Last month I was invited onto Star Radio's Marketing Review programme with Cambridge Marketing Colleges to talk about Marketing Automation. We did get a little side tracked so in this podcast we're discussing responsive web sites, why they are important and why it's critical for marketers to consider their organisation's web site as the critical key stone in their marketing tool set. We'll be appearing again in the new year with the rest of the interview where we'll get back to the original subject!
We can of course provide much more to marketers than a responsive website, however there is little point driving traffic to your website if half your visitors then have a bad experience!
For those of you that have read my previous articles you'll know I've been a little frustrated at times when companies contact us to discuss digital marketing only to discover they've just "done their new website".
There's nothing wrong of course with choosing the best graphic designer you can get to give you that attention grabbing look and feel, just don't let them dictate the platform on which it'll be used. This is how the world has arrived at a host of pretty Word Press web sites so top heavy with plugins that Google penalises them on performance and real users get bored and wander off to their competitors.
Consider a web site as two components. Firstly there's the appearance, with which most people are familiar, and then there's the platform on which it is to run. The latter is outside of many people's comfort zone and experience and so a 'default' choice is made or the decision is simply delegated to the company 'techie' or to the graphic designer.
As a digital marketer you don't need to understand how the technology works but you do need to be able to write a set of requirements against which you will judge the available platforms. A typical check-list might include:
- Minimum performance requirements (page load times) for the live site
- Maximum download sizes for standard pages (avoiding code bloat from unnecessary plugins)
- The ability to build landing page forms for calls to action (CTA) - once you've got people to your site, capture them in your lead database!
- Contact tracking and analytics - how engaged are your leads with your story?
- Ability to build customised work flows or 'stories' for individual contacts
- What content management tools do you want?
- Add content and view drafts?
- Add/resize/crop images?
- Authorisation work flows to review content before publication?
- If you might work internationally, can the platform support multiple languages?
- Can content permissions be delegated for different areas of the site?
- Do the tools simplify creating responsive content?
- Search Engine Optimisation tools to improve your organic search results
- Will it periodically check for external broken links and report problems?
If you're not sure how a modern digital marketing platform could boost your lead generation activities then I'd be delighted to give you a tour of CommsBox. There's no obligation, naturally, and it's a fairly quick and painless way to discover what you could be doing before you commission a new web site.
Click here to arrange a CommsBox demo