Web Development: Understanding its Place in the Marketing Mix

There’s a lot of temptation to think of the different pieces of digital marketing as separate. SEO is SEO, social media is social media, PPC is PPC—read up on enough strategies for each individual piece, and you’ll know how to make sure each ingredient in your digital marketing salad is fresh and colorful. More and more, though, it’s becoming clear that, unlike vegetables in a salad, the individual ingredients in your marketing strategy don’t stand alone. SEO isn’t a carrot, social isn’t a tomato; they’re more like the flour and sugar in a cake. You don’t just open up a bag of flour and start eating; flour doesn’t taste delicious until it’s part of a cake. Just like the ingredients in a cake, the various approaches to digital marketing rely on each other to come up with real meaningful results.

Your website, in a lot of ways, is like the cake batter.

Web design and development, like any part of your strategy, don’t stand alone. However, while the various segments of marketing rely on each other, web design is more like the culmination of your various marketing efforts, and should be treated as such. Creating your new website, or redesigning an old one, is where your integrated marketing strategy should get its chance to shine, bolstering your website and contributing every step of the way. To give you a better idea of what that looks like, here are how some of the most important segments of digital marketing should work with your web design:

Your Website and SEO: This one should be fairly obvious, but businesses still have a hard time making search-engine-friendly website. More than any other part of the marketing mix, SEO must have a hand in the web development process. On-page SEO, whenever possible, should be a process that begins when the new website is being designed and built; the technical, nitty-gritty tactics of SEO must be integral to your web design strategy, and not an afterthought.

Optimizing your web copy, your site map, and your site architecture from the start means that your website is ready to get you the results you need once you launch it, with minimal tweaking later on.

Your Website and PPC: The customer-reaching power of PPC ads and the fantastic, content-rich website you’ve built and designed meet each other in the middle at landing pages. If all of your PPC ads are directed at the same landing page, you might not be taking full advantage of your opportunities. Taking your PPC campaigns into consideration when working on your website—and vice versa—can do wonders to keep your potential customers on your website and drive conversions.

Continue to read on our blog: Web Development: Understanding its Place in the Marketing Mix
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