Waiting for developers to launch a campaign or test new messaging on a landing page? Or even worse, are you waiting for developers before you can engage with your audience through an email or a blog post? Seriously — this has to stop!

Every time a marketer is forced to wait for a developer to launch a campaign, a kitten dies. 

Expectations are high for the new marketers. Unlike the previous generation of old media advertisers and mass communication practitioners, modern marketers must deliver quantifiable results. They must attract and engage today’s top prospects and turn them into tomorrow’s revenue. They have a lot on their plate and there is no time to waste.

Can they deliver? Yes! But... IT must get out of the way.

Developers have grandiose dreams of building the next great application, and it makes sense. They’re builders. That’s perfect for your product, but not for your marketing campaigns.

In order to succeed, the new marketer needs:

• The ability to operate with no intermediary
• The right tools to maximize output

The bottleneck

Dharmesh Shah, CTO at HubSpot, recently warned startups: don’t build your own CMS. It’s not because the development team feels like it will be so easy that they should build it. It’s the marketer, after all, who will have to deal with this tool on a daily basis — bugs and outdated functionalities included. Upgrading the blogging widget will never be a top priority for the development team, ever. On the other hand, WordPress is easy to set up and there are tons of other tools available. For example, Uberflip now offers a blog authoring tool built in for marketers so you can author and manage your content in one spot.

Next, relying on developers to A/B test landing pages is another no-no. All landing pages have a lot in common: they include compelling sales copy supported by a nice image or video, and they invite the visitor to press a big, shiny button or to fill out a lead generation form. Nothing crazy here — no animation, no bells or whistles. So why the heck would you need a coder to do this for you? For the same price as an hour of development a month, you can access a ton of landing page templates out of the box from Unbounce and A/B test the copy and design whenever you feel like it. Now that's real control.

Still building your own analytics dashboard in-house? I mean, that’s a cool project to present at the science fair but it’s not the most effective way to track your website. Marketers have work to do. They must run experiments, tag, and track new events all the time. They can’t afford to wait for a developer to tweak a graph in the dashboard. They need data, and they need it now.

My last pet peeve is control over emails. Email is one of the oldest channels but still, even today, transactional emails remain an untapped opportunity for most marketers. Why? Because more often than not, transactional emails are uploaded to the server and hard-coded in the system. This keeps marketers from making quick changes and tracking results. I recently got wowed by sendwithus and thought: A/B testing transactional emails? Hell yeah! 

Empowered marketers

Go for it! Ask for more control and get shit done without a developer. Empowered marketers are are in a better position to deliver what’s expected from them using the right tools. But listen up: with great power comes great responsibility.