Why Your Internet Marketing Strategy Is Broken

Tough love time: most companies employ broken internet marketing strategies. It’s not because the company has employed an inexperienced web developer, an incompetent SEO provider or the CEO’s fourteen year old niece as a social media consultant  - in fact, they might have a crack team of the very best professionals in their respective fields and could still just as easily be failing to achieve their overall goals.

The problem is communication. Let’s break this down:

Web Designers & Developers

Here’s an obvious one to get started with. If you’re going to build a website you would expect your web designer to work very closely with your web developer (assuming they’re not the same person). I mean, designers’ imaginations can run wild if they have no concept of what is feasible from a development perspective and a developer can entirely mistranslate a design if a developer does not have clear instructions from the designer. This problem isn’t as common today as it used to be but you would be amazed how many agencies still segregate these two groups.

SEO Providers

Search engine optimisation is all too often advertised as a one stop solution for solving all of a companies internet marketing woes. Perhaps 10 years go, but no longer can an SEO provider consistently offer proper results without a decent knowledge of web development techniques. The biggest ranking factors today in the era of the mighty Panda and Penguin (Google’s most infamous algorithm updates for years) are undisputedly measured on your website itself. Proper URL structures, document structures, even the ratio of text versus code on a site all matter immensely and none can be manipulated in the way they should be without an experienced web developer.

In an ideal world an SEO will be talking with the designer and the developer during the initial production of your website. This isn’t always possibly though so an SEO has to be prepared to work with their peers after the initial launch of a site and to provide clear and actionable instructions.

Social Media Consultants

It would be fair to assume that social media experts are the least susceptible to poor communication skills but alas, in general they’re about as bad as those already mentioned above when it comes to collaborating on internet marketing strategies. Again, talking with designers and developers is paramount to building the right sharing tools and the best interactive experience for users. Social media and SEO are two sectors that are rapidly becoming aligned. Search engines care about the signals the social sphere can provide about a website and with the help of a solid SEO strategy the positive effect these signals have can become increased dramatically.

The Bottom Line

Don’t be afraid to get your team talking. If they can’t or worse won’t then it can only be because they don’t feel their objectives are aligned and if that is the case then it means they aren’t all working to the objectives you want to reach.