The Intersection of Digital Marketing and Web Development

As the number of online users grows worldwide, with over 4.3 billion internet users reported at the beginning of the year, businesses are beginning to see the importance of digital marketing. Promoting products or services using electronic devices like computers and mobile phones falls under digital marketing and there are a number of tools and strategies used in the field.

Digital Marketing

While online marketing is one of the most popular types of digital marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, content writing, AdWords, social media marketing, and analytics are all important components of digital marketing.

In order to understand the link between digital marketing and web development, it is important to briefly look at the various components of digital marketing. Search engine optimization or SEO is where a website is optimized in order to increase visibility on a search engine. Keywords as well as user-friendliness and speed of a website are instrumental in SEO.

While email and social media marketing are self-explanatory, it should be kept in mind that email and social media campaigns often direct people to the business website. AdWords is a tool used to advertise on search engines like Google and analytics is the collection of data in order to understand the success or failure of various strategies and campaigns.

Since digital marketing relies on electronic devices, it is a given that websites play a crucial role in the success of digital marketing campaigns. Thus, a company that wants to reap the benefits of digital marketing will also want to invest in web development.

Web Development

Web development looks at creating and maintaining websites. This is important because many people learn about brands, products, and services by visiting the business website. A slow and badly designed website may make potential customers go to competitors in the field as no one wants to waste time waiting for a web page to load or make an effort to navigate through a complicated web design.

If you take an online clothing store, for instance, customers may come across an advertisement on Instagram or Facebook and may even be able to purchase items on these social media platforms. However, a customer will first check the authenticity of a business by entering its name on a search engine.

If the business has invested in SEO, the link to their website should turn up at the top of the search results. The customer would then click on the link and visit the business website. The customer will only spend time on the website and make a purchase or keep returning to it depending on the web development the company invested in.

Link Between Digital Marketing and Web Development

Digital marketing strategies are heavily focused on attracting users to the business website but these efforts will fail to show significant results if the company website takes a long time to load and isn’t user-friendly. A website that isn’t mobile-friendly, for instance, may lose a lot of potential customers as online mobile users keep increasing worldwide.

This is why it’s important that the digital marketing team and the web development team of a business work together and understand the requirements of each field. A web developer, for instance, may want to use large, high quality images on the website but the digital marketing team may see how this will slow down the site, negatively affecting their online marketing strategies.

Content is one of the main areas in which digital marketing and web development can be in conflict or disagreement. A web developer may think that content makes a website bulky and heavy while a digital marketer may not look at a website in terms of design and attractiveness.

Understanding the different types of content required for various digital marketing strategies like SEO as well as website design, user-friendliness, and loading times, will help create a link between the digital marketing and web development teams in a company. The failure to do so will result in either digital marketing strategies that fail to obtain the expected results or a well-designed website that attracts no traffic.

It is for this reason that digital marketing and web development are now being seen as teams that must work in collaboration as opposed to focusing on their individual responsibilities and tasks.