- In this video, Mike and I are gonna talk about
why every marketer should learn JavaScript.
On more, coming up right after this.
(upbeat music)
Hi there, and welcome to another video of measureschool.com,
where we teach you the data-driven way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian, and on this channel,
we do marketing tech reviews, tutorials and
the occasional interview just like this one.
So if you haven't yet, consider subscribing.
Now, this week I had the chance to talk to Mike Arnesen,
he runs upbuild.io, a boutique marketing agency
that actually helps people out
with technical marketing specifically.
So they do SEO, CRO and analytics as well.
Now, if you wanna find out more about upbuild.io,
head over to their website and their blog
where they also have some great tips
on newest marketing tech, tips and tricks on how to
do a little bit more of the technical things
in digital marketing.
But in this interview, I talk specifically with Mike
about his technical skillset and why he thinks that
marketers should definitely learn JavaScript
if they want to become a technical marketer.
Now, we've got lots to cover, so let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
Let's talk about the topic we wanted to talk about today,
why marketers should learn JavaScript.
So could you give us a first take of why do you think
JavaScript is so important to learn as a marketer?
- Yeah, I think we talked about understanding
the underlying principles of how things work on the web.
Like it or not, JavaScript is the leading backbone
of a lot of the technologies we experience today.
So web sites are increasingly more reliant on JavaScript.
Some sites are almost completely built in JavaScript,
if you're talking about like a Node site
or an Angular.js site.
That's so JavaScript heavy and understanding that
is so helpful.
Google Tag Manager, that is, at its core,
it's an abstraction of JavaScript.
You need to understand JavaScript to understand
how GTM works, and yeah, they make it really usable
and friendly for someone who doesn't have that background,
but understanding that will make the lock click in your head
to just be like, oh, wow, here's this hidden power of it,
and it just really expands on you very quickly
once you understand like, oh, if I understand more
about JavaScript, this really just
becomes something hugely powerful.
And then, of course, SEO.
SEO is ensuring that a computer program
can experience your site the same way that a user does.
So if a user is seeing a site that's just very complex
with JavaScript, there's a lot going on,
there's a lot of interactivity.
You need to be able to understand why or why not
is that going to transfer over to a program, so it's like,
because Google's getting pretty good
at rendering JavaScript and processing it.
But the other search engines are not that far along.
Google still has, I think,
my general belief about Google is Google likes to think
they're a couple years ahead of where they actually are
in terms of, they're like oh yeah, don't worry
about your site, it's great, we'll parse
all the JavaScript and process it.
Tends to actually not be the case most of the time.
So you still need to understand like okay,
here's where we're running into roadblocks,
here's why that's happening, and maybe here's
where we can solve them.
And I think by understanding JavaScript,
you get to solve SEO problems, analytics problems,
and be more conversant with your development partners
and the people you're working with every day.
- So yeah, just to add to that, I would say that
there are a lot of use cases, there's even the PPC use cases
in order to write AdWords scripts.
There is, if you do any kind of CRO implementations
of A/B testing--
- Absolutely.
- There are so many fields of the marketing
that JavaScript touches.
Obviously, you should know a little bit
of the backbone as well like HTML and CSS,
but JavaScript is the meta skill that basically
renders everything, it's the superpower
that renders everything useless in that regard.
So let us talk a little bit more
about the communication part, so once you become
proficient at JavaScript, what do you think
are the implications on talking to developers
and communicating maybe also with your clients?
- Yeah, I mean, for me personally and the people
on my team, it's been, I kinda had a pretty okay familiarity
with JavaScript, but really in the past two years,
I've really made an intentional effort to ramp up
what I know and adapt to my knowledge, so I'm taking like,
every couple weeks I'll hop into a course at Codecademy
and learn more about like hey, why is Angular 2 different,
what's going on there.
Or like TypeScript and stuff like that.
Having a baseline understanding
of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, stuff like that,
I understood enough of okay, here's why accessibility
and content rendering is really important for SEO.
But I was always like, well, this is like SEO best practice.
Everybody should make sure their site renders,
of course, obviously.
So when I ran into a site that was built on Angular
or React or Node or anything like that,
and it didn't render with that JavaScript,
I would kinda get annoyed 'cause I'm like,
how did these people not know that, of course,
they should totally do it.
But once I dug deeper and understood
more complex topics around, like let's continue
with the Angular example.
So taking three courses in Codecademy with Angular 2.
And you know, like other JSON technologies, like Ruby,
for that matter, just like seeing the similarities there.
It suddenly clicked and I was like, I know why developers
have chosen to do this now.
It makes sense, it's totally powerful to be able
to dynamically pull stuff in client side and
kinda build out experiences on the fly
and not put everything at a unique URL
that needs to load up, query a server side database
and bring in the information, it can be kinda slow.
The benefits became very clear.
And at an interpersonal level, that made it so much easier
to be able to come to development partners
from a place of empathy and be like hey,
I totally get why this is awesome.
