Marketing at the Speed of Light: What You Need To Know, And What You Don’t - - December 3, 2008 at 12:48 pm

Just the other day, we (we being the marketing team at Model Metrics) realized that we should make a relatively minor change to our website – the thought being that we could increase conversion or some such metric.  A little thought and literally 5 minutes of work and our change was rolled out onto our public website.  No big deal.

That’s how it works today though, or at least it should.  Not long ago, literally just a few years ago, it wasn’t so simple.  To make a website change, you had to involve a designer, a technical resource, and if you’re with a large company, a ton of approvals to make what should be a simple change.

But those simple changes truly are becoming simple now.  Content management systems have evolved to the point where nearly anyone can manage their own website without coding skills.  Want to change the written content?  It’s just like typing into a document program such as Microsoft Word.  Want to move things around on a page?  Just drag and drop.  Want to change some colors?  No coding, just do it in the wysiwyg editor.  Even a CMO can do this stuff.

Beyond content management for your website, there are a ton of other tools now available that can help a non-technical marketer at least appear have a hidden technical competence, in addition to truly being an effective employee or manager.

Here’s a few of them:

1. Google Sites – a great tool that let’s users quickly and easily create websites that enable just about anything.  We’ve used it to create a marketing asset management tool to allow password protected access to our logos, etc. for vendors.  Among others, we’ve also used it as a project management tool for partners we are co-developing applications with.
2. Content management systems – as mentioned above, check out WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
3. Graphics design programs, such as CS4 by Adobe.  These aren’t cheap, but save you money over the longer term and can significantly decrease the turnaround time on projects if you can establish even marginal proficiency yourself.
4. Salesforce Web to Lead (W2L) functionality – if you use Salesforce CRM and want a lead to automatically flow into your Salesforce application, it can automatically create the html code of your website’s registration form.

There’s literally hundreds of tools available today that can help marketers at all levels get the job done faster and less expensively without giving up quality. Hopefully these few get you started.