We've been delving back through several years of blog posts we've made on digital marketing and web development to find some Top Tips based on personal experience where projects worked and also when things didn't quite go according to plan.
1. Get inside the heads of your web users
Making developments very user focused and using regular feedback helps to transcend internal views that may be, well, too internal. Establish personas, write user stories, validate with research and build user communities.
2. Fail fast and fail cheaply
Make good use of free and open source environments to test and experiment.
3. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Avoid vendor and agency lock-in at all costs. Stay highly flexible and adaptable in difficult market conditions.
4. Abolish the term 'webmaster'
Don't place all the emphasis for your website developments on one individual. Distribute content creation and management responsibilities.
5. Close the gaps between business need and technical implementation
Business people continue to struggle to articulate what it is they want the technology to achieve in their organisations and technical people continue to struggle to understand how business goals could and should influence implementation.
6. Demonstrate flexibility and adaptability.
Marketing folks can’t help themselves sometimes and get absolutely fixated about what something looks like over and above all other considerations. Don’t get us wrong, what a website looks like is very important on a number of different levels but in many cases it is the easiest aspect of a project to change in subsequent Iterations.
7. Hire some Millennials.
The younger generation who are in the first or second roles have an immediate affinity with web tools and little or no fear in using them.
8. Don't get distracted by social media.
We think organisations would do well to not get unhealthily distracted by the hype and really focus on what it is they do well. After-all, if the products and services they provide live up to their promise, they will be talked about with positive sentiment and the brand advocates will naturally do their part to drown out the negatives.
9. Email is still the best way to engage
Email provides an excellent filter for a very noisy social media environment and if it isn’t handled properly then that is often the most frequent point at which negative sentiment is triggered online.
10. Get the marketing basics right, because social media isn’t going to help
Marketing is the process of ‘making what you can sell’ versus ‘selling what you can make’. Get that right and ‘Word of Mouth’, viral promotion and/or network effects will be a natural consequence. Get it wrong, and now matter how hard you try to get some buzz going for it the chances are your efforts will backfire.
11. Keep learning and experimenting
Here's a tip we learnt just yesterday... If you run Adwords campaigns, check out Ad Extensions - this is a free service and basically allows you to create direct links into your website from your sponsored ads. If you achieve top 3 positions for your ads, this is a great way to give them even more impact and push those competitors further out of that 'golden triangle'
