A marketing analyst needs these 6 skills.

How do you spot a marketing analyst who can level up your measurement capabilities? 

Credentials like bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees, or certifications in Google Analytics or Microsoft Excel — they’re great, but they aren’t enough to guarantee success on the marketing analyst career path. 

Great candidates in this role have a special skillset — one few other marketing specialists have — that they developed through not only formal training, but work experience and real-world problem-solving. 

Key skills for the marketing analyst role include:

  • Advanced data analytics and statistics: A marketing analyst’s expertise here goes deep. Using statistical software and running multivariate analyses is no problem for them, and they know which regressions make the most sense for which data sets.
  • Forecasting and predictive modeling: A marketing analyst has the data science chops to build a forecasting model without overfitting to existing data or ignoring key variables. This can help you gauge your growth trajectory and avoid oversaturating channels. 
  • Attribution modeling: If a customer sees your ads on multiple channels before buying, how should you attribute that revenue? Marketing analysts assess that for e-commerce shops, brick-and-mortar establishments, and hybrid businesses.  When first- and last-touch attribution don’t fit, they create custom multi-touch attribution models. 
  • Dashboard building: Using tools like Looker and Tableau, marketing analysts can build custom dashboards and data visualizations for different marketing stakeholders, so they can easily access relevant graphs of channel or team performance over time.
  • SQL coding: SQL is the language commonly used for querying data warehouses directly — something the best marketing analysts can do autonomously. 
  • Communication: Excellent marketing analysis is nothing if a candidate can’t clearly communicate their methods and findings. They should be able to speak conversationally about the “why” behind their hypotheses, noteworthy performance shifts and any impactful changes in market conditions and market trends.