Developers Aren’t Marketers, and Marketers Aren’t Developers

Chris Davis 0:10
And we’re back. Welcome to another episode of the All Systems Go podcast. Today I’m going to take you into a bit of a peek into my day to day. And it’s one of the things that I found serves as more of a hindrance than a help when trying to deploy technology properly across your entire company.

Chris Davis 0:43
And it seems there are times where it seems like it should be a little more straightforward than it is. And it’s interesting. I’ve lived two lives, essentially a life as the marketer or on the team building on platforms and then now leading teams in technology initiatives that involve developers that build platforms. And in both cases you have building taking place, building of developers, building of marketers.

Chris Davis 1:14
And that conflation leads to a lot of false expectations, poor performance and undesired output. And, and that’s what today’s podcast is about and why it’s titled Marketers aren’t Developers. Developers aren’t Marketers. And the first sense I got of this was when I was getting started in entrepreneurship.

Chris Davis 1:40
I was a web developer. That was the first thing that I did out of engineering to do coding for a business. And the most common ask back then, and this is way back when email newsletters were like revolutionary. Aweber eye contact and get response and maybe one other one campaign.

Chris Davis 2:04
What was that? Campaign monitor. I can’t even remember it. Oh, constant contact.

Chris Davis 2:10
I’m sorry. Where the main mailchimp was really just getting more usage on the scene. So this is way back when everybody I’m dating myself over 10 years ago and over a decade ago. How about that?

Chris Davis 2:23
And the main request for a web developer was can you put my newsletter form on my site? And I have seen that request extend to developers from can you put it on my site? To can you build my landing page? Can you hook up my CRM?

Chris Davis 2:41
It just got the requests, got more and more on the developer for marketing tasks and if anything, spoiler alert, that is the cause of all of the frustration in your business. More than likely you’re asking a developer to act as a marketer and you’re thinking a marketer can do everything that a developer can, right? And what I found is that as I started to navigate from developer to marketer, I started judging the developers, everyone. I started looking at them like, hey, why are you guys putting this blanket opt in form in the footer of every website date yourself.

Chris Davis 3:31
If you had a website developed and nowhere in the design showed A footer opt in for the newsletter, but when the website was delivered to you, it had the footer for the newsletter. And usually it’s hooked up to Gravity forms because that’s what developers use. Or they were using Contact Form 7 or some WordPress plugin. But essentially there was no logic, there was nothing behind it.

Chris Davis 3:55
They just threw it on there. And that is what happens when you ask a developer to do a marketing task. And I’m not saying this to talk down on developers or higher on marketers, or down on marketers, higher on developers. I’m stating this objectively and I have to say it because, and let’s just call it what it is, developers can get real sensitive, okay?

Chris Davis 4:19
I found that marketers have a lot tougher skin. But developers get very sensitive when you start to talk about the integrity of their code or the boundaries of what they shouldn’t be doing because they feel like if it touches anything online, a developer can do it. And it’s just not true. There are two different types of building and two different types of brains that are required.

Chris Davis 4:42
And understanding that is going to save the developers on your team stress and unfair criticism. And it’s also going to empower the marketer. So what am I saying? I would start with this statement, developers build and marketers use what developers built.

Chris Davis 5:05
That’s the beginning of this thought that I had. But then I said, well, wait a minute, no, marketers build too. And there we go, the build build conflation, right? They build funnels, they build landing pages, they email sequences, they’re builders.

Chris Davis 5:20
So, so what’s the difference? Well, the difference comes in from the foundation. Developers are the beginning. Everything starts with a developer.

Chris Davis 5:31
A developer creates the foundational platform that all other building will take place on. So if you think of a developer just like land, someone who develops land, they determine if the land is good to build on. They start to work with the, with. I don’t know the exact, I’m not a general contractor, everyone, so I don’t know the exact terms, but they start working with other people who build houses.