Angular actually is cool.
Unfortunately, there's a little bit of workaround
we're gonna have to figure out because here's X, Y and X
about the reality of SEO today, so let's just figure out
a happy middle ground, instead of coming at it from like,
hey, this site sucks, it needs to change
because search engines can't get at it.
You can come from a different approach
once you understand it more and speak in their terms and
convey that same passion about the cool technologies.
It's super super helpful for building relationships
and getting problems solved together.
- Absolutely.
What are some use cases for you
and the work that you have done with JavaScript?
Yeah, what are some use cases
where you used it on clients' projects, for example?
- Yeah.
Here's a cool example that we, I mean, I guess that involves
pretty much everything.
We work with a lot of, maybe we don't work with
a lot of clients that have a lot of layers,
but we work with a couple bigger organizations
that have a lot of different divisions.
So we work with a non-profit, they do medical research
and so we worked the fundraising arm.
And they really needed to basically have a popup
on their site that was going to ask people to donate.
They were gonna have a big campaign, and they had
essentially run out of budget with their developer.
And the developer didn't have a lot of time either,
so even if they had the budget, it might not have happened.
And they were like, "Well, we wish
"we could have this popup come up on our site
"that's going to ask people like donate,
"drive them to our donation page."
And we were like hey, let's take a crack at that.
So what we ended up doing, so essentially,
no one involved on our side or
with our client's direct contact
could really access the code base of the site.
So if we wanted to like upload the file,
it's not gonna happen.
If we want to change content, it was not gonna happen.
So we got actually a file in Adobe InDesign,
and they were like, "Hey, this is what
"we want this to look like."
So we actually went to, we just used Codepen
to mock up what this code is gonna look like,
we got the HTML, the CSS, the images,
uploaded the images to our server.
Basically made the popup together
in functional, responsive HTML
with the JavaScript components.
And then we actually hopped into Google Tag Manager
and said hey, let's create a custom HTML tag,
let's put all the code in there that's required
and have that fire after six seconds of being on the site,
which is what the client wanted, and we actually got it
right in time for when they needed it.
So we got to basically hop in, get around all the obstacles
using our understanding of JavaScript and Google Tag Manager
which is fantastic, I'll never not
be in love with that tool.
To actually get real business results for a client.
For me, that's the most exciting thing
about knowing JavaScript, and Google Tag Manager,
for that matter, is being able to overcome
or go around problems as they arise and just be like hey,
we need to keep moving forward.
These tools make it incredibly easy to do so
if we just know enough to be able to ask the right questions
and dig for the answers.
- Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, just a disclaimer, you told me that before,
it's probably not best practice to do that all the time,
but in the end, it's a viable method,
and I will say that also scraping from websites
via Google Tag Manager, it's definitely a viable method
to get around obstacles, it's not best practice, but...
- Yeah.
- If speed is the thing that you need right now,
then you should implement it that way and maybe
then talk to the developer later on
when they have time and the budget
to implement that properly on the server side as well.
Great talk, first of all, but where can people
find out more about you and what you're up to,
and maybe a little more about Upbuild?
- Yeah.
So people can find me at mikearnesen.com.
Pretty easy spot to get to, also mike_arnesen on Twitter.
It's kinda my two main channels where I do stuff,
and then my company is upbuild.io, so people can
check us out there, we try to blog about
what we consider cutting edge technical marketing stuff so
hopefully there's some good tips there for people
who are interested in learning more about this stuff.
- Yeah, absolutely, it's a great blog and I also read
that story about, your building story of Upbuild.
That's something people should check out, definitely.
- Awesome.
- Thank you.
Thank you, Mike, for being on the show.
- Thank you for having me, it's been an absolute pleasure.
- Thank you.
(upbeat music)
All right, so there you have it,
this is why you should learn JavaScript as a marketer.
There are daily new use cases for JavaScript, really.
So if you haven't yet, then you should definitely learn it.
There are new technologies coming out, obviously,
but also in our marketing field, there is PPC, SEO, CRO
that you can use JavaScript in,
there are automation scripts such as Apps Script or
Google AdWords Scripts that also run purely on JavaScript
that are definitely worth digging into
if you know already JavaScript.
And obviously, Analytics and Tracking
and Google Tag Manager is very much based on JavaScript,
and so it's very worth learning that skill.
Now, you might have noticed that we have cut this interview
a little bit short.
If you wanna see the full version,
then head over to techmarketer.io/mikearnesen,
where I dig into a little bit more of his skillset,
how he built his career, and how he helped his clients out
with his digital marketing and technical marketing skills.
So check it out at techmarketer.io/mikearnesen.
Now, if you wanna see more of these interviews,
then hit that subscribe button right over there,
'cause we will bring you new videos every week,
and we also have already some interviews
that you can see on our channel as well.
My name is Julian.
Till next time.