Interaction between software developers and digital marketers may be limited, but spending time learning about how software developers spend their days can offer digital marketers some useful insights into how to better structure their own work.
In essence, five things help software developers to make their work a success: perfect planning and clear communication,complete organization, keeping ahead of the game, flexibility, and rigorous testing.
1. Perfect Planning and Clear Communication
From coordinated marketing campaigns to developing a new mobile application, every project starts with planning. After all, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Ensuring that all stakeholders are involved from the very beginning is essential if everyone is to understand the overall aims and objectives, and make a project succeed.
Frequent and thorough communication, both internally and with clients, is critical to managing expectations and resolving any potential issues that may arise.
Recommendations for marketing teams:
- Ensure that all actions, plans, and objectives are written down. Relying on memory is imperfect, and verbal requests can easily be ignored or forgotten.
- Ensure that all documentation is stored in a central, easily accessible location.
- Nominate a dedicated person or team to be responsible for the delivery of a campaign. That person or team can be a central source of information and point of contact for a client.
2. Organization
Having the correct structures in place to manage workflow is essential to ensure the steady delivery of key objectives.
From making sure your marketing team has the correct resources before starting to knowing where and how information is recorded will influence the success of your efforts.
Recommendations for marketing teams:
- Before embarking on a project, put together and circulate plans and timing schedules.
- If you don't have a dedicated project manager, train key staff members in project management tools and techniques to help successfully bring together the various moving parts (and people) needed to deliver a successful campaign.
- Purchase a dedicated project management tool. With a variety of cloud-based options available to them, key stakeholders the opportunity to discuss, share, and manage workloads in an efficient way.
3. Staying on trend
Software developers have their work cut out for them in trying to keep up with how the technical landscape is changing. They also have to stay up to date with more mundane details of constantly changing knowledge.
Similarly, marketing teams have their work cut out for them in keeping up to date with the latest trends... from the latest update to Google's algorithm to the next viral video.
Recommendations for marketing teams:
- Allow time each week to both read up on industry developments from authorities in your field.
- Schedule a meeting with our team members where you can discuss updates and play around with ideas which may affect your future business.
4. Flexibility
Each new client or project brings with it a unique set of challenges and resources. Some demand incredible tech-savviness, and you have to be ready and willing to demonstrate expertise. Others, not so much.
Either way, each project needs to be tailored specifically to clients or key stakeholders if you are to deliver something that can work with their available resources. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work.
Recommendation for marketing teams: to clearly demonstrate how a project will be carried out, create an SLA (a service-level agreement), a document that outlines what the client can expect from you, and in return, what you can expect from the client.
5. Testing
Naturally, before a new tool or program is launched, software developers undertake rigorous testing. Even minor errors can quickly spiral, causing huge embarrassment and lost revenue if a mistake isn't identified.
In the marketing world, campaigns and content all need testing. Whether by checking how a contact form works to conducting A/B split-tests, marketers should not allow any projects to fail because of errors or poor judgment.
Recommendations for marketing teams:
- Establish clear KPIs to understand how a new project is performing.
- Build campaigns based on evidence and experience.
- If resources are available, test campaigns first with a small group of people before rolling it out to a wider audience.
