If you follow our blog, you can read about the intersection of web dev and digital marketing. Yet, most readers may wonder what goes into actual support from the web dev side of things.
The problem with this type of sort is that it seems self-explanatory, and it isn’t in the slightest, at least if you want it to affect the marketing performance.
Keep reading to find the most common ways web development supports marketing strategy and implementation.
Web Dev and Marketing
An image pops into your mind as soon as someone mentions web development. It’s an image of a room of people clicking on their keyboards, coding a new website. Often, that’s not far from the truth but is also an understatement of a web developer’s role in marketing.
The main culprit here is the standard sales methodology of web development services. Developers try to package their services as website building without consideration for marketing strategy and marketers. That way, most online businesses fail to assure any actual performance. And, that’s how you can level up your work as a marketing agency.
Web developers do impact marketing strategy, and they do so by helping marketers engineer a specific experience for the website users. If you want to create an outstanding user experience and work as a performance-driven agency, that’s an asset.
Moving On
Then again, management may argue the actual profitability of bringing in the developer. If you go for a junior or medior web developer, it’s evident that you’ll lack the results. You can’t let an inexperienced person handle a sensitive task, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
The actual value of a senior developer isn’t in the tech stack, and it’s the experience you buy with it. With a professional with a dozen projects behind, you can build almost anything. Relying on a person taking the opportunity as a learning experience gets you only so far.
After all, marketing is a fast-paced discipline. Marketers issue monthly performance reports. Their clients don’t have the time for a developer to experiment and learn what they need to make the project work.
Hiring a senior developer, or even better, a web development agency, solves those problems. It comes down to the quality of work you want to provide for your clients. And, it comes down to operating a custom website.
Staying Agile
Yet, there’s another thing we should point out. Web dev is never that static. It’s an agile and fast-paced discipline, just like digital marketing. A web developer can rarely work on a project from start to finish. Of course, that’s the best-case scenario since you can work on every web aspect to support marketing strategy.
A typical scenario for web developers is to start working on a website long after the initial web deployment. Staying agile is even more valuable if you want your work on code and the website to impact marketing performance.
Then, it becomes less about the tech stack and more about what the developer brings for your client. It’s not about what you know, but what you can do with that knowledge to solve practical problems.
Testing the Website
Until now, this was a hypothetical article, and it’s time to put it into an actual business context.
Optimizing websites for page speed is one of our services. The thing is that you never fix the page speed issues. Page speed issues are a matter of:
• Poor code
• Paid themes
• Faulty web design
• Lack of compliance with Google updates
• Poor website management
• Lack of mobile-first solutions
But, that’s only the web developer’s part of the work. You have to think of the marketer hiring you to help them, and consider:
• How these fixes fit marketing tasks and strategy
• How they impact relevant pages and website structure
• How these changes affect the current website workflow
• How these changes affect the business aspect of the website
A web developer has to collect all this information before doing anything. Then, they can give feedback to the marketer that includes:
• What are the core problems with the website
• What are the possible solutions
• How long do the changes take
• How they impact web performance
• What else they can change on the website
Now, marketers have something solid to present to their clients. Also, they know how long the changes take, why they are valuable, and their impact. After you finish the work on the website, marketers can move to other tasks and measure performance.
That’s the most efficient way to support a marketing agency. Or, at least that’s how we do it at Deluminal. If you were to add more to your website, we could help you with bespoke software.
The Upgrade
If you are a small marketing agency looking to expand your services, consider working with a web development agency. It could be quite a lucrative deal if you know how to negotiate it.
Consider the extra value you bring to the client. Sure, you’ll split the check with another agency, but you also get to do a better job, and that’s what matters the most in the end.
