How to Learn SQL for Marketing Analytics With LearnSQL.com

SQL is a valuable tool for any experts wanting to make data-driven decisions. Marketers are no exception. Let's explore how to design an effective learning path for SQL in marketing.

SQL for marketing analytics is used to understand customers better and to increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. If you work in marketing and want to join other marketing experts who have already benefited from this tool, you need to learn SQL.

However, you don't need to follow the same path as database administrators and other data experts. You can learn the skills that are useful for your particular job assignments. In this article, we show an SQL learning path specifically for marketing analysts, assembled from interactive courses at LearnSQL.com.

Everyone needs to start with the basics. So, if you are new to SQL, the SQL Basics course is your first stop. With 129 interactive exercises, this course covers the most important SQL topics, such as retrieving data from one or more tables, aggregating and grouping data, and combining query results from multiple tables.

But before you dive into writing SQL queries, let's briefly discuss what SQL is and how marketers use it.

SQL for Marketing Analytics

SQL, or Structured Query Language, is a programming language used to interact with databases. You use SQL to store, manipulate, and retrieve data from relational databases.

You can even use SQL to work with data in spreadsheets. Check out this guide for a more detailed introduction to SQL.

Here, I want to focus more on how learning SQL is useful for marketers. There is a widespread misconception that SQL is used only by programmers, database administrators, and data scientists. On the contrary, specialists across different business lines and departments use SQL to base their daily strategic and operational decisions on data. In today's data-driven organizations, SQL is used in sales, logistics, HR, audit, and of course, marketing.

Among a long list of potential use cases, marketers use SQL to:

• Better understand the customer acquisition process.
• Build more effective customer segmentation models.
• Learn how to retain customers.
• Analyze and compare the effectiveness of different marketing channels.
• Plan and design effective advertising campaigns.
• Analyze data about web page visitors using Google Analytics.
• Analyze media mentions.

SQL is extremely valuable in marketing analytics (see more examples here). If you choose the right resources and learning path, you learn it very quickly and effectively.

Why Choose LearnSQL.com to Learn SQL for Marketing?

It's not very difficult to learn SQL, but the key to success lies in lots of practice. You cannot learn a new programming language, even a beginner-friendly one such as SQL, without actual coding.

Since books, articles, and video tutorials do not provide you with the practical experience you need, the best way for a newbie to learn SQL is by taking interactive online courses. It is a relatively cheap, fast, convenient, and effective solution.

However, there are tons of online courses. It is challenging to choose the right one.

I think the LearnSQL.com platform is one of the best solutions available on the market. Here is why:

1. Interactive exercises. Each course on the LearnSQL.com platform includes dozens and sometimes even hundreds of interactive exercises. For each exercise, you get a piece of reading, where concepts are explained in detail and with examples. Then, you get a task related to the same topic, in which you write actual SQL code to solve a given problem. You get feedback on your code immediately – whether it's correct or wrong, and if wrong, where to look for an error.

   An exercise with a correct answer

   An exercise with an incorrect answer

2. No IT background required. You don't need any prior exposure to IT to take courses on LearnSQL.com. They are designed for analysts across different industries and areas of expertise, including marketing, sales, HR, logistics, etc.
3. Real experience from the comfort of your browser. You don't need to install any additional software on your computer to practice on the LearnSQL.com platform. You complete all the exercises from the comfort of your browser. A lot goes on under the hood: a real database runs your code, checks your solution, and tells you if it's correct or not.
4. Exercises resembling real-world problems. The datasets in the course and the exercises are designed to resemble real-world problems. With each exercise, you learn how to solve problems you are likely to encounter in your actual job assignments. This allows you to build higher confidence in your SQL skills.
5. Focus on specific business tasks, including marketing. Despite the huge number of online educational platforms, there aren't many good SQL courses for marketers. The LearnSQL.com platform has several courses that focus on skills required for marketing analytics.

Let's discuss which courses help you build the SQL skills needed for the specific assignments you encounter as a marketer.

SQL Learning Path for Marketers

The SQL learning path for marketers starts at the same point as it starts for other specialists – the basics.

1. SQL Basics

The SQL Basics course is for anyone who needs basic SQL training. It starts from the very beginning and covers the most important SQL topics, such as retrieving data from one or more tables, aggregating and grouping data, and combining query results from multiple tables. This course is a good, thorough, and practical introduction to SQL.

On LearnSQL.com, SQL Basics is available for standard SQL and the MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MySQL dialects. This is valuable if your company uses one of those RDBMSs.

After you learn the basics, you are ready to continue with other business-focused courses.

2. Creating Basic SQL Reports

Creating Basic SQL Reports is an intermediate-level course for those who know the SQL basics. With 97 interactive exercises, the course is focused on writing real-world reports in SQL to track and analyze business performance metrics.

In the course, you work with data from a fictional store. Among other things, you track the most popular product categories, the value of the average order, and the number of orders a typical customer makes. There are customers, products, product categories, orders, etc. almost everywhere, making it easy to adapt these queries to other businesses.

The course demonstrates common patterns and techniques used in generating SQL reports. It also discusses common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid.

3. Customer Behavior Analysis in SQL

Customer Behavior Analysis in SQL is an intermediate-level course designed for marketing analysts. As the title suggests, the course teaches how to do customer behavior analysis in SQL to understand the customer lifecycle.

With each subsequent course section, you learn how to use SQL to analyze different stages of the customer funnel: registration, conversion to a paid client, customer activity with your product, and finally customer churn. After completing the course with its 76 interactive exercises, you know how to compute various marketing metrics in SQL, such as conversion rates and time to first order.

Here again, we analyze the store performance in our examples. Store metrics capture the essence of customer behavior metrics and are straightforward to adapt to different businesses.

This overview article has more about the course "Customer Behavior Analysis in SQL."

4. Revenue Trend Analysis in SQL

Revenue Trend Analysis in SQL is also an intermediate-level course that teaches important SQL skills for marketing analysts. With 60 interactive exercises, the course explains how to perform SQL trend analyses and build a meaningful revenue report from scratch.

For example, you learn how to compute the total revenue of your company during a given period, how to compute the year-to-date and month-to-date revenues, how to compare revenue across different time periods and product categories, and how to create a clear and concise revenue report in SQL.

This course may not be at the top of the list for marketing analysts, but it is helpful if your work includes analyzing financial data for your business.

Read more in this overview article about the course "Revenue Trend Analysis in SQL."

Learn SQL for Marketing Analytics

Now you have seen how learning SQL for marketing analytics on LearnSQL.com improves the effectiveness of your marketing decisions. All that is left for you is to take the next step: learn SQL.

Thanks for reading, and happy learning!