What are the most common skills among marketers?

by:

Jessica Jacobson

Once a month we dig into the data underlying the NetWise Audience Platform to see what interesting trends we can uncover in our “From the Data” posts. Want to make sure you don’t miss the next one? Want even more info? Sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of the page.

Here’s what we’ve got this month:

Background

The NetWise platform allows users to target contacts based on skillsets through the advanced filter section. You can filter by up to five different skill columns.

For this exercise, we grabbed all five skill data points and figured out which ones were the most common. Then we filtered the population down to those working in the marketing job function within the Advertising & Marketing industry.

The Query

Used the UNION ALL command to combine skills listed across five columns.
Counted up the number of skills usually associated with each contact.
Looked at the distribution of skill counts per contact.
Looked at the top 100 skills listed.

Insights

62% of our marketing contacts who work in the marketing & advertising industry have at least one skill listed.
Of those, 97% have five skills listed. This means that nearly all of our contacts have five skills listed if they have any at all.
There are 34,000 unique skills.
Social Media, Event Planning, Leadership, Marketing, and Copywriting are the top 5 skills among marketers.
Other top skills include Microsoft Office, Customer Service, Interactive Marketing, and Public Speaking.

Takeaways

This analysis is useful for understanding the skills that marketers typically have. You can see from the data that although there are some common skills among marketers, there are many different skills that make marketers successful.
It’s not surprising that social media is the top skill listed. Social Media marketing is a tool that marketers use heavily to reach a variety of audiences.
Event Planning is a common marketing function, but we were a little surprised to see it listed as the second most frequent. Maybe this could mean that in-person events such as conferences will make a big comeback in the near future.

See you next month