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How to Level Up Your T-shaped Marketer Skills

Over 80 Resources for 27 Different Marketing Skills

Buffer
Startup Grind
Published in
10 min readApr 5, 2017

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Recently at Buffer, we’ve been exploring a new marketing career growth framework — the T-shaped marketer framework.

This framework was greatly inspired by ’s article on becoming a customer acquisition expert and an article from Distilled on building T-shaped web marketing skill set.

Here’s how our T-shaped marketer diagram looks like:

If you are interested, you can read more about the framework here.

Leveling Up Your Marketing Skills

If you are keen to follow the framework (or to become a better marketer), I believe you’d wish to know how to level up on those skills. Fortunately, there are a ton of resources on most any marketing skill you could hope to achieve.

Here’re a few of the resources we’ve found helpful as we’ve leveled up in all the different areas of a Buffer T-shaped marketer.

Base knowledge

Behavior Psychology

Knowledge in this area helps you better understand why people do what they do — a handy skill in most any job, particularly so when you’re eager to understand why people click, like, share, and buy.

Storytelling

We see storytelling and copywriting as different things. Storytelling is about knowing how to put together a narrative. Copywriting is about knowing the right words to use to express that narrative.

Data and Analytics

Before you get into the weeds of Excel, Looker, SQL, etc., it’s essential to have a foundation in the general concept of data and analytics so that you know what’s possible to learn data and what makes for good data analysis.

Research

We were lucky to get in early with customer development at Buffer, which helped us cultivate a research culture. In specific marketing terms, research means checking with your audience to learn their experience, their problems, and their wishes. In more general terms, research is about putting a process to one’s curiosity.

Design and UX

We don’t expect Buffer marketers to be design pros (we’ve written several articles admitting we’re far from professionals). What we look for instead is a cultivated design eye: Do you have good taste? Can you identify the elements of design that lead to high quality?

Branding and positioning

This one could possibly also fit in “marketing foundation,” but I see branding as a bigger concept. We all have personal brands (whether we actively cultivate it or not). We position ourselves for new jobs and opportunities. There’s a basic knowledge here that transcends marketing.

Marketing foundation

Copywriting

As I mentioned above, copywriting is about knowing the best words to use in order to get a message across.

Sketch, Canva, and Wireframing

This is a step up from the base knowledge of “Design and UX.” Once you know the principles of design, how far can you get with creating something yourself? Sketch and Canva just so happen to be our tools of choice. Photoshop or another software might make sense for your marketing team.

A/B testing

A/B testing can somewhat share a line with Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), but we split it out on its own because we want all our marketing team to understand the basic principles behind A/B testing. First, do you have a testing mindset? (Which, put another way, could be “do you have a data and growth mindset?) Then second, if you think about testing, do you have the ability to bring basic scientific tests into your area of expertise? A/B testing is like our default setting for scientific tests.

Video

For many companies, video is a channel all its own. For us, video is such a big part of the social media marketing we do that it just makes sense for us all to be well-versed with what it takes to create a compelling video and be confident on camera.

The Down and Dirty DIY Lighting Kit | Wistia Learning Center

Statistics and Excel

This is the next step beyond data and analytics. We’d love for everyone on the team to be able to put together a solid spreadsheet to track numbers and goals.

Funnel marketing

How does a customer become a customer? This feels like something it’d be great for all on the marketing team to know, even if they only have a particular impact on one portion of the funnel.

HTML and CSS

This level of code knowledge can come in handy in so many places: blog posts, landing pages, email design, just to name a few.

  • Community: Stack Overflow
  • Website: Treehouse
  • Tip: Right-click and choose “View Source” or “Inspect Element” to see how any website is built

Customer experience (CX)

CX is a big part of Buffer as a company, which is why we emphasize it for our marketing team. This can look a number of different ways: for instance, hopping into the inbox to answer support tickets or thinking through the potential customer impact on launches, content, etc.

Channel expertise

Biz Dev

Business development is the strategic relationship-building of key people and companies. For instance, at Buffer, if you were in Biz Dev you’d probably network with folks at Twitter, Facebook, Apple’s iOS store, etc.

Community

Community is the process of connecting people with people, with the common denominator being Buffer.

CRO

This can also be classified as bottom-of-the-funnel marketing. The goal here is to improve conversion rates by lots of different avenues: landing pages, CTAs, ads, content, and more.

Email

Email marketing may include one-off campaigns, daily newsletters, lifecycle campaigns, and a lot more. In addition to being good at the content and conversion of emails, an email expert also knows the ins and outs of deliverability, ESPs, and a lot of other technical bits that are unique to email.

Events

An events expert can do everything from a meetup to a conference and tie back the event efforts to business impact.

Content marketing

Content marketing is primarily about blogging, though the true definition of content extends to anything you might create. More and more, the “anything” seems to fit on the blog as well: video, audio, slideshows, etc.

SEO

This is anything to do with search engine optimization, both the content/strategy side and the technical side.

Multimedia

For us, a multimedia channel expert shows a deep skill with podcasting and video production. They can create both types of media as well as put together a multimedia strategy based on business goals and existing content.

Paid ads

Most often when we talk about paid ads, we refer to social media advertising — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. However, a paid ads expert may also be adept at search engine marketing (SEM), media sponsorships, and banner and display ads.

Partnerships

For partnerships, we define this as someone who builds mutually beneficial relationships with peer companies, in order to drive a marketing objective. It’s a different flavor of biz dev: Biz dev is more focused on necessary networking for business growth, whereas partnership marketing is more focused on ad hoc collaborations for marketing objectives.

PR

PR is accountable for driving interest and mentions for the brand. At Buffer, this includes press outreach, inbound PR, syndication, and communications.

Social media

I like the way Gary Vaynerchuk describes his work as the clouds and the dirt. He wants to be comfortable both at the highest strategic level and at the most tactical, on-the-ground level. This is true of someone who shows social media expertise.

Viral marketing

The outcome of viral marketing is that customers are selling your brand for you. There are a lot of different levers that can make this happen, not the least of which is a referral or loyalty program, as well as a deep understanding of virality, psychology, and network effects.

Other: International marketing, product marketing, mobile marketing.

The list of channels could go on and on. A couple others that come to mind include international marketing (strategically reaching an audience beyond your primary audience) and mobile marketing (iOS, Android, apps, etc.).

Over to you

I’m sure our list of resources for these skills is incomplete. It’d be great to hear how you level up your skills to become a better marketer.

What do you do to get better? What resources do you use?

What skills are you working on that we’ve not mentioned? What do you do to get better at them?

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Buffer
Startup Grind

Written by Buffer

174K Followers
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Buffer is a suite of products to help you build your brand and connect with your customers online. Come say hi and see what we’re about at buffer.com.

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