Let marketing not Information Technology lead web development

Google alone searches more than 8 billion web pages continuously, even as you read this piece. Everyone has learnt to live with competition, but its ferocity and pace on the Internet is unparalleled. Pages surface at or near the top one day, only to disappear in to oblivion the next. The medium is in a fluid state and earth-shaking changes generally take no more than a month.

Information Technology and programming are essential but inadequate by themselves to support web development. Marketing as a discipline encompasses processes to study and to understand consumer behavior, formulate coherent and distinctive strategy and to implement it with rigor. It thereby gives body and substance to HTML, WYSIWYG, Flash and all the other acronyms that can so easily confound basic web development aims.

Software engineers should enter a web development project only after segmentation and targeting have been completed. This involves know-how related to environment scanning and methods such as PEST (Political, Economic, Social and Technology) analysis. Investments in time and money to assemble appropriate expertise to do due diligence to such tasks, pays off handsomely later.  

Segmentation is a creative process and should be under little or no resource constraints. Demographic, economic and social grouping is easy and obvious but may suffice only for a niche. Web development for mass consumption brands and services that are global in scope, call for the construction of clusters and an error in web development foundations cannot support any durable super-structure.  

Targeting is somewhat easier, because one always has the choice to sequence development of more than one web site. However detailed knowledge of segment behavior, thinking, values and influences helps to map decision making and thereby plan a superior and unique value delivery. Competitive advantage is a dynamic process, so assumptions made at the targeting stage should be reviewed with a frequency of not less than once in a hundred days.  

Web sites may be developed by not-for-profit organizations. Such bodies do indeed own some of the most valuable sites on the Internet. Principles of Applied Psychology have great relevance on the Internet as browser behavior is impatient and on impulse. Commercial firms and industries with extensive Marketing resources may find the surfing propensity hard to manage and hence knowledge of how to hold a site visitor’s attention is an insight of immense value.    

Web development is a strongly supporting example of the adage ‘well begun is half done’. A thorough market or environment scan, followed by thoughtful and inspired segmentation and thorough understanding of the chosen target and the value delivery, lays a clear path to web development success. Engineers are critical thinkers by nature and should understand the outputs of the Marketing process up to this point. They can then start to iterate some basic approaches to design, especially the landing page, links, colors and amounts of text.

No amount of planning and projection is ever a substitute for a real or even simulated consumer test. Primary data generation on awareness and recall from a group of typical potential visitors gives important validity to early outcomes of web development. Focus groups may also yield much information at this point and the project team should keep their minds open and free of bias, to avoid downstream disappointments. 

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