Why SQL is Useful for Marketers

Advantages Of SQL In Digital Marketing

Together with marketing, SQL is utilized in many fields. So, the most significant thing in today’s world is data. And where there is data, there is SQL. To run any marketing campaign, marketers, data analysts, and product managers have to pull data to make a clear picture of what is working. Every time you research, you will possibly find new data. You will definitely collect the data in the database and analyze it. According to this collected data, marketers will plan their campaigns. So, in the entire process, you will need SQL since SQL deals with data. You have to add a query to deal with data and also various tools for data analysis and data mining.

In this blog post, you will find an intro to SQL basics.

Table of contents:

  1. What Is Structured Query Language (SQL)?
  2. What The Options For Learning SQL For Marketing
  3. Why People Are Turning To Data-driven Marketing
  4. When To Use SQL For Data Analysis?
  5. How To Make SQL Query

What Is Structured Query Language (SQL)?

In simple words, SQL is a basic programming language that is deployed to pull information from a database. Every auction your clients take is captured in a customer database somewhere. Understanding how to use SQL enables you to retrieve any kind of data about your customers. You can communicate with relational databases utilizing SQL, the database language for interacting with management systems. SQL enables the joining of Google analytics tables using a few lines of code, with a structure most non-technical employees can learn faster.

Imagine you had an Excel spreadsheet that comprised of every possible bit of data you have about your clients- how often they have bought from you, what plans they are on, the marketing campaigns they saw when they signed up, when they signed up, every action they have taken on your site or within your application- there is so much you could do with that data. Knowing SQL is typically just like having access to such a spreadsheet. 

You can deploy it to:

  • Do cohort analysis and see if clients are utilizing your product more or less over time
  • Analyze various marketing campaigns
  • Check what actions your most valuable customers took
  • Identify the demographics of your most valuable clients 
  • Create ad campaigns targeting similar demographics

These types of technical skills are only becoming essential as marketing becomes more data-driven. Despite whether or not marketers subscribe to these labels, technical skills are becoming a requirement for success in online marketing. Typically, the marketers who understand SQL, can write code, perform quantitive analysis, and leverage APIs will be the most productive and desirable individuals in the industry.

What The Options For Learning SQL For Marketing

Good SQL Courses For Marketers

In this section, we have reviewed picks of the best SQL tutorials and courses for marketers and business analysts. Hopefully, it helps you select the right one for your personal needs. If mastered well, SQL levels up your working efficiency:

  • Online SQL for Marketers- Microsoft SQL Server And Tableau Edition
  • Online SQL For Marketers- MySQL Edition
  • SQL Workshop Online Course For Marketers
  • Data Manipulation at Scale: Systems and Algorithms for Python and SQL
  • Interactive Online Courses For SQL
  • Workshops Offered At Various Conferences
    • Digital Anaytics Association
    • Digital Analytics Hub
    • eMetrics-Marketing Analytics Summit

All workshops offer you SQL scripts that you can use immediately. Note there are other marketer courses that can equip you with SQL skills.

In any SQL basic course, you will learn how to:

  • Create simple client reports using aggregate functions
  • Work with multiple tables
  • Write complex ‘where’ conditions
  • Build basic reports from scratch
  • Retrieve information from an SQL database
  • Understand SQL set operations
  • Write complex instructions and subqueries

Why People Are Turning To Data-driven Marketing With SQL

Data driven marketing might sound like a buzzword, like an influencer, or like growth hackers, but it is for more than that. The term data driven marketing refers to marketing strategies founded on insights from big data. It can assist you in predicting future consumer behavior and work more effectively with your present customer base.By deploying SQL to analyze your databases and follow a data-driven marketing strategy, you can be much more effective at analyzing, organizing, and applying data to your marketing campaigns.

Below are some of the ways SQL can make you a better marketer:

  • SQL skills will make you a generalist specialist: Today, managers are looking for marketing generalists who have a broad understanding of the marketing cycle and specialized skills like designing, coding, and analyzing data.
  • Learning SQL will ramp up the speed of your marketing team’s performance: With SQL, you will not have to wait around for a developer to help you analyze basic database information.Here is how SQL will help your marketing team:
  1. More efficient
  2. Gather better insights
  3. Run better campaigns
  • You can perform your own quantitative analysis: If you become familiar with SQL, the world of quantitative analysis is your oyster. SQL assists you in researching the answer swiftly and your marketing objectives by the time.
  • SQL will assist you in learning more about your audience: The insights you can get from utilizing SQL to access your database are limitless. You will learn interesting things about your customers and business.

When To Use SQL For Data Analysis?

SQL is best utilized when you need to answer particular, granular questions about your startup or established business that out-of-the-box tools are not equipped to answer. For instance, an SQL database is helpful if you want to organize customer behavior into various cohorts and analyze it, mix data from various sources or platforms for integrated data analytics, or build customized dashboards with unique metrics. There comes a point in every company where the funnel analysis, trend lines, and cohort reports just do not provide the granularity you are seeking- is where SQL comes in.

How To Make SQL Query

Making SQL Queries

One of the most significant SQL functionality you can learn as a marketer is a simple query. An SQL query is a question posed to the database utilizing SQL, which prompts it to retrieve the relevant data. Let us say you want to know if your company’s newer clients are committing to yearly plans. 

  • First, you will write an SQR query requesting information on how many clients who have been with the business for two years or less are subscribed to monthly contracts. 
  • To do this, utilize SQL to count the number of data entries from the customer detail table where the tenure of that client is less than two years, and the agreement type is monthly. Use a SQL type that is fine for these data sets. 
  • Typically, the syntax is logical once you get the hang of it and reads almost exactly the same as you would write it in English. The SQL query for this objective would be like this:

Select count (*) From customer detail

Where tenure <= 2 and contract_type = ‘month-to-month’

And here is how the result would look like:

Row Number Count
1 1

The result you get from these simple queries:

  • One new client is on a yearly contract
  • Three new clients are on month-to-month contracts-

This shows that those who have been with your company two years and under appear more reluctant to sign on for longer terms. Hope we have answered your question ‘ Why SQL is useful to marketers?’ Now, you can go ahead and take the SQL basics course.

About Author