What I'm about to mention is just 1 skill among many that a marketer ought to have – and not, by a long shot, the most important. But, since it is my own narrow area of specialization, the lack of this skill among marketers is something I notice daily as a glaring omission.

Domain names – the internet is built on domains. They're how we name websites, protect brands online, navigate directly to a site from a billboard or a radio ad, shorten URLs, recognize email messages, and trust that the page we're viewing really belongs to our bank.

Yet marketing professionals, for the most part, don't understand domain names adequately. I know VPs of marketing who mix up basic terminology like "URL" and "website" and "domain". Most marketers don't value domains adequately, seldom realizing there's a whole property market in which domains are trading daily.

Most professionals – including very smart people – rarely think about domain names strategically as assets to leverage in marketing campaigns. Usually I see entrepreneurs naming their startups and blundering badly because they don't think about domain-related issues.

Among established organizations, half fail to protect their brands by registering the right domains. And the other half wastes money maintaining domains they don't need. It's a rare company that knows its way around the domain industry or which plans ahead with any kind of domain portfolio strategy at all!

Marketers know by now that they can't neglect social media or PPC. So everybody knows they ought to know something about those topics. Domain names are important in a similar way – as another tool in the toolkit.

Your employers won't tell you to learn about domains. You won't be asked in job interviews. But they weren't asking about your social media acumen years ago either. If you want to be ahead of the curve, learn about domain names.