
I Have No Technical Skills
The life of a marketer in the Tech Capital of the World
It’s a funny feeling working for a tech company in San Francisco and not possessing a single technical skill. I can’t code, and the extent of my HTML ability is bolding and italicizing text.
And you know what? That’s just fine.
My job is communicating with our mostly nontechnical users, and finding more of them to try our product. The marketing team at JotForm is sort of the litmus test: if it doesn’t make sense to us, it’s not going to make sense to our users. That’s sort of the great thing about JotForm: it’s a tool that’s designed to be easy to use, so it’s simple enough for us to understand and sell it well. We also have measures in place to make sure we can take material that is more complicated and make it easy to understand.
Our small marketing department is actually nicely set up in this way. We do have a more technically minded marketer on staff that helps break down the technical components of our product to the less technically savvy of us. There’s usually a white board involved and a few confused questions. But once it makes sense to us, we ready ourselves to tell the world. That’s when we get to use our areas of expertise.
Some people call marketing skills “soft skills” — a term I’m not a fan of. These soft skills had to be developed for just as many years as technical skills, just in ways you wouldn’t imagine, like through extracurriculars after school or through various fields of study in college.
In an nutshell, here are the most important attributes for our marketing team to possess:
Ability to write well and quickly
Writing is really the most important thing the marketing department does for JotForm, and we do it every day in one way or another. Whether it’s a blog post, guest post, update for internal employees, social post, video script, press release, medium article, pitch email to press, or vendor email, it needs to be crafted carefully and thoughtfully.
A healthy obsession with company growth
The first thing I check every single morning when I wake up is the daily report telling us how many users we gained from the previous day, broken down by our various pricing plans. If our team wasn’t concerned about this, we’d be in the wrong business. Growth is everything, and its marketing’s job to concern ourselves over that more than anyone else.
Conceptual understanding of numbers
Not advanced calculus, but a genuine understanding of data. Numbers are intertwined with words for our marketing team. We write, then we check to see how it does (how many comments it receives, how many pageviews, how many referral links back to JotForm, how many shares, retweets, etc.).
Of course, there are plenty of other skills that help us through the day, but those are at the core of what we do.
The reality is, we have a swarm of talented developers who understand what goes into making JotForm what it is. Without them, of course, there’d be nothing to market. But having them be technically proficient allows us to focus on what we’re best at, which is communicating.