Does Learning to Code Help as a Marketing Automation, or Zapier Expert?

Long story short: 100%.

Read on to find out why.

So you found yourself wanting to learn automation?

You might be 1 of these 3 people:

  • You’re a business who wants grow your business, take back your time, and do it yourself
  • You’re a business who wants to just learn about how automation can help your business to grow
  • You want to become an automation freelancer or Zapier expert yourself (like me, certified), and make money online helping businesses grow

You’ve probably thought and come across other people asking…

“Do I need to know how to code? Damn, that’s technical!”

No. You can reach a bit of success without learning how to code.

But do you want to actually become good?

Yup. You need to learn at least a bit.

I’m going to discuss 4 reasons why you’d want to learn a bit about coding if you want to learn automation

The topics I’m going to touch on today…

  • API’s, because not every solution is as simple, “Connect A, connect B”
  • Being able to fix and understand automations like you’ve become Inspector Gadget
  • Creating more efficient automations, which can bring save you, and or your clients, a lot of money
  • Thinking like a coder creates scale-able automations

Let’s go!


API’s, because not every solution is as simple, “Connect A, connect B”

Don’t worry, this won’t turn into a tech talk.

API’s, “Application Programming Interface”, is how different tools and apps communicate.

And it’s how the tools like Zapier, Make, ActiveCampaign, etc, connect together all the different tools we use.

Unfortunately, not every tool businesses use are available on these platforms.

Simple reason, these teams, but there’s just too many tools to keep up.

Your own business, or a client’s business, might use a tool not available on automation platforms.

But. If that tool has an API. There’s hope.

You can still create an automated solution for yourself or a client if you know how to directly use an API.

That means you need to learn about HTTP requests, how to use Webhooks by Zapier, and a bit of coding.


Being able to fix and understand automations like you’ve become Inspector Gadget

Things break.

Instructions are unclear.

You want to quickly test something.

You just gonna give up? Nah. I thought so.

That’s where being able to understand technical documentation, specifically API documentation, saves the day.

A lot of people first learning about automation never how to dig into the details.

The inner workings.

How these automation tools allow different tools to communicate.

And understanding and reading API document helps you to do that.

Further, there are tools like Postman that allow you to directly use API’s.

(Once you understand how to read the API’s documentation)

This allows you to quickly test what’s possible with an API.

For example…to do initial research for yourself, or for a client, to know if what you want to automate is possible.

Creating more efficient automations, which can bring save you, and or your clients, a lot of money

There is a trade-off when using automation tools like Zapier, Make, etc

Because they give you a user-friendly interface, and hide the technical details…

You’re trading off flexibility and how much you can customize.

This trade-off sometimes leads to less efficient automations.

By less efficient, I mean we have to add a lot more steps to the automation.

And in most situations, this also increases the price of use of automation tools.

With a bit of coding experience, you can often use little bits of code to combine multiple steps of an automation into one.

This will bring down costs, and actually makes the automations easier to manage in certain situations.


Thinking like a coder creates scale-able automations

There’s a concept in coding and software development called, “DRY”, “Do Not Repeat Yourself’.

The name basically says what it’s about.

You do not want to be have the same code copy-pasted in multiple places.

The reason? There’s more opportunities for things to break. And if we need to make an update, we need update the same thing in multiple places.

(And that means people can make mistakes).

Learning how to code, and thinking in “re-usable” can be used with tools like Zapier, ActiveCampaign, Make (aka Integromat).

For example, Zapier introduced a tool called “Sub-tasks”. Sub-tasks are steps of instructions that can be dropped into multiple automations.

And this also means only one place to update.

Vs. copying the same steps into multiple locations.

You also start to think, how can I set up these automations so one automation triggers another one.


Conclusion

Being able to code, or learning to code, is not a requirement to learn automation.

You can still automate parts of your business, or a clients business, without learning to code.

But if want to significantly increase your automation skills without that much effort, learning to a code a bit is invaluable.

As discussed:

  • API’s, because not every solution is as simple, “Connect A, connect B”
  • Being able to fix and understand automations like you’ve become Inspector Gadget
  • Creating more efficient automations, which can bring save you and or your clients a lot of money
  • Thinking like a coder creates scale-able automations

Let’s stay in touch

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