Chris Davis 5:59
Let’s just say, let’s say houses and buildings and help them develop the land, understand the floor, understand the layout and what can be built. Well, the same is for a developer online, except the real estate is not land. It’s a domain, it’s a website, it’s a platform, right? And when you develop the land, you can now build on top of it.

Chris Davis 6:24
So part of developing, we’ll say the land is also laying the foundation. Once the foundation is laid that concrete slab. Now anybody, any home builder can come and build on top of it any type of home that they want that matches the foundation, of course, and you see that working in sync. So you wouldn’t ask a.

Chris Davis 6:48
If you do have a company that builds homes, they either have the developer in house or they contract that out, right? And there’s even builders who contract out the building at times to other companies that are coming and actually lay the framing and all of that. So when you go to real life scenarios, building is very clean. It’s like, hey, here’s the foundation, here’s the wall, the framing, who’s doing the windows, who’s doing the painting.

Chris Davis 7:21
They’re all different types of builders, but online we just say builder and we expect them to be able to do it all. Whereas a developer online responsibility is to lay the foundation, which is what we’re calling platforms. Okay? A developer doesn’t build a landing page, shouldn’t build a landing page.

Chris Davis 7:43
They should create the servers and the capacity for a marketer to build a landing page on top of it, right? So you start to see this differentiate when you see that developers build platforms, marketers build on developed platforms. If you, if there’s nothing else that I say in this podcast, you have to own the understanding of that statement. Developers build platforms, marketers build on platforms that are developed, okay?

Chris Davis 8:23
And the reason being is because you need to understand who owns the platform. If you’re buying SaaS software, well, that platform is owned by that SaaS company. And who maintains the platform is the same one who builds. This is why you send in support tickets, right?

Chris Davis 8:48
Because you have no control over the features, errors, whatever the case may be. So you have to send in a support ticket and then they route it to the developer. And what does the developer do? They update the platform so that you can continue to build on top of it.

Chris Davis 9:05
So marketers, builders, automation, service professionals and providers are all second degree builders. First degree builders are the platform builders. Second degree builders are the ones who build on those platforms. And again, this is going to save you a ton of, a ton of headaches and issues because when you conflate the two, you’re going to have a developer building a landing page, integrating CRM forms, and guess what?

Chris Davis 9:41
Can they check the box and say, yes, I built this? Absolutely. Will it be functional in some capacity? Absolutely.

Chris Davis 9:54
Will it achieve what you need it to do from a marketing and business growth perspective? Usually not. And here’s why. When a marketer builds a landing page, they’re focused on Conversion, they’re focused on attribution, capturing leads, making sure they’re connected to the CRM, that the copy on the page is matching the email so that their conversion rates can be as high as possible.

Chris Davis 10:25
They’re conversion focused builders. What are developers? They’re function focused builders. So though they can do it, the operation of it is not going to meet the standard that you actually need in producing the output.

Chris Davis 10:45
High conversions that marketing is responsible for. Right? And I’ve had this issue so many times with so many companies that I’ve worked with and usually here’s, here’s what you’ll see the symptoms of. The developer gets the bad rap for doing something poorly.

Chris Davis 11:06
They didn’t really do something poorly, they just didn’t do it like a marketer would. And the company very rarely understands the difference between a marketer building something and a developer building something. But guess what? Just because they don’t understand the difference doesn’t mean that they don’t have the same expectation.

Chris Davis 11:26
So now they’re expecting a developer to produce the output of something a marketer would do and should do. Right? That expectation now has the developer in a position where they can produce something that’s functional, but it’s not effective for the marketing needs. And now the developer is looked at as, oh, they, they, they didn’t, they don’t know what they’re doing.

Chris Davis 11:50
They broke something some. Every time we asked them to do something. One, it takes long. Two, it never works.

Chris Davis 11:56
You start to hear these terms and a lot of times when I come in and I start talking to the developers, they’re, they’re, there’s some of the sharpest, nicest, just capable types of professionals. And it always hurts my heart because I’m like, man, you’re really getting a bad rap. And let’s give some ownership to the developer, usually developer. And I’m talking about senior developers, everyone.

