A marketer and an IT specialist cannot be one person

I don’t care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!

Vidiu Platon

As long as they are our friends, everything is fine and their only flaw is that you won’t pick up a nice girl in the evening with him as your companion.  The problem starts when you work together  on advertising creations. Usually, what imagination and creativity arduously create will be reduced  to a flat and boring binary system. We can observe the same in the interaction between other completely different areas, especially between marketing and accounting, as the latter will always find a difficulty when it comes to accounting for special offers and prizes. I am adding this very important sentence to emphasise that this text  is not a direct accusation and attack on the arrays of “amazing” IT specialists, but it only aims  at highlighting the communication mistakes and pointing out at the problem of an accurate choice of human resources for the execution of a certain task.

When a website “is working, but it isn’t” From now on, we will focus on one specific example, namely – the creation of a web page. Running my own advertising agency, I often talk  to self-confident clients who say that their website is excellently prepared because it was created by  a great IT specialist. And exactly at this moment you start to realise that there might be a problem at the very beginning of the cooperation. And why  is that? Because most IT specialists are experts  in their field of expertise, but not in the area  of marketing. Also, judging from my experience,  in the case of many clients, what needs to be done first is a complete restructuring of the web page or, in a best-case scenario, a lot of small corrections need to be implemented, as they have a huge impact on conversion. What I find surprising  is the fact that when I talk to my clients,  the majority is surprised because they believe that we shouldn’t expect such knowledge from IT specialists, as they are not marketers. It is also difficult to explain why the web page has such  a low conversion rate, why it is unclear and not really intuitive. Maybe it is because of Mosher’s law of software engineering: “Don’t worry if it doesn’t work right. If everything did, you’d be out of job.”

SEO and the visibility of the web page The purpose of every web page, even if it is not prepared to generate sales, despite the premises and the circumstances, is to sell something. It doesn’t matter if it is information, a mass announcement, image or building a positive PR  of the company. Therefore, every investment  in a web page should not only have  a professionally prepared content, graphics and design, but more importantly, it should have solid foundation and be prepared with SEO and visibility in mind. Finding the appropriate keywords, which will then be located in a precise place in the content as well as their accurate implementation,  is the obligation of every company, if it was defined in the commission. This knowledge is closely related to SEO agencies, which have experience in this field. Forgetting about it means that we call into question the return of our investment.

Every person perceives the world in a completely different way. During the conversation, even if you think that you are talking about the same thing and imagine a seemingly identical object in exactly the same way, usually, it is only our false perception of mutual understanding. IT specialists can be a great example, as in my opinion, they see the object in a binary system: lacking space, colours and shapes

Communication The basic problem, apart from the above mentioned marketing elements, is communication. Have you ever tried to communicate with an IT specialist in such an effective way that the work you ordered was done according to the guidelines, without changing anything and adding something extra? Have you ever met an IT specialist who was able to create a web page that was clear and easy to navigate, so that the user could find the information intuitively? Has any one of them designed the home page and the whole scrolling and clicking mechanism, based on psychological elements, research and statistics regarding the process  of creating a web page?

Binary system between an iT specialist  and a marketer When creating a web page, we can’t forget that every detail matters. Let’s divide this topic in a very general way, because if we try to provide a detailed description, it may become a separate and lengthy publication. When analysing the structure of a web page, it is a good idea to think it through and design the layout, the way we want it to open, the graphics, the fonts and their size, the colours, the advertising slogans, the pictures or the forms of contact like modern communicators, which help to start the conversation more quickly. These are the elements, which every competent marketer is able to prepare. On the other hand, only a few of them are able to design and make them work. For sure, there are some, who have such knowledge, but the majority have no idea and need a good IT specialist who will transform the information into an efficient and stable system according to a detailed plan and guidelines.