Online marketing - The Technomarketers...
and the Design Gurus
By Jon Fletcher - Managing Director
When an expert in any topic makes it seem simple, you just know that beneath the veneer of calm assurance, a lot more is going on.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of online marketing, with its central requirement to integrate the varied fields of design, technology, copywriting and marketing strategy.
Online marketing arose as a result of the Internet revolution and the associated marketing opportunities that appeared almost overnight. Its most influential proponents are based in the technology sector and it is typically delivered by traditional marketers and their design colleagues. It’s right here at the beginning that things can start to go awry, with the technology champions being motivated by the technology itself and traditional marketers attempting to fit a completely new form of marketing into an existing template.
The Technomarketers
In the summer of 2004 I was sitting in the office of a neighbouring company, doing a spot of networking, listening attentively to an exquisitely intelligent MD explain how he had cracked the secret to top search engine positioning.
His method was elegant and logical; provide his Compumarketron TM (name made up to protect the vulnerable) with any phrase and it would scour the Internet, specifically newsgroups, for mention of that phrase. The Compumarketron TM would then précis each article (chop off everything apart from the first 250 words) and upload to a web site.
The same exercise would then be repeated with synonymous phrases and each article would be linked with an auto generated menu structure and site map. The result was a comprehensive archive of material automatically extracted from the web focussed on specific topics and, by its very nature, highly optimised for search engines.
Within its own safe world of technological solutions, algorithms and function calls it was a marvel to behold. Back in the real world though, it was just a system for randomly copying web material - wildly off-topic, badly written and unlikely to be indexed by a search engine because it was a copy.
Needless to say the Compumarketron TM never saw the light of a commercial day.
Technology must respond to a need - a clearly defined need with a full specification, reviewed by people with preferably no technical ability. The problem with the example above is obvious - it was a solution looking for a problem and was not designed to meet any specific actual need.
So, how do you spot a Technomarketer?
It’s usually quite simple. You will be introduced to the latest system with a funky or ‘acronymous’ name, given a list of its abilities illustrated with diagrams (or even... flow charts) and all shown on a curiously unimpressive laptop. It is unlikely that you will at any stage be asked about your business goals, current issues or, in the more extreme cases, what it is you actually do.
The Design Gurus
There are some outstanding designers out there! Give them a badly made plastic spanner set from Heilongjiang and they’ll give you back a set of designs that make it a must-have thing of beauty.
The self same skills that allow a design guru to beguile your senses on paper translate perfectly to the web - after all it’s just another medium, emitting photons instead of reflected ones.
Online marketing needs those same design abilities – but the problem comes when that is as far as it goes. Rather than picking on a specific example (and we see about three a week), lets instead look at ‘Flash’* - the software that helps produce animated web sites.
Flash offered unprecedented opportunities for designers to produce graphically gorgeous web sites with things swooping in, expanding out - generally providing a visual feast. The problem was that for all of their gorgeousness, Flash web sites were practically invisible to search engines and as a result were a real challenge to drive traffic to.
This alone should have consigned Flash to its rightful place as a tool to create web objects, elements of web pages rather than entire sites... but it didn’t. The design gurus couldn’t let it drop. “Just look at what we can do” they argued, “What a beautiful pattern! What fine colours! That is a magnificent suit of clothes!”
To this day, complete sites that have a requirement for search engine marketing are written in Flash for no reason other than it being the preferred tool of the producing ‘guru’.
The same issue is far more commonly found with web site designs that are little more than brochures translated into web form. They are produced like this because the team that produce them typically produce brochures, and don’t have the web experience to guide their clients towards the notion of a real web site.
How do you spot a Design Guru? In much the same way you spot a Technomarketer.
You will be taken through the early stages of a design workup, shown gorgeous web site designs, asked designer questions about the ‘feel’ of the site but not a word about your business aims, goals, key performance indicators and the like.
So who should you be talking to?
A company who understands the place for technology, the place for design and the place for all of the other elements that go to create a successful web site. It’s all about integration, blending all areas so that the whole is most definitely greater than the sum of its parts.
But how can you be sure that you’re talking to the right company? Simple... ring 01789 491610.
* Not the 50’s B movie sci-fi hero... or a household cleaner... or a type of photographic illumination... or an unspeakable exposure…it makes you wonder why they chose such an overused word for a piece of software that would produce an animated web site.
Can we help?
It’s all about integration, blending all areas so that the whole is most definitely greater than the sum of its parts.