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Labor statistics estimate that marketing analyst jobs will grow by 22% between 2020 and 2030.
And the driving force behind this growth is increasing global data production. A market research analyst role would have focused more on qualitative research in the past. But these days, marketing analysts are more like data scientists than marketers.
And since the role needs data analysis and statistical data skills, it comes with an attractive pay package.
So if you’re looking for some career advice on becoming a marketing analyst in 2022 or want to improve your chances of getting a role at a top company, this article is for you.
Why There’s a Demand for Marketing Analysts
9 Essential Skills for Marketing Analysts in 2023
2. Experiment Design Experience
5. Project Management and Reporting
8. Creativity and Diversity of Thought
Ensure You’ve Got the Necessary Skills for 2022
Why There’s a Demand for Marketing Analysts
Katie Zmijewski, the lead analyst at Market Strategies International, cites constantly evolving consumer demands as the reason companies need digital marketing analysts.
Ecommerce is no longer a niche sales medium. By 2025, ecommerce sales will make up 24.5% of total retail sales worldwide. And in 2021, consumers spent $4.9 trillion in ecommerce purchases. By its nature, ecommerce sales generate a lot of valuable ecommerce data.
Unfortunately, most marketing teams don’t have the skills to analyze this data.
Here’s where digital marketing analysts come in. They conduct market research and interpret data to uncover insights that can improve a company’s marketing campaigns. To be successful in the role, you’ll need to combine basic marketing principles with a detail-oriented mind.
And since data production is skyrocketing, so will analyst jobs and marketing analyst demand.
In the US, the median salary for a marketing analyst is $71,833 per year, including bonuses. But the salaries vary depending on location and company. Also, you don’t need a bachelor’s degree, but having one in marketing or one related to analytics will help your career goals.
The career path starts as a junior marketing analyst before moving on to a senior analyst. After that, there are management roles, like the director of analytics, marketing director, marketing manager, or chief marketing officer.
But due to the technical nature of the position, it’s also possible to switch career paths and become a data analyst or data scientist.
9 Essential Skills for Marketing Analysts in 2022
To excel as a marketing analyst, earn the big bucks and climb the ranks, ensure you have the following top skills:
1. Advanced Data Analytics
Advanced data analysis is arguably the most important skill when it comes to marketing analytics.
LinkedIn research found web analytics and Google Analytics to be two of the most in-demand digital marketing skills. On top of this, their 5th most viewed course in 2021 was on Google Analytics.
Types of statistical data that you’ll need to analyze as a marketing analyst include:
- Sales data.
- Customer data.
- Competitor analyses.
- Market research.
- Product data.
In particular, there are two top data analysis skills for 2022:
Data visualization
You may be comfortable understanding technical data, but other stakeholders won't be. Visualization takes raw data and turns it into visual elements, such as:
- Tables
- Charts
- Graphs
- And maps
These visuals help stakeholders better interpret the data. Top visualization tools to be familiar with include:
- Tableau
- Power Business Intelligence
- And Google Charts
Here’s a rundown on effective visualization if you need some step-by-step help.
Data cleaning
Tableau describes data cleaning as “the process of fixing or removing incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicate, or incomplete data within a dataset.”
And data cleaning is a crucial part of uncovering accurate insights that lead to good marketing campaigns.
🧼We explained all marketing data cleaning steps and best practices in this guide🧼
You’ll often need to pull data from several locations and across several formats to generate insights. So you’ll need to arrange the data into a uniform structure and remove any inconsistencies and errors.
It’s possible to clean data by hand using Python and R, but you can also prepare your data with an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool. An ETL platform aggregates, cleans, and stores data without manual intervention.
2. Experiment Design Experience
As a marketing analyst, experiment design is crucial for uncovering trends to pay attention to.
Aaron Christensen, VP of growth at MarketerHire, believes that “at a minimum, marketing analysts should have experience setting up a test group and a control group, running an experiment and comparing the results.”
This skill allows marketing analysts to go beyond basic A/B testing and adapt to changing circumstances like iOS 15s privacy updates.
Some aspects that you can experiment on include the company’s:
- Marketing budget allocation.
- Landing page copy.
- PPC campaigns.
- Graphic design choices.
- Email campaigns.
Many top marketing analysts also use machine learning to support their experiments or generate new ideas.
The benefits of machine learning include:
- Real-time experiment monitoring and automatic analysis across several marketing tests.
- Automatic trend recognition that you can analyze further and design an experiment around.
For example, Mailchimp provides you with Click Maps which you can use to analyze interactions. Then you can create an A/B test to see what improvements you can make to your marketing efforts.
3. Attribution Modeling
Attribution modeling is vital for understanding the impact of your company’s marketing activities.
It involves analyzing which channels and touchpoints are responsible for a marketing conversion.
For example:
- Content marketing.
- Twitter ads.
- Advertising campaigns and paid search.
- Google Ads.
- Email campaigns.
And it’s your job as a marketing analyst to decide which attribution model to run. The problem is that there are many different models you can choose from, and each distributes value differently.
Peter Foy from Agency Analytics lists six common attribution models:
- First Interaction
- Last Interaction
- Last Non-Direct Click
- Linear
- Time-Decay
- Position-Based
On top of this, you can even create custom attribution models that fit your specific marketing needs.
