvio, knowing how it works under the hood can greatly improve your expertise or even your ability to expand that data further. Now, even though I'm fairly proficient at SQL, I'm not going to pretend that I'm ready to teach it. I've still got plenty of learning to do myself. So I want to point you towards the course SQL for Data Reporting and Analysis. This course is a great place to learn how to get the information you need, without having to go too deep on everything there is to know about SQL. You can also check out the LinkedIn topic page for SQL, at linkedin.com/topic/sql. Here you can engage with others who have this skill, or identify learning paths and posts related to this topic. I highly recommend that you take some time to explore SQL. Maybe schedule time to sit down with the developer on your team, who can secure you read-only access to your database and then get you set up with a client, that'll allow you to start playing around with your own SQL queries. Thanks for checking in this week. As always, I'd love to hear from you. So connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter via @bradbatesole. And let me know if you're thinking about learning SQL. I'll see ya next week.