Why Your Marketing Team Needs Web Development

Sure, when people think “ad agency,” they probably don’t think of web development. In fact, before the past decade web developers probably weren’t even hired by ad agencies. But now that buyers are going online to make purchase decisions, web development has become an integral factor in effective advertising and marketing.

What Is Web Development?

In order to understand why your marketing team needs web development, you should first have a clear understanding of what web development really means. The term “web development” is used to describe the process it takes to create a website, whether on the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (private network).

Web development could range from a simple webpage of plain text to a complex web application for business transactions (e.g., employee portals, sales applications, ecommerce) and social network services (e.g., functions performed on channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter).

To put it simply, some degree of web development was involved in every display and function you’ve ever seen on any website.

If your company has a website, then (to some degree) you have already experienced web development. Or you may have had a web developer build an online application to help with business functions.

Why You Need a Web Developer

When it comes to web development, it’s a mistake to “set it and forget it.” Because so many business opportunities are happening online, websites should always be updated to stay in stride with the business. Having web development capabilities built into a business’ marketing team offers it a resource to customize the way the website is edited. Web development offers you the ability to easily edit your website; whereas, a rigid website template would restrict the edits you’d be able to make.

Besides the need for a web developer to redevelop or regularly update your website, there is another factor that makes having a web developer on your marketing team essential for success. A web developer can turn your website into a 24/7 marketing & sales machine!

Web Developers Capture Incredible Marketing & Sales Stats

What does a 24/7 marketing & sales machine look like?

Let’s first break down the reason for having a business website. If your website isn’t programmed to perform a sales transaction (ecommerce), then the main purpose of your website is to generate leads. Of course, lead generation is measured in many different ways.  

Below are some of the ways a developer can program your website to measure incredible results.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that helps website owners measure traffic that can convert into leads. With the tool, you can measure traffic to a website or a mobile app and compare it to any date to monitor its effectiveness. In order to do this, you just need to add a few lines of code to the backend of your website. (Depending on your comfort level with programming, adding a Google Analytics tracking code to your website may require a web developer.)

Digital Ads (Google AdWords, PPC)

A web developer can also connect your data from digital ads (e.g., Google AdWords, display ads, PPC) to your Google Analytics. Connecting AdWords to Analytics will allow you to see the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. For example, your reports will allow you to know:

• Impressions (the number of times your ad is shown on the Google Display Network)
• Click through rate (a ratio showing how often people who see your ad end up clicking it)
• Return on investment (how much profit you’ve made from your ads compared to ad cost)

Google Analytics API

A web developer can also build an application that extracts raw data from the APIs of various platforms (e.g., social media ads) and collect it into a CSV file that can be uploaded to the Google Analytics API. In other words, you can collect data from any online campaign, or even track what led to a customer’s phone call, all in one place.

To sum things up, having a web developer on your marketing team allows you to build, measure, and refine anything that could help you generate a sale through digital means.

Add Web Development to Your Marketing Team

We hope this article has helped you learn more about web development and how we believe web developers make a huge impact on the success of a marketing team. If you’re interested in adding web development to your marketing team, we’d love to help you make that possible.