Each attribution method has its pros and cons, and some work better in certain situations than others. So you’ll need an understanding of each method and when to use it.
If you want to learn more about attribution modeling, you can either:
- Play around with Google’s MCF Model Tool
- Learn through their Analytics Academy.
4. Forecasting
Forecasting allows you to predict factors that affect revenue, like lead generation numbers and conversion rates.
Another aspect of forecasting is predictive modeling which involves predicting customer behavior based on past interactions.
You can use this behavior to:
- Skew marketing resources towards customers that are more likely to convert.
- Decide when and where to provide content to customers.
- Increase customer lifetime value through relevant cross- and up-sells.
- Craft a digital marketing strategy.
But forecasting also has a direct impact on the rest of the company as marketing forecasts can affect:
- Long-term management decisions.
- Sales teams.
- Investor perceptions.
- Product strategy.
To create accurate forecasts marketing analysts rely on:
- MATLAB: A programming language that shortens the time spent processing, cleaning, organizing, and visualizing data. It can also execute machine learning models, which can automate your forecasting.
- Microsoft Excel: The original data analysis platform is still popular today. VBA, its native programming language, and Microsoft’s Analysis ToolPak help marketing analysts shortcut basic statistical and analytical tasks.
If you want to learn more about these languages, you can check out:
5. Project Management and Reporting
As a marketing analyst, you’ll be running many projects across forecasting, experiment design, and data analysis.
To keep all these moving parts in working order, you’ll need project management skills. You’ll also need to coordinate with many stakeholders, including:
- Engineers
- Graphic designers
- The marketing team
- Sales and business development
It’s a good idea to use a project management tool like Trello or Basecamp. These tools can help you track the project’s progress while keeping stakeholders informed and improving work efficiency.
At the end of each project, you’ll need to create reports and dashboards that provide actionable insights for the marketing department.
Over your career, you’ll create real-time reporting dashboards and reports that highlight marketing trends. And you’ll create these using the visualization and cleaning languages and tools mentioned above.
Here’s an example of a dashboard you could create as a marketing analyst:
If you want more visual formats for your reporting, you can also learn how to create an infographic and integrate it as part of your reporting.
6. Market Research Skills
Market research is a foundational skill for any marketing analyst. This skill allows you to design practical experiments and gather data that help to improve your marketing strategies.
Marketing analysts in 2022 will typically deal with quantitative data. But you may need to do qualitative research like customer interviews and surveys.
Some examples of market research include:
- Analyzing competitor tactics
- Analyzing marketing tools
- Determining product-market fit for a new product or service
- Analyzing customer journey data
- Developing new ways to analyze marketing results
Learn how to leverage data to make better marketing decisions
7. Customer Service Know-how
In marketing, it’s vital to understand how customers tick. Knowing general customer service skills also helps build strong relationships with customers and stakeholders.
It pays to chat with customers or spend time doing customer service to understand the customer experience. Gaining direct customer feedback will help you better understand their wants and needs, allowing you to craft better marketing experiments.
If you don’t have the opportunity to talk to customers, make sure you connect with different departments, such as:
- Sales and business development.
- Account management
- Customer success
- C-suite leadership team
People in these departments will all have different angles of understanding. And it’s up to you to synthesize them into actionable experiments to support your marketing efforts.
8. Creativity and Diversity of Thought
People often mistake technical roles as being void of creativity. But this couldn’t be further from the truth—especially for marketing analysts.
Consumers' preferences always change. For example, with the growing demand for more visual forms of marketing, more and more companies have begun to embrace video marketing campaigns. So creativity and thought diversity lead to out-of-the-box thinking.
But there are misconceptions about creativity. It isn’t about reinventing the wheel. It’s about connecting things and ideas that are usually separate.
And the best ways to improve creativity and thought diversity is by reading, listening, and learning widely.
Well-known copywriter, Eddie Shleyner, draws inspiration from various sources, many unrelated to his craft.
For example:
- Jiro Dreams of Sushi by David Gelb—a film on purpose and craft.
- Reach For The Sun by Charles Bukowski—a collection of personal letters written by the author.
- The Complete Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway—a collection of fictional stories.
9. A Mix of Soft Skills
Marketing analysts don’t sit behind a screen crunching numbers all day.
Soft skills like communication, critical thinking, resourcefulness, and many others come into play.
You’ll need to:
- Design research and analysis projects.
- Navigate data privacy and tracking issues.
- Generate experiment ideas.
- Communicate with customers and various stakeholders.
On top of this, you’ll need to craft a compelling narrative about any insights you find. It isn’t enough to report the hard numbers. You need to take those numbers and explain what your company can do with them.
To learn more about communication skills, you can follow content and copywriters like Eddie Shleyner and Nicolas Cole on LinkedIn. They share tips on psychology, storytelling, and other skills.
Keep in mind that not everything you achieve as a marketing analyst has to be dependent on your repertoire of skills. The use of technology and conversion tools can help aid you on your journey to getting the results you need.
Ensure You’ve Got the Necessary Marketing Analyst Skills for 2022
These nine important skills will position you as an in-demand marketing analyst for 2022 and help you build a rewarding career.
But it’s not enough to read about them. Pick (at least) one skill set to focus on and use the resources mentioned throughout the post.
If you’d like to learn more about being a marketing analyst and industry insights from experts, check out Improvado’s blog.
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