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Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a digital marketing agency owner, or lead an in-house marketing team, you probably know having more developers on your team would mean more projects get done, extra bandwidth for more clients or tasks, and likely provide an overall boost to your bottom line.
What you may not have considered are the specific benefits of having developers working directly with your digital marketing team to implement new strategies.
Truth be told, developers almost immediately level up your marketing team once they’re up to speed with your code. But if you’re reluctant to hire developers, you’re not alone.
After all, web developers are often associated with high price tags and a certain air of mystery. They have a specialized set of technical skills that many–if not most–people are not familiar with. This creates an intimidating knowledge moat.
Here’s the good news: there is an easy way to bridge that gap. And most importantly, developers can actually save you time and money–not to mention make your marketing efforts more effective.
Here are four ironclad reasons why:
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1. Developers let you efficiently implement new strategies.
Lack of implementation is the number one reason marketing efforts fail.
Developers can provide a wide range of services to your marketing team, from developing custom applications to integrating third-party tools and a number of other technical-focused benefits.
For instance, a custom application could automatically generate weekly reports on social media metrics or compile data from multiple sources to create an interactive dashboard for your marketing team to leverage.
This would save your team manual time pulling reports, which means they have more time to spend doing tasks that will help build and add value to your brand.
A developer can also handle setting up an automated marketing strategy–and all the software and third-party tools that go along with that–with ease. This also eliminates manual work.
While many great marketing tools are available, they don’t always integrate seamlessly. A developer can ensure that all of your marketing tools play nice with each other, which leads to fewer lost leads, conversions, and sales.
They also help fastrack styling and aesthetic changes to your website, which we cover in more depth below.
2. Fine-tune technical SEO on the go.
On-page SEO (search engine optimization) aside, you almost surely have ways to improve your website’s technical SEO from the backend.
A dedicated developer ensures that your website is properly coded and optimized for search engines. This helps ensure a higher rank in search results and makes it easier for customers to find you.
In addition, developers can also help with technical SEO tasks such as auditing your website for crawlability issues, fixing broken links, and making sure 404 and 301 redirects are up-to-date.
Broken links can have a brutal impact on your website’s SEO because search engines view broken links as an indicator that your website is not well-maintained and not up-to-date.
But perhaps most importantly, page speed load time. Page load time is the unsung hero of well-optimized SEO. In fact, even a one-second delay in page load time will drop your conversion rate by a crushing 7%.
On top of that, Google penalizes ‘very slow’ websites (greater than 4-7 seconds for the page to become usable).
Why? At about three seconds, users start turning back to the SERPs (search engine results page) to look for other results.
Can you afford to lose at least 7 of every 100 visitors to your website and lose all-important SERP results? Most businesses can’t.
With more developers to tackle technical tasks, you can streamline the technical aspects of online marketing and keep your site optimized to the teeth.
3. Improve user experience and website aesthetics.
We just established having a developer on hand keeps your marketing team from getting bogged down due to a lack of technical knowledge.
Ideas don’t get implemented without technical or design capabilities. But with them, when an idea comes, the design team greenlights it and pushes it out possibly that same day or week.
There’s that word again–implemented.
Plugging a developer into your marketing team is like a shot of adrenaline mixed with a breath of fresh air. It gives more time for the other tasks, namely, generating fresh ideas to help grow your brand.
Another way a dedicated developer can help creative teams is by sprucing up the style of a blog or landing page, as mentioned above.
Developers have a particular set of skills that allows them to make websites more visually appealing. This is a valuable asset for marketing teams who want to make their blogs, landing pages, interactive media, and more stand out from the rest.
Tools like Unbounce and LeadPages are available for landing pages, but they have a steep learning curve. You don’t want to just slap together landing pages and then put thousands of dollars in ad spend behind them.
You only get one first impression, as they say. Make it count.
Or maybe your creative team wants to update images, graphics, or CSS styling text. Perhaps, they want to test a parallax effect on the homepage or rollover to a certain button on a high-traffic page–or the entire website. A dedicated developer streamlines those tasks, too.
And let’s be candid about something, aesthetics matter more than ever. Your creative team knows this. You know it. That’s just the way things are in our digitally saturated reality nowadays.
You need to stand out. You need to look professional. A dedicated developer on hand who works with a designer will give you the best shot at doing both consistently.
4. Improve your sales and overall ROAS.
Marketers are creatives but also realists.
You know dev work doesn’t come cheap. So does your marketing team.
Chances are they have some rock-star ideas banging around in their head–or maybe you have some of our own–but you and your team just can’t execute due to the lack of technical ability available.
A dedicated dev unleashes this pent-up potential. Simply put, you and your team get more bandwidth to apply your full creative talents. That should lead to more sales and, in turn, benefit both your ROAS and ROI.
In terms of sales, developers also make sure your website stays up and running. Downtime happens. But you minimize that downtime when you have a developer one message or a call away to get you back online.
After all, less downtime means more time you’re open for business.
For smart business owners with a holistic view of their strategy over the long term, adding marketing-focused developers just makes sense.
[Looking for pre-vetted development-focused digital agencies? Yes, I am.]
How Do You Hire The Right Developer?
Onboarding a development-focused digital agency is the best, most cost-effective way to get marketing implemented for your company.
That being said, if your company has the budget, hiring dedicated developers and designers in-house is the best way to go.
For entry-level talent, you can expect to pay at least $45,000 per year. Mid-level developers will expect at least $80,000 with top-tier talent looking for at least $125,000.
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A more affordable option is to take existing developers at your company and shift their tasks towards marketing work. This can work if you have developers at your company who are also excited about working on marketing projects.
This can be risky though. If these developers are not excited about working on marketing projects (many aren’t), then they may come to resent the work and may leave your company.
Chances are that they already stretched too thin.
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You may think you’re going to get faster marketing results but all that happens is that development work across the company slows down. In the end, everyone—marketers, salespeople, and developers—ends up frustrated.
Hire A Development-Focused Digital Agency
For these reasons, the best option for most business owners is to hire a development-focused digital agency. Agencies are almost always open to bringing on new clients and have availability to do the work you need quickly.
They also come with the benefit of account and project managers keeping things on track, which means you don’t have to play that role.
Yes, agencies have their own quirks and costs. Yes, you may get an unhelpful project manager. But the risks are no different from hiring in-house.
In truth, the chance of potential problems is lower because you start faster, can often request a new PM or developer if needed, and agencies have processes to get you the quality and timely work you need.
Having developers alongside your digital marketing team is a rock-solid investment that helps implement and test new strategies in less time, which leads to more traffic, conversions, and revenue.
So are you ready to elevate your marketing department? Easy! Check out our development agency matching service – or simply fill out the form below.
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