Why Your Marketing Agency Needs Software Developers (And Where To Find Them)

Digital marketing - essentially any form of marketing that exists online - is booming. A Forrester report published last year forecast that spending on digital marketing will reach $146bn by 2023, growing at a 9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). It makes sense if you consider that we’re reportedly spending more than six hours a day online, with nearly 30% of US adults saying they are “almost constantly” connected. And while the Covid-19 pandemic has caused widespread economic damage and disruption, it is also set to accelerate the broader digital transformation, with major implications for marketing. After all, why would you keep spending money on subway billboard ads if your target audience is no longer commuting to the office or traveling to the shops?

In this era of rapid transformation, marketing agencies are being forced to adapt. While the broad fundamentals of marketing never really change, the way in which they are applied and activated is evolving rapidly with the advance of technology. One key shift is the gradual blurring of the lines between digital marketing and software development - these days, you’ll struggle to develop a relevant and effective digital marketing strategy if you don’t know your HTML from your Javascript. And what’s the use of creating visionary social content if you don’t understand how to use the right tools to drive customer engagement or analyze its overall impact?

What links digital marketing with software development?

The concept of having completely rigid and separate creative and tech teams is looking increasingly obsolete as digital market strategies become more sophisticated. In fact, the whole marketing process is being transformed with trends that marketers may not be fully comfortable with, such as cloud computing solutions, IoT interfacing and security, machine learning and deep learning algorithms for artificial intelligence (AI) functions, augmented reality and virtual reality programs, natural language processing (NLP), messaging bots, and the uses of big data.

Digital marketing agencies increasingly feel under pressure to be on top of these latest trends and tools if they’re going to help their clients stand out in a crowded and fickle online environment. But here in lies a danger: without the relevant tech expertise embedded in the marketing team, you could end up spending large sums on marketing software or technology that won’t actually help you reach your goals (or those of your client). That is why nowadays there is a new term going around used by marketers and software devs, called: "MarTech". This make us understand the need between them.

Now, if you’re running a small, independent marketing agency, you can’t really expect your in-house staff to become experts in software development overnight. An alternative option is to have the developers that build, maintain and upgrade these powerful marketing software solutions working alongside your traditional marketers. This can help you make sure you implement the right tools in the right manner to maximize the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. Better still, they could potentially build or customize marketing technology to serve the unique needs of the marketing team.

It sounds great in theory, but the reality isn’t so straightforward. Bringing in a team of dedicated software developers in-house is likely to be costly and may not always be effective if your recruits don’t have the relevant expertise for a specific client request.

Tune Up Your Marketing Agency With Nearshore Devs

So what do you do if you want to scale up your digital market agency operations or need to quickly fill a tech skills gap to deliver on a particular client’s campaign requirements? Outsourcing is the seemingly obvious solution, and with good reason. Hiring a third party with specialist technical expertise for certain projects is far cheaper than hiring a full-stack development team in-house. Adding in offshoring - outsourcing projects to development teams/partners in far-flung countries - opens up a wider talent pool and could imply even greater savings due to lower labor costs. However, this ‘too good to be true’ solution can sometimes be just that: communication issues, cultural misunderstandings, and awkward collaboration across different time zones often bring a whole new set of problems that no reputable agency can afford to deal with.

A better alternative is to cultivate a long-term relationship with a reliable team of talented developers that can integrate smoothly into your existing team as required. And that’s where nearshoring staffing firms like Jobsity come into play. Nearshoring involves outsourcing some of your software development to a nearby country rather than one on the other side of the world. For companies in the US or Canada, this typically means partnering with companies in Latin America. Nearshoring staffing firms have a deep knowledge of the local talent and can augment your agency staff seamlessly with high-skilled developers. They’ll also take care of a bunch of secondary issues such as recruiting, retention & continuous training, project management, and quality assurance, etc.

Safe in the knowledge that the external tech talent will be quickly and fully integrated into the team, digital marketing agencies can focus their internal activities where they add the highest value. If you want to see how nearshore staff augmentation can help your company, get in touch with us here at Jobsity.

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