Be careful your Marketing Company is Not Your IT Company Too
Category: Blog
By Janice
21/01/2019
It goes without saying that marketing and IT serve different purposes. However, all too often, we are seeing marketing agencies offer services which should really be left to IT companies. This, in turn, becomes a problem for everyone involved as it ends up wasting both the marketing company and their clients’ time as well as money. In order to help you navigate the differences between a marketing agency and an IT company, let’s have a look at what each of them is supposed to do for your business.
The main difference between an IT company and a marketing agency is their agenda. They each have very specific targets as to what they are meant to deliver for your business. Let me explain: a marketing agency will focus on helping you gain more customers, communicate with existing customers, get new ideas to market efficiently, strengthen your branding and help your business differentiate itself in its marketplace. An IT company has completely different concerns for your business. They will focus on cybersecurity, support/maintenance of your IT systems, web development, provide IT solutions for your businesses customers/clients and so on… This is by no means a complete list of everything a marketing agency and an IT company does, however, it highlights that they have completely separate agendas and don’t overlap that much in terms of the work that they do.
As most marketing tasks now happen in the digital realm there is a degree of tech savviness marketing agencies are required to have as they could simply not deliver digital marketing strategies otherwise. This results in marketing agencies offering services which should be left to IT companies or at the very least should involve an IT company. Services which require solid backend development such as building websites for example. A marketing agency will probably be able to create a good looking website for you but depending on what you need they most probably won’t be able to make it as functional as it should be.
This is where IT companies will make the difference as they will have the expertise required to build a website with the features you need instead of a website that just looks nice. Even in terms of website safety! You can be sure your website will be safe from cybercrime and hacking if it was built by an experienced IT company. This may not be the case if it was built by a marketing agency. Marketing companies are good at establishing your brand, visual identity and increase your sales. They can build you a great website with the terrific front end which will get traffic and convert sales however there is no point getting all the traffic if there is a weak backend resulting in website crashes, issues with purchase requests, slow loading time amongst others, and security risks for your customers, which will ultimately have a negative impact on your business.
Although there are marketing companies with good IT departments capable of delivering on the backend side of things, they are currently a minority and more often than not we hear stories from unsatisfied clients who need to hire IT companies to fix the mistakes made by marketing companies who oversold their services. As a client, you need to understand the differences between IT and marketing and their limitations in order to not end up in a situation where everything looks great but runs poorly or a situation where everything runs great but looks uninteresting and isn’t set up to convert sales or gain new customers.
If you need a bit of help with understanding the differenced between digital marketing companies and IT, please contact us. We can also help you source an IT partner.
To be featured or find out more:
e-mail us on support@companyconnecting.com
call us on 0845 643 5375
or contact Janice on Linkedin
"Be careful your Marketing Company is Not Your IT Company Too" First published on Company Connecting January 2019
©Company Connecting