Chris Davis 12:27
It gets worse the more junior you get. But I’ve seen senior developers do this too. They get territorial and they, since they don’t understand the line of delineation between building on the platform and building the platform, they get territorial and they start taking on more than they should. And now when they should be drawing a boundary saying, hey, no, that’s actually outside of what I would do, they say, yeah, sure, I can put that form up.

Chris Davis 12:55
Yeah, sure, I can build that page. And technically they can. Right? Like me, technically, can I run four miles?

Chris Davis 13:09
Sure. But do you want me doing it? You probably want somebody who’s more conditioned and not just you do I want me doing it. No, because I don’t want to live with the aftermath.

Chris Davis 13:23
And that’s the thing. When a developer builds outside of their element and they’re more so doing what a marketer does, though, they can build it, they can’t maintain it. You start, hey, can we update the copy? You’re like, yeah, just send us over the text and let us know where to go.

Chris Davis 13:42
Where you want it to go. Where a marketer, that’s not even a question. They’re like, you know what, let me split test this. Oh, this headline’s not working, let’s change this.

Chris Davis 13:51
They’re integrated. A marketer knows the day to day needs of a dynamic webpage, of a sales funnel. They know all of these things, which is why we had software like leadpages, click funnels, go high levels, come to the scene. Because what they did is they say, hey, we’re gonna provide you a developed platform called SaaS.

Chris Davis 14:16
SaaS are developed platforms that makes building easy. You don’t have to talk to a web developer. If you wanna change something, you could change it right there on the site. You, you want to split test something, hey, it’s done right inside the platform.

Chris Davis 14:30
They’ve abstracted the platform, they simplified the platform so that builders do not need a high, high IQ and a high knowledge of building to get effective use out of it. That is the whole purpose for SAS is to provide developed platforms. And in doing so, development is now out of your control and in the control of another company. So a lot of times when you come into companies who have their own developed platforms is where you start to see the conflation, the confusion and the lower conversions.

Chris Davis 15:12
And those are the people that I’m talking to. Because at some point this is the reality, because of AI’s ability to generate code, everybody is going to have their own developed platforms. Everybody. If you’ve been a follower of the podcast, if this is not your first episode, you, you’ve probably heard my personal software podcast or you’ve heard me talk about internal apps and software that serves you, you internally and not people externally.

Chris Davis 15:46
We’re building platforms, right? We’re now building internal platforms that can be either built upon or they execute the process on our behalf. And anytime you build a platform, what do you have to do? You have to maintain it.

Chris Davis 16:06
So in I can’t remember what, what, what old school movie this is. Those of you in my community, if I get this wrong, make sure you correct me. But I, I believe it’s, don’t be a menace. The Wayans brothers, where they walked in the store and, and the clerk was like you touch you by right, well, well, it’s the same thing with building.

Chris Davis 16:30
You build, you maintain. Right? Whatever you build, it’s now your responsibility to ensure that it’s working continuously and accurately. So if a web developer is building a landing page and then you’ve got your own app, you’ve got all these other platforms running, you have just added to their list of things to manage and maintain.

Chris Davis 17:00
And guess what? They are not the best maintainer of landing pages of marketing assets that change dynamically, frequently and frequently. That’s the whole reason that marketers are different is because there is a dynamic need. There’s an ongoing change that takes place on for a marketer in all of the martech that they use Developers, you build a website, you’re building a platform that’s pretty stable and it doesn’t require a lot of updates.

Chris Davis 17:38
Give you an example. I run a Heitzner server on some of my assets. I can’t tell you the last time I had to log in and fix the server. I can’t, right?

Chris Davis 17:55
It’s a platform that’s pretty maintenance free. Now I’ll go a level deeper. Got my web developer hat on. You now have let’s say WordPress installed on that server.

Chris Davis 18:07
Well, the maintenance of WordPress is maybe weekly. Those of you that know how to use WordPress, a lot of people don’t know how to use WordPress and they’re like, I hate it and you know, whatever. But I go into WordPress websites for my clients and I see 50 plugins, most of them redundant, outdated, terribly coded. And a developer did that, by the way.

