Kristine’s Cartoons: The Importance of Great Web Development

This coder’s on fiiiiiire. As you may have heard, we recently acquired a lovely little web development firm and while we love creating websites and even making the occasional cost calculator or partner portal, we are thrilled with the number of smart coding pros we now have at our disposal from our merge with hayWire. But what does this mean for marketing in general? A great development team can impact your company in a lot of ways and having access to one via your marketing firm makes it even more powerful:

Showing the value of your product: The aforementioned cost calculators are part of this. If you can show the value of a product (especially one in a new category) you are accelerating your sales process. Developers know how to build them.

Creating an educational partner strategy: Do you have a set of partners or affiliates? Of course, you do. Building an online hub for them to get educated about how to best sell your product can slash marketing costs and when you have a development team to create it and a marketing team to populate it, you’ve created an army of evangelists.

Implementing customer loyalty: You can have the best product in the world but if there’s no way to easily navigate your dashboard, you’re sunk. Developers, coders, designers…they can all make this a much easier process that doesn’t just look good, it works the way it’s supposed to. Tutorials, apps, easy tours and dashboards. Yeah, developers do that.

Supercharge your marketing automation: While tools like Hubspot and Marketo seem plug n play, the reality is, sometimes they need customization to work the way you envisioned during that initial heady demo (just like salesforce). Developers can make your software work within your environment the way you want it to work, essentially throwing good money after good so your customer acquisition and lead nurturing get a huge boost.

Build a community: There are plenty of opportunities to create communities around your product, but the technology that’s out there can make it cost and time prohibitive. But with a team of developers smashing code daily on your behalf, it’s whole lot easier to build a group of like-minded people around your product or service. Whether it’s an intranet custom-built for your far-flung workforce or a learning module for people in a specific industry, developers have got you covered.

Maren Hogan

Maren Hogan is CEO of Red Branch and general Bad@$$

Maren Hogan is a seasoned marketer and community builder in the HR and Recruiting industry. Maren started Red Branch Media and, before she hired all the smiling faces you see below, she ran it on her own. In marketing for over 15 years, she has deep experience in strategic campaigns and a long-term, results-based operational approach.