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In today’s day and age, a strong online presence helps businesses establish a reputation, inspire trust in new customers, and build their brand image.
As we all rush to find the best online strategy, there are two lingering topics that we can’t deny: web development and digital marketing.
Website development and digital marketing are like the dynamic duo of the online world. Combining these two efforts is the secret to creating more online visibility, attracting visitors, and converting them into customers.
Dive into this topic with us, where we’ll explore the world of web design, what encompasses digital marketing, and why they’re such a powerful combination.
Understanding the Digital Landscape
An online presence is synonymous with visibility, credibility, and accessibility. However, it’s important to note that it’s no longer enough to simply have a Facebook account or a couple of ads; there are many factors that work together to create a strong online presence.
The digital world is vast; it includes landing pages, ads, various profiles on social networks, digital brochures, and pretty much anything else you can think of. All of these different online angles help businesses reach a larger audience and make the customer experience as pleasant as possible.
And at the center of it all: user-friendly websites. A website is a must-have marketing tool for businesses. Many digital strategies, such as ads, emails, and social media, direct users back to the business’ website; if the website isn’t optimized, visually appealing, and easy to navigate, then the business could risk losing a valuable lead.
As a bonus, a website is the only platform that is considered a company’s property. This differs from other platforms, such as social media accounts and email platforms, that could be suspended and affect a business’ access to their audience.
What’s evident is that the key to outperforming competitors is to implement a mixture of both digital marketing and web development. And while both have their own requirements and strategies, many marketing professionals now understand that you can’t do one without the other.
Web Development and Design Fundamentals
Web development services refer to the building, creation, and maintenance of websites. While this is a complex topic, let’s take a look at the basics.
Importance of a well-structured website or application.
Who else has visited a website and instantly left because it was unorganized, hard to navigate, and “messy”? Yep, we’ve all been there. In fact, a recent report claims that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience.
While there may be many contributing factors to what makes up a “bad experience,” poor site structure is definitely high on the list.
Aside from user experience, a well-structured website is more easily indexed and recognized by search engines, meaning you have a better chance of ranking on Google and other important search engines. This plays into an SEO strategy, one of the many marketing channels that we’ll discuss below.
Overview of web development technologies.
In the world of web development technologies, there’s no shortage of programming languages and tools that are used to produce websites and applications.
Front-end technologies are used to develop interactive elements on a website, which are the features that are visible to the users. Back-end technologies focus on developing the technical foundation of the site, such as the structure, system, data, and logic.
Choosing the right technology can make-or-break your website’s success, and developers must carefully choose the right web development technologies with the specific project in mind.
Choosing the right platform.
When it comes to bespoke web development, choosing the right platform is no easy task. Each platform has its own features, capabilities, and limitations, and the decision should be made with the project’s current and future goals in mind. Will it need to be scaled in the future? Require functionalities to keep up with the ever-changing web development trends? Optimized for search engines?
Web development companies will consider every detail and decide on the right platform on a per-project basis.
Introduction to responsive design.
Responsive design refers to designs that respond to the environment in which they are viewed. In other words, it allows your website to look good on all devices by adjusting the browser space to ensure consistency. This facilitates usability and navigation, helps you reach a larger audience, and improves SEO.
Some companies make the mistake of only making their designs for desktop users; this neglects the millions of people who have their phones in their pockets at all times. In today’s world, responsive design is a key part of web design and development and helps companies stay relevant to the growing number of devices and the users that own them.
Digital Marketing Fundamentals
Digital marketing trends are constantly evolving, and experts are continually changing their strategies to stay ahead of the crowd. That said, here are the must-knows of digital marketing:
Understanding digital marketing.
Digital marketing, or online marketing, is the act of using online channels to attract leads, build brand awareness, sell products and services, and improve customer loyalty.
This typically includes email marketing, content marketing, monthly SEO services, social media marketing, ads, and more. And of course, the strong connection between web design and digital marketing means that developing a great website contributes to all of these efforts.
Since there are many factors that make up digital marketing, every business’ strategy will be different based on their industry, budget, and short- and long-term goals.
Different digital marketing channels (SEO, SEM, SMM, email marketing).
Semrush identifies the 7 effective digital marketing channels as: social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, paid advertising, video marketing, referral marketing, and content marketing. Let’s take a look at each of these channels:
- Social media marketing: SMM is the use of social media platforms to interact with customers and drive traffic to the website. Popular social media platforms include Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more. While the brand’s voice should stay consistent across all channels, the strategy will change depending on the platform.
- SEO: Professional SEO services are key to improving a website’s ranking on search engines, resulting in higher visibility and traffic to the website. This is done through keyword research, a quality content strategy, site audits, and more. Search engine marketing, or SEM, also works to increase a business’ website on search engines but utilizes paid advertising instead of organic growth.
- Email marketing: This is a form of marketing that uses emails to promote a business’ products and services. The goal is to attract new users and improve loyalty among existing clients.
- Paid advertising: Paid advertising is a strategy where businesses pay to display their ads to a targeted audience. Paid ads can be found on many platforms, including Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon, among others.
- Video marketing: This strategy uses video content to promote a company’s services or products. Similar to paid advertising, videos can be used on various platforms, such as their own website or as part of a SMM strategy.
- Referral marketing: Referral marketing is a form of advertising that encourages users to recommend their services or products to other people. This word-of-mouth strategy is mutually beneficial; existing customers receive some kind of reward or bonus, and the business receives new clients that were recommended from a reliable source.
