When you’re assessing your company’s digital needs, it can feel overwhelming. Nowadays digital encompasses everything from website design and development to UX (user experience), social media, marketing automation, search engine optimization, and more. For businesses that have been wary to explore the digital realm, it can be difficult to know exactly what your digital needs are in 2018 and how to address them. There are various factors that come into play here, including your marketing budget, the design of your website or app, your internal manpower and your overall company goals. In order to identify which avenues are right for your business, I would start by assessing your goals and identifying your strengths and weaknesses. Depending on your resources and objectives, you’ll want to start by addressing either digital marketing or user experience.
When You Need Digital Marketing
At the highest level, digital (or inbound) marketing helps elevate your brand authority in the marketplace. At a more granular level, digital marketing is used to increase website traffic and drive leads and sales. You bring customers to you through web traffic, instead of exclusively through outbound marketing which may consist of cold calling and other time-consuming tactics. This doesn’t mean those tactics die out, but they instead get supplemented through digital marketing that should ultimately work for you to help grow your business by generating leads and sales.
Digital marketing includes, but is not limited to:
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- SEM/PPC (search engine marketing and pay-per-click marketing)
- Marketing Automation
- Social Media
- CRO (conversion rate optimization)
- Content Creation
- Web Analytics & Reporting
A well-crafted digital marketing plan will often include efforts in all of these areas in order to maximize efficiency. With that being said, digital marketers prefer to work with a nicely designed website/app that isn’t restricted by technical roadblocks. And if you want your leads to convert to customers, you should have a well-designed website that’s optimized for their experience.
When You Need Design/Development/UX Services
Digital marketing is essential if you want to increase web traffic and ultimately grow your business. But if you’re attracting people to an inefficient or poorly run website, it won’t do much good. A talented development team can greatly improve the efficiency of your digital marketing efforts. At the highest level, these services help improve the user experience (UX) of your website, mobile app and digital marketing initiatives.
These services include, but are not limited to:
- Website design and development
- Mobile app design and development
- Platform integrations
- Hosting
These services are the foundation of any great digital plan. Developers want users to enjoy their experience using a website or mobile app, whereas marketers want to encourage users to engage with the brand and ultimately become a customer. In other words, instead of throwing the cart before the horse, you want your platform to work well and be functional for your users before you work on attracting customers to your site through inbound (digital) marketing. For that reason, many digital marketing agencies will recommend that you optimize your design/UX before starting anything else.
Intersection: The Gray Area
Despite their differences, there can sometimes be an intersection between digital marketing and user experience. Sometimes an SEO specialist can have development experience, whereas others may have a more robust knowledge of the latest SEO trends but very little development experience. The amount of intersection between digital marketing and UX often depends on the internal capabilities of the team you’re working with.
The intersection can include any of the following:
- Site speed improvements
- Analytics configuration
- Landing page creation
- Website/CRM management
- Product Listing Ad (PLA Feed) modifications
- Sitemap changes
- Code implementation (schema, HTML, etc.)
As you can see, there are various areas in which these two services can overlap. This can be frustrating to all parties if the full extent of their capabilities are not understood. However, proper communication during the initial phases of an engagement can help alleviate these issues so you can determine what your primary digital needs are and how they will benefit your business.
How Can Parqa Help?
Digital marketing continues to evolve at a constant pace, so it helps to have a team on your side to navigate the latest changes and help you get solid results based on your unique objectives.
Parqa is a Digital Marketing Agency that specializes in SEO, SEM, Marketing Automation, Social Media and content creation. We help grow your brand and drive leads through inbound marketing.
