AGSM The Star May 2016 | Page 5

What happens more often is people go, “Alright, I’ve got this thing I want to market. I will design some sort of pretty website. I will then put some content on.” And then they ask, “What am I going to write?” This is in completely the wrong order. It is the content that is going to give you the sale and the traction, not the design. The design is only the hook. Q. What are the skills of a digital marketer and how do the skills differ from its traditional predecessors? There is a big skillset from end-to-end. The first person who has to get involved is someone who has a big picture brain. The strategist, they understand the whole picture, they understand business, they understand how to market online and they understand the whole process. That person who works with the business analyst comes up with the strategic process for that particular business. Then the next skill is content. You need good professional content well-written. You see in a traditional business and traditional marketing you can change what you are saying to adapt to the circumstance, but online you’ve only got the one thing that is there, so you’ve got to have that professionally well-written. The next thing is design. It needs to be superb, at the cutting edge and right at the place where design is now. You need great programmers and the guys who program our websites are just superb. They code inside-out and they need to be coding full time and bang up to date with the latest stuff. You need to understand search engines, how they work if you want any sort of traction with google. You then need to understand the latest in digital advertising and there is a lot going on with retargeting now that you need to be on top of. Now how do they differ? Some things haven’t changed, like how you write for the target market but you just put it on a piece of paper and that was kind of it, really, like a piece of book or magazine or a newspaper. But there is just a whole lot of more skillsets now in digital that you want to be across if you want to be successful. Q. What inspired you to author The Contented Website? Well I realised that business owners weren’t putting value on content. So they were all getting excited about design. Then the website company would go to them and show them the designs and go, “Hey this is a beautiful website” and they then get