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