When a large company like Pepsi wants to launch a new marketing website or make enhancements to their existing website, a cast of characters is involved. Let’s look at who they are and what they do.
Planning
Business Owner
This person is responsible for the business goals associated with the website project.
Typically, the goals will be around increasing revenue, reducing expense, increasing customer satisfaction, increasing brand awareness, or something else that is measureable and designed to have a positive impact for shareholders, customers, or employees.
Product Manager
The product manager takes the business goals and creates a roadmap with features and enhancements designed to meet those goals. He defines each feature into a set of functional requirements and then leads the cross-functional teams to execute against the roadmap.
Product Marketing Guy
The product marketing guy is responsible for specifically defining the features and benefits that need to be conveyed to the website’s visitors. This person works closely with the product manager to ensure that any enhancements are meeting the objectives of the business.
Implementation
Web/Interaction Designer
The web designer prepares wireframes from the functional requirements and works with the graphic designer to layout the look and feel of the website in a graphics tool like Photoshop.
Graphic Designer
The graphic designer is responsible for defining the website style or adhering to an existing style guide. He will provide the web designer with guidance on colors and font styles as well as any graphical or image components needed to implement the website design.
Copywriter
The copywriter provides all content that is needed for the website. This includes headlines, primary content, instructional text, help content, and error messages. The copywriter works closely with the product manager and product marketing guy to understand all features as well as the messaging.
SEO Specialist
The SEO specialist is responsible for creating the plan to ensure that the website is visible to the desired audience on the search engines. She conducts keyword research, linking analysis, and competitive research that culminates in a plan that contains tactics to be implemented on the website as well as on other sites.
Technical Lead
The technical lead works closely with the product manager to understand the roadmap and functional requirements. He then creates a technical approach that is designed to satisfy the business goals. His recommendation may be to create everything from scratch or to use an existing content management system like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal.
Web Developer
Once the designers have completed their mockups and wireframes, the web developer builds the new website using HTML, CSS, PHP, .NET, or any other language that has been determined by the technical lead as suitable for the needs of the project.
Quality Assurance Analyst
The quality assurance analyst or QA analyst creates test plans based on the wireframes and requirements and tests the completed website to compare it to the desired outcome. If there are any deviations from the requirements or anything is not working as designed, the QA analyst logs these defects as “bugs” to be reviewed and prioritized by the product manager. A strong QA process ensures a low defect website.
Promotion
Marketing Gal
While the website is being created, the online marketing gal works with the product manager or product marketing guy to create the promotion plan to create awareness about the new website. The team determines the target audience – new or existing customers – as well as how to reach them – direct mail, email marketing, paid media, social media, events.
The online marketing gal then creates a plan and manages the execution of each of the promotional activities.
What This Means For You
As you can see, there are many roles and responsibilities needed to successfully launch an effective marketing website. In my next post, I’ll talk about how these roles map to the resources available to you as a small business owner.
