I’ve been quiet lately. Startup life is busy… and exhausting. Blogging for me has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo. I’m planning to change that.
Since technology is increasingly involved in a modern company’s marketing department, it’s become quite common for those of us who are developers to find ourselves deeply involved with our marketing team. Almost two years ago, I took on the role of “Director, Web Strategy and Marketing Technologies” at Contatta. As a small startup, it means I personally handle a whole host of technology decisions and implementations — and I do it within a limited budget. Sometimes that requires me to get creative instead of going for a big all-in-one solution.
Though early in my career (building small business web sites) I regularly provided clients with organic SEO and analytics, the techniques I knew have changed. We now use schema and OG markup. Google Analytics has been upgraded to Universal analytics. There are additional analytics tools available like Mixpanel and Kissmetrics. There are also a whole host of things that I didn’t regularly offer back then — like A/B testing, heat mapping, multiple landing pages, and very few clients used email marketing. Through a lot of trial, and some error too, I’ve been creating a system that gives us the ability to test, analyze and iterate quickly.
I still do all the front-end development for Contatta’s website and blog — and I’ll continue to blog about web techniques and technology. But I’ll also start sharing posts with marketing technology-related information. Tips and techniques, and creative ways I’ve found to make things work on a budget. (I’m probably posting these as much for me as for you. More than once, I’ve done a search for how to do something and found the answer in one of my own, older blog posts. It’s one of the best reasons to blog—I can’t remember everything—even when I once figured it out.)
I’m enjoying this journey. I hope you’ll share things you’ve learned with me as well. Cheers.