- Content marketing: Content marketing involves the creation of content that’s used to attract and engage the audience. Content marketing is typically seen throughout other areas; for instance, a new website requires copy, social media marketing needs captions, and an SEO plan will need quality blogs and SEO landing pages.
Setting goals and KPIs.
Setting goals and defining key performance indicators helps businesses track progress and make changes to their strategy when necessary. Since the world of digital marketing is constantly evolving, this also helps digital marketing experts keep up with the changing industry.
Some examples of KPIs for online marketing include: web traffic sources, leads, page views, conversion rates, and click-through rates.
Tracking and Analytics.
Marketing analytics lets you track your performance, allowing you to better understand your customers and how they interact with your business online. For instance, let’s say you post something on Instagram and it doesn’t perform as well as you expected. Marketing analytics shows you exactly who liked it, where they’re viewing from, how long they interacted with the post, and more. This type of information combined with an SEO checklist gives you valuable insight into your clients’ behavior, allowing you to adjust your strategy to improve future posts.
The most important digital marketing analytics include traffic, conversions, website loading speed, and bounce rate.
Website and Application Optimization
Developers and marketing experts use the following tools and advanced strategies to optimize both websites and applications.
Performance optimization (loading speed, images, caching).
Both websites and online applications should be optimized to improve the user experience and enhance ranking in search engines. This may include optimizing images, reducing HTTP requests, caching, improving page loading speed, optimizing server-side performance, enhancing front-end performance, and more.
SEO best practices.
Remember when we said that marketing and web development go hand-in-hand? Well, this is the perfect example. One of the ways to optimize your website and application is through SEO best practices. As explained above, SEO helps your website rank on search engines; this translates to more online visibility and more conversions.
Developers contribute to this plan by focusing on technical SEO, such as creating a great user experience. A digital marketing expert, on the other hand, optimizes websites for SEO by doing keyword research, using internal linking, publishing amazing content, and optimizing the site’s loading speed and title tag.
Mobile optimization and ASO.
Mobile optimization is the process of adjusting your website content to be accessed on mobile devices. You may remember we mentioned something similar above: responsive design. The main difference is that responsive design reformats websites for any device, regardless of size, while mobile optimization is specific to mobile devices.
And just as websites should rank well on search engines, apps need to rank in app stores. App store optimization, or ASO, typically includes optimizing titles and descriptions, doing keyword research, and producing compelling visuals. For more information on how to make your app discoverable by your target audience, read our app store optimization guide.
Security considerations.
Developers are always concerned with the security of your website or app. Some of the ways developers protect and secure information include: requiring input validation, encrypting data, avoiding security misconfigurations, and applying authentication, role management, and access control.
Tools for Web Development and Digital Marketing
Digital marketing and web design also overlap when it comes to the available tools that can be used in both areas. Here are 3 of the areas where there’s an intersection.
- Analytics Tools: Tools like Google Analytics can be used in both web development and digital marketing. Developers use them to monitor website performance, while marketers use them to track user behavior and campaign effectiveness.
- Graphic Design Tools: Graphic design tools like Adobe Creative Cloud help web developers create web assets and digital marketers create visuals for social media and content.
- Content Management Systems: CMS platforms like WordPress allow web developers to build and manage websites, while also acting as an important tool for marketers to publish and optimize content for SEO.
Case Studies and Success Stories
At Scopic, we understand that a great strategy merges both web design and digital marketing. Take our client Shapiro, for instance. Shapiro, a waste management company, wanted their services to be more accessible so that more businesses and consumers could easily reduce their waste. Scopic developed the website and created a better UX design to help users easily navigate the website.
After the website was developed, Scopic’s marketing team stepped in and applied the best SEO and conversion optimization practices. The services in this project were a mix of website development and digital marketing, including Google Analytics, WordPress, copywriting, Google Ads, SEO, and Google Tag Manager.
Another project that combined the worlds of website development and digital marketing is our work with Origin Bathrooms, a company dedicated to bathroom design and renovations. Origin Bathrooms knew that a user-friendly and high-ranking website would set them apart from their competitors. Though they tried to do the job in-house, the site’s ranking did not perform as well as expected.
Scopic’s team proposed a complete website overhaul, where they created a new website and applied the latest SEO tactics. As part of their long-term strategy, they regularly research and optimize web pages, create engaging blog posts, and work closely with Origin Bathrooms to reach their business objectives. These efforts led to a significant increase in traffic to their website, resulting in increased leads and conversions.
Conclusion
If there’s one thing we’re sure about, it’s that marketing and web development are a powerful duo. And while you can have one without the other, why would you want to?
A great website turns a lead into a client, but it’s the work of digital marketing that encourages them to even visit your site in the first place. These two forces work together to cover all the bases: developing the website, optimizing it for SEO, and creating a customized strategy that reaches your target audience.
Every day, an increasing number of companies are focused on improving their online presence. If you want to outperform the competition, it’s time to start thinking about what strategies work best for your business.
At Scopic, we have a team dedicated to both web development and digital marketing services. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you.
About Web Development and Digital Marketing Guide
This guide was authored by Baily Ramsey, and reviewed by Araksya Hakobjanyan, the SEO Lead at Scopic Software.
Scopic provides quality and informative content, powered by our deep-rooted expertise in software development. Our team of content writers and experts have great knowledge in the latest software technologies, allowing them to break down even the most complex topics in the field. They also know how to tackle topics from a wide range of industries, capture their essence, and deliver valuable content across all digital platforms.
Note: This blog’s images are sourced from Freepik.
