Can No-code Upskill the Non-Technical Marketer?
Marketers who take advantage of no-code and low-code platforms now will have an edge over others. Those who ignore the shift may soon be relics. Marketing teams and the way they function have gone through some serious evolution in the last decade. Marketing and sales tasks increasingly blur into each other since the funnel is […]
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Marketers who take advantage of no-code and low-code platforms now will have an edge over others. Those who ignore the shift may soon be relics.
Marketing teams and the way they function have gone through some serious evolution in the last decade. Marketing and sales tasks increasingly blur into each other since the funnel is no longer linear. Data has become a dominant element in creating meaningful experiences. And so, understanding the technology that lets you make sense of that data is a critical skill for the job. The marketer must graduate to a marketing technologist, and no-code platforms can help bridge the gap.
Remember when WordPress launched in 2003 and changed the way we looked at the previously daunting task of building a website? Even today, about 35 per cent of the world’s websites are powered by WordPress. Content marketing really took off following this moment. Similarly, Shopify came along and empowered the world to create online stores with a few clicks in 2004, spurring smaller players into the eCommerce.
Also Read: CX Needs a Data-First, Technology Agnostic Approach
Drag-and-drop tools
No-code development platforms provide drag-and-drop tools that enable anyone to develop software quickly without coding. They come with WYSIWYG editors, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get visual tool that allows the developer to see what the end result will look like. Think of it as a menu of components to quickly assemble your applications. While low-code platforms need some developer intervention, no-code platforms promise just that–an easy to use format for non-developers to practice rapid application development. You can connect libraries, use templates to help with various tasks like managing campaigns with your creative team, conducting market research, process automation for customer support and collaborating with vendors. These platforms are now sophisticated enough to allow custom workflows and functionality specific to your business objective. Low code software is typically priced per user per month, in a subscription model.
There are more than a few options available to get started with. US-based Appy Pie is a growing cloud-based mobile app builder software that lets you create websites, chatbots and workflow, automation builder. Nintex Process Platform, has clients across 90 countries, and can help marketers with process mapping, robotic process automation, document generation, forms, mobile apps and process analytics.
Chatbots are probably the most common use case for marketing teams to leverage no-code platforms. Customer support benefits enormously from simple chatbots trained to answer repetitive questions about offers, and to register complaints. DialogFlow by Google was perhaps the most famous example of building a chatbot by assembly. Think of it as a flowchart with if-this, then-that logic. The platform did most of the heavy-lifting by pre-determining intents that define your required action.
Landbot also builds conversational apps and offers a series of UI elements. You can also choose the personality of the bot and design it to suit its function. For example, a friendly introduction, matter-of-fact booking agent, a convincing sales agent or a cheeky personal assistant.
Airtable, founded in 2012, has a vertical designed especially for marketing teams to build tools that can work with content calendars, campaign management, event management, product launches, and content operations. An interesting feature is their collaboration tool where you can invite vendors to work on a single base where work can be shared and approved in sprints. It also lets you control access so that creatives are protected till launch.
Outgrow is worth mentioning because its tools aid marketers to acquire, qualify and engage leads. They do this by making it easy to build personalised quizzes, calculators, assessments, contests, forms and surveys, polls and chatbots. Their design templates can be optimised to be used across mobile, desktop, and tablet. These elements are also embeddable into your advertising, websites, mobile apps, social media, SMS and email communication.
The easiest way to get started with no-code platforms is to use them to elevate something you are already doing. That way, you get comparable results and the learning curve isn’t too steep. For example, every marketer is more than familiar with spreadsheets. Well, Stackby is a collaborative spreadsheet-database hybrid. It brings together the familiarity of spreadsheet-style interface, functionality of databases and integratable APIs (YouTube, Google, MailChimp, Facebook, Clearbit) on a single customisable canvas. Their templates offer a range that includes sales, product, growth hacking, video production and project management. Insycle helps with data management, data cleanup, data automation, data preparation and manipulation and integrates with popular tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Intercom and Mailchimp.
Also Read: 