This is my series of 30 brief interactive marketing tips. I’m posting each business day at 8:30 a.m. EST. Catch them all by subscribing to my blog or bookmarking the site. All of the posts will be tagged “30 interactive marketing tips” and listed on this page.
#5 – Hire Great Interactive Marketers
No matter how many blogs you read, books you stack on your nightstand or conferences you attend, you simply don’t know everything you need to know to create a great site.
You might go searching for talent when you reach your limit or perhaps you’ve got the foresight to recognize your weaknesses early in the process. Either way, you need some help. You don’t have to hire all of these people, sometimes consultants will do just fine.
Here’s my list for an interactive marketing dream team:
- Web Analyst – What did you expect to be first on the list? A great analyst is worth his or her weight in gold. They set a foundation of metrics and form the core of your data-driven decision making culture. Novice or pro? Learn about hiring web analysts here.
- Designer – Branding, looking and feel are the emotional core of how you connect with your audience. Few purchases are purely rational, so ensure your site is professional, credible and engaging with a great designer or creative shop.
- SEO - Organic search is a behemoth in terms of potential traffic and conversions, yet many people take a “if I build it, Google will come” approach to their site. You need an SEO process to address the technical, content and off-site elements that influence your site’s search engine friendliness. The sooner you engage an SEO, the better.
- User Experience Architect – The information architecture, interaction design and task flow of your site directly correlate to customer satisfaction and sales. A great UX champions customer centricity and pushes for frequent user testing and review. A logical and pleasing experience (balanced with SEO needs) translates into happier customers and more money.
- Paid Search Manager – Performance marketing is dominated by paid search in the world of interactive marketing and with good reason. The field is awash in metrics and options to fine tune your campaigns according to what’s profitable for your company. The bad news? It’s a full or part-time job. The good news? Great PPC people or agencies pay for themselves.
- Developer -Someone has to translate your vision into code. If the site doesn’t function, what’s the point? If you can’t make changes, what will you do? You get what you pay for in developers, as in so many other disciplines.
- Additional Channel Experts – Your particular business may call for investment in other channels, like affiliate marketing, email or social media. Each of these areas has its own set of rules. It’s great to ride with training wheels by yourself, but that does not make you a world class cycler.
- Strategist/Marketer – This is probably you. Some guy or gal has to have the vision and business sense to set goals and draw a path toward those goals. This is the person who knows what to do and how to do it, or at least to find people who know how to do it.
Who’s on your dream team?
