An organisation’s website is its shopfront, its brand in digital form, it’s presentation of “why” to the world. It is also often a shop, a place to transact, a key channel for marketing messages. In other words, your website is mission critical.
Many organisations source external assistance in the development of their web and digital marketing capabilities. This is generally a good thing: great design and web development, and the optimal configuration of your digital marketing capability is a specialist capability, and only the largest companies can afford to retain such capability in-house.
However, once the initial development has been completed, the organisation should be able to run its day-to-day business via its website without needing external, programmatic assistance. You may not have the skills to build a car, but you expect to be able to drive one without the need for assistance from the engineering team who built it.
I’d like to offer my own observations based on over a decade of running web development and digital marketing agencies.
1. SIMPLE CONTENT MANAGEMENT
The advantage of your organisation’s website as opposed to printed brochures, is that it is an ever evolving branding and marketing asset. As your organisation changes, your website should be able to be updated with it. You should be able to:
- create, edit and delete pages in your site;
- create, edit and delete text, images, video and tables;
- create forms;
- load PDFs that the users can download.
2. ANALYTICS
You should be able to review your own analytics. You should be able to log in at any time to see every activity of your audience’s online journey and review your website’s performance.
Your Google Analytics account should also be owned by you. Don’t let an agency have the ability to lock you out of your own account. Years of intellectual property will be lost if this happens.
3. MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
You should be able to create landing pages for new marketing campaigns. Creating those compelling marketing pages that engage and move your audience, should be something you set up with your agency with a design framework. Then you can iterate into different campaigns whenever you want to at a fast agile pace.
4. ECOMMERCE
You should be able to create, edit and delete products and services from your eCommerce solution, including pricing and discount/coupon features. For many organisations the ability to keep bringing new products and services to market quickly with the ability to pay for them is mission critical.
5. EVENTS
You should be able to set up and edit events whenever you need to. Again, get your agency to set the framework up at the start with the view that you can quickly and simply create and edit your events into the future.
THE FINAL WORD
Digital agencies can add so much value to your organisation by setting up the frameworks for all of the above organisational activities which will drive growth and income. But they should set you up for success so that you can drive your own organisational car without having to solely rely on the mechanics that created the car in the first place.
I’m Lee Jones, Hearburst’s General Manager and that is our philosophy. We can help you. Talk to us.