Chris Davis 18:27
A developer did that, built a website with all of these plugins that allow you to just appearingly do stuff easily and create a horrible environment. But anyways, I’m talking about a clean environment. Good developer says, hey look, now you have WordPress, which is software running on top of your server. Hey marketer, if you want to build landing pages on the website, here you go.

Chris Davis 18:53
Or they say, hey look, web developer, you handle everything website. When we run marketing, which is what I prefer if you go back who you got to go back into the archives. This, this was episode number. Let me get what episode number this was where I talked about the marketing layer.

Chris Davis 19:13
In the marketing layer is its own marketing layer. Let me see. Marketing layer is its own sub domain that runs your marketing so that if your website goes down, your marketing stays up. Where is it at?

Chris Davis 19:34
I’m trying to find it. I Want to get you, I want to get you the exact episode number. Marketing layer. What is a marketing layer?

Chris Davis 19:45
Episode number 10. Episode number 10. And the reason this was way back when I was still operating as a marketer. The reason why this was important back then is because again, you have poor development.

Chris Davis 19:59
You’d have web developers that would do something very poorly on the website. And if your landing pages were attached to it, when the website went down, so did all of your landing pages, so did your lead generation, so did your sales. Ridiculous. So I created the marketing layer.

Chris Davis 20:15
What I call the marketing layer is hey, if you’ve got, I’ve got automationbridge.com and now you’ll see this a lot more frequently. I also have go.automationbridge.

Chris Davis 20:23
com go. Automationbridge.com is where I put all my landing pages. So now if my website goes down for any reason, Godot is still up.

Chris Davis 20:32
All my landing pages are working, right? What, what is that? You, you give ownership to the web developer for the website. They can do whatever they want to.

Chris Davis 20:42
It doesn’t even have to be on WordPress, it could be on Webflow, it could be custom built. The website is the web developers thing. Because your website does not change as dynamically as a landing page, at least it shouldn’t. I mean you can do some split testing, but usually you want marketing pages that you split test and drive traffic to and all of that, right?

Chris Davis 21:03
So now the web developer has their domain that they build on and then the web developer then says, okay, I’m going to create a subdomain. And with this subdomain you can either use leadpages, click funnels, whatever, landing page builder and map the domain there. So you can use that SaaS, that developed platform external to our company to build your landing pages, or I can put another instance of WordPress on that domain. And if you want to use a page builder like Elementor, Divi, you name it, you can now build your own landing pages that way.

Chris Davis 21:41
So developers enable the second degree builders, which are marketers, right? Integrators, builders. They enable them by giving them the platforms that they can build upon and control more dynamic operations. This is the approach that is going to save you hours of developments, hours spent on improper development, frustration from not being able to launch fast, faster or at all.

Chris Davis 22:18
The frustration of things always being broken, but yet they’re working. How does it work? But it’s broke. Well, it works because the form is on the site and when someone submits it, it does capture, however, it’s not routed appropriately on the back end to the right destinations because you didn’t have a marketer.

Chris Davis 22:35
Somebody who’s core existence online is to make sure that leads are attracted and are properly added to the appropriate systems for follow up to eventually convert and pass on to the sales system. Right? So we have to understand why when I say developers aren’t marketers, marketers aren’t developers. They’re both builders, right?

Chris Davis 23:03
They’re both builders, different types of builders. It’s really, I’m doing it for your safety. I’m doing it for your safety because I don’t want you to be led astray. I want you to be able to get the output that you’re expecting that you’re going to get from both your developer and your marketer.

Chris Davis 23:19
If you feel like you’re getting very poor development, it could very much be you need a different developer or you could be asking your developer to do too much. And unfortunately, developers are not good on average. The ones that I’ve worked with are not good at saying no. They will take on more thinking, they’re helping.

