If you think this is code - you need help!

As someone working in marketing, youve probably heard or at least some stage, said; Im not actually technical, youll have to speak to the techies

In todays digital dawn of modern marketing, should we still be thinking like this?

Unless youve been hiding under a rock (which is not wifi-enabled, I might add) for the last decade, you might not have noticed that techies can now talk and do most other normal social and business functions too - so it begs the question - why cant marketers code?

While self-confessed geeks such as Zucker, Gates, Page & Brin are busy running the internet for us, is it that unreasonable to expect digital marketers to be equipped with HTML or Java programming knowledge? Or if an academic programming background is too much to expect, should marketers take the initiative and learn to code themselves using online free tutorials such as Code Academy - You gotta start somewhere!

Okay, so we may be a few years away from Marketing Directors expecting marketeers to have coding skills. However, without these, digital marketing managers today are increasingly frustrated on having to depend upon IT or tech departments to action marketing objectives.

So the next time, a simple marketing task is held up by the need to use a techie to add some code which entails facing an IT ticket queue of mammoth proportions, ask yourself, If I could code a little, wouldnt my life be much easier?

Having asked myself that question about 18 months ago, I personally found using...:

• A slice of Code Academy
• Time with techies to find out how it all knits together
• View source option on internet browsers to examine website code
• Notepad to check and change email creative html 
• Reading up with the help of an old html book
• Google to plug any annoying gaps in my wafer thin coding knowledge

... has worked wonders to speed up my marketing effectiveness. Whilst Ill never be a No.1 coder, I can solve many simple bugs and make changes to code without the need to submit myself to ticket request IT hell.

And.... guess what... my life is now much easier! I dont sweat the small stuff and leave the big stuff to the coding experts.