Do modern marketers need to up their technical game?
The digital age made the ability to understand code and technical terms a desirable skill among top-notch marketers – but it may now be an essential part of their armoury.
From First Contentful Paint to headless, webp and Cumulative Layout Shift, marketers are now drowning in technical terms. Although they don’t need to retrain as software developers, those that understand and embrace the concepts and their business impact are the ones that will succeed, says Sputnik Digital MD Andy Nicol.
“Marketers don’t always talk about engineering, good code or automated testing, but they should do,” he explains to BusinessCloud. “There is a huge latent opportunity to positively impact their KPIs, including search rankings, conversion and LTV.
“Adhering to software best practice and having a good engineering team on your side really does impact the areas that are important to marketers.”
Sputnik have a reputation among chief technology officers (CTOs) for complex engineering projects in heavily regulated industries such as financial services. However Nicol says its thorough approach translates effectively to online marketing products, such as websites.
As such, he is hosting a free hour-long webinar workshop on 8th February – covering digital projects, legacy tech and web performance – which will demonstrate how engineering teams can help marketers meet objectives across user experience (UX), SEO and conversion. You can sign up below.
Reserve your spot on the webinar here
“When we build marketing solutions, we apply the same software best practice that financial services clients and regulated industries demand; the engineers that work on a small £500 engagement bring with them the knowledge and experience of delivering £1m digital transformation projects for enterprise clients,” the founder says.
Nicol, a seasoned digital strategist with over 25 years of expertise delivering digital projects for brands including GoCompare, Swinton Insurance, Axelos and Fluent Money, says the webinar highlights how good code can increase reliability, reduce server costs and improve sustainability and accessibility.
More importantly, it will boost SEO: Sputnik powered a rapid improvement in performance for a PLC client after it had dropped from top spot in Google for the search term ‘car insurance’ to eighth in less than a year. Within two months of going live with their code optimisation, it was back at No.1.
A similar engagement for another client saw Sputnik hugely improve results for the search terms ‘bike insurance’, ‘motorbike insurance’ and ‘motorcycle insurance’, lifting them from Google position 20 up to number 5 within three months.
Yet another real world example of the impact of better code saw a 19% improvement in conversion through the customer journey on mobile devices, with an average of 7.5% across all devices – the kind of numbers that would impress any marketers, and all through knowing how to engage better with the engineering teams.
“If you held these two websites side by side, as static pages, they looked identical – our job was not to redesign them, just to make sure the code and infrastructure adhered to modern better practices,” Nicol explains.
“Design and user experience are important in CRO – but actually, just having good code is hugely important. The risk of choosing the wrong technical partner is that you can lose 20% of your customers.”