Chris Davis 23:41
And at times, a lot of, a lot of times it actually hurts more than it helps. So what do I have to do? I have to go in proactively and say, hey, look, we’re removing these marketing tasks from your plate and we’re going to either hire a marketing agency or we’re going to get some marketing acumen to handle that. And sometimes they kick and scream, no, I can do it, it’s fine, I’ve been doing it, blah, blah, blah.

Chris Davis 24:02
But when it happens, oh, it’s the thing of beauty. The marketer is like, they’re chomping at the bits to take over the landing pages, the attribution split testing, the email sequencing like they want to. Any, any marketer worth their weight is going to have a problem with a web developer doing that, right? Or a developer just in general.

Chris Davis 24:25
And then any developer that understands their role is going to, they’re like, oh, finally I can just build. I don’t have to worry about all of these marketing tasks that seem to come up a new one every day. And I’ve seen that alleviation of relief on both sides. And then I’ve seen an increased output of quality and quantity of, of marketing assets and leads, sales and customers.

Chris Davis 24:54
But it’s often, you know, you don’t, you don’t realize that this, how this affects the end goal that you’re really looking for. So today I’m just highlighting what’s underneath the surface that you may not have been able to pinpoint but you’re experiencing the symptoms of it, right? So remember, marketers always build on top of developed platforms. Developed platforms can be internal or external.

Chris Davis 25:25
SaaS is external. SaaS are externally developed platforms and they’re built for marketers and builders to be to easily build upon. You do have some SaaS platforms that are built for developers that say hey look, we’re going to simplify your job too. Get snowflake CDPs, things of that nature.

Chris Davis 25:45
Hey, segment Mixpanel data systems usually simplify it for the developer and say we’re going to give you this interface that is easier to use than if you build something on your own to handle all of the data in XYZ. So SaaS platforms can serve both. But when you start building with AI, you’re now building platforms in your business and the lines do get a little blurry, right? Because now a marketer can say hey can you build this for me?

Chris Davis 26:21
Now a non builder can say hey, can you create xyz? Just know when you’re creating that you’re creating a platform and what you build you have to maintain. That’s the other part and this is a whole nother episode. But this is where I see the build biggest hole, the biggest gap, the biggest unknown unseen that’s impacting building with AI is the maintenance.

Chris Davis 26:48
Everybody’s excited about the capabilities but nobody really is speaking loudly about how do I maintain that? Am I getting when every time something breaks something doesn’t look right, who do I call? You? You’re the builder.

Chris Davis 27:02
That’s what you call, you call yourself. So that’s the other side of it, right? But I hope my hopes is that this episode was helpful in drawing that line of delineation for a lot of you who are hiring both marketers and developers. You’re building internal platforms, you’re using external platforms.

Chris Davis 27:24
By the way, if you’re integrating platforms natively, usually a developer does that. When a developer can’t do that, that’s where the Zapiers and Make.coms came from, is to give marketers platforms to connect other platforms. But usually you’ll want to connect them natively and that’s what a developer does.

Chris Davis 27:44
That’s the weight and gold of a developer is that they can make your systems talk without all of the external or the third party software involved. That often introduces vulnerabilities and security issues. So yeah, you want that, you want the direct integrations as much as possible, but if they do the integration, they maintain the integration and you see that a developer’s task list of things that they have to do grows, grows very rapidly as you develop more and more in your company and another reason why they should be insulated from marketing assets and activities. So I hope that was helpful if you’ve been experiencing those hardships, that’s probably why.

Chris Davis 28:33
And for those of you building on developed platforms, if you’re a senior builder, if you’ve been building for, you know, five years or more, I would invite you to come join the community, share, learn from other builders who are sharing what they’re building. Learn how to move faster, essentially learn how to build better. We are a community of senior builders. Or how about this expert, a senior kind of, you know, you start looking at the gray hairs and everything.

Chris Davis 29:02
But expert builders who have learned a lot and are willing to share a lot. If you want to learn quickly, it’s the, it’s the only place to go that I would trust because I vetted it with that being said, thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope something was said to improve your business and your life today and until next time I see you all online, automate responsibly, my friends.