The new must-learn skills: keeping up in the evolving mobile industry

What are the most important skills mobile marketers should be learning in order to not just keep up, but thrive in the industry?

You don’t have to look far to find evidence that the digital marketing and advertising landscape is undergoing massive changes. From Facebook’s new clear history tool to Google’s recent pushback against tracking on Chrome.  As the channels marketers have grown to depend on compete, pivot, restrict and improve, we all want to ensure we are capable of finding new solutions and acquire the skills each different app requires to be successful.

We asked leading app marketers which soft and hard skills will become the most in-demand and important for ensuring success in the future, and got perspectives from Mobile Masterminds working in 7 different app verticals. Check out which mobile marketing skills they think will be the most impactful as mobile marketing and advertising evolve!

Fitness

“The skill that I think is most important to have nowadays is the ability to visualize data. Data analysis and statistics can open up a world of insight and it’s very empowering in my opinion. It lets you discover trends and notice significant shifts, find correlations or spot the lack of them. Looking at your data retrospectively is helpful, but plotting projections and trends for the future based on past performance is even more useful. And app marketers can use their deep understanding of trends and changes in the industry to better pinpoint issues and spot things that a data analyst might miss.

There are a lot of free courses on Coursera, Udemy and other sites that make it possible to enter this field without any prior data-related experience, and sometimes a super strong math background is not needed either. But if taking a course is too much of a commitment, you can benefit from watching tutorials and reading manuals for software like Tableau, Qlik, Google Data Studio and trying to apply what you’ve learned in their free versions (which are limited by either time or functionality).

With a little bit of curiosity and “detective” ambitions, you can produce meaningful visualizations and discover valuable insights that could be rewarding for not only yourself, but for your company’s success in the long run.”- Ekaterina Shpadareva, User Acquisition and ASO Manager at Runtastic.

Transportation

“In my opinion, the most important skill every mobile marketer should be learning is data analysis. With a good understanding of how to read data, you can analyze not only the results of all your activities, such as AB tests and experiments, but also understand what kind of traffic you are buying from your different networks.

Furthermore, you can learn how your users are behaving after the install, e.g. what features they like the most, how long they stay in the app, and so on. With this information, you can adapt both user acquisition campaigns and re-engagement. Successful marketers on the top of their game aren’t waiting around for their BI teams to give them all the data and insights they want. Be curious about your data, and let it tell you how successful you are ;-).” – Lorenzo Rossi, Head of Marketing at Free2Move.

Travel

“For me, there are three important skills mobile marketers need to be focused on developing: Analytical skills: becoming a better problem solver, understanding attribution platforms and models, and being able to analyze dashboards and graphs according to your company KPIs. Learning to work with raw data and compile results, using behavioral and predictive analysis, and improving marketing automation.

Test, learn and communicate methodology: improving A/B testing and experimentation. Failure and learning should be part of our daily life as well as communicating our learnings to our teams or company. Customer focus: better understanding our user’s needs, their behavior and finding innovative ways that we can help them and add value to their experiences with our apps.” –Rocío Pérez, Acquisition Manager at Liligo.

Education

“Adaptability is one of the most important skills for anyone in mobile marketing. The landscape is constantly changing, be it ad units, new platforms, new optimizations or technologies, etc. The ability to adapt to what works best currently and maximize your marketing dollars while also keeping feelers out there for what could be the next channel is key to success in the field. Reading case studies and being active on the various UA-centric Slack channels is a great first step, but actual hands-on testing is where you’ll find the most actionable insights.” -Sam McLellan, Head of Growth at Yousician.

GPS Maps

“The most important skill mobile advertisers need to learn is how to be able to change directions quickly and learn on the fly. This industry is constantly changing, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis. If you aren’t following the flow of change, you’ll likely miss something BIG or be left behind.

A great example of this can be seen in the changes happening to Facebook on the advertising side. Like it or love it, their parameters and ways of segmenting audiences for advertising purposes is changing, and will continue to do so. As they become more restrictive with targeting capabilities, we’re having to reinvent the ways we find our users. On a larger scale, when (not if) the US decides to implement something similar to GDPR, this ability to adapt that we’ve been cultivating will be learnings we can transfer to the rest of our advertising efforts, to ensure we don’t see a massive drop in performance.”– Greg McQueen, User Aquisition Manager at onXmaps, Inc.

 Payment Services

“I believe the most important skill to learn is the ability to work with the data collected from each mobile campaign. Today, you can get so much important information and valuable insights into your marketing strategy, you just have to know how to put the data to use.

It is important to have this ability because every day a different partner appears with new ideas to make your business grow. If you have the knowledge of how to manage the data on your own you do not have to depend on other departments or people to give you their final analysis, you can obtain the answers on your own.” – Felipe Costa, Senior Marketing Analyst at Recarga Pay.

Gaming

“Marketing is such a multidisciplinary field that today’s marketers have to do everything from data analysis to copywriting to queries. It requires a solid understanding of UX, psychology, statistics and so much else! But if I had to pick the most important skill it would be eagerness to learn. In mobile marketing, things are changing all the time and you have to be passionate about learning so that you can constantly gather the new necessary skills to stay ahead of the game.

This brings me to a second big one: adaptability. In a market that’s constantly shifting, both these skills are unnegotiable. Once you have these two, the rest follows and you can grow in the direction that’s needed by the company, acquiring the roster of skills that are important in your specific environment and tackling face-on any sudden changes in direction.” –  Paula Neves, CMO at Gazeus Games.     

Gaming

“The number one skill that every (future) marketer should have and embrace is flexibility and adaptability. As platforms come and go you need to stay up with trends and channels that are popular among your audience(s).”-Michael Jessen, User Aquisition Specialist at Social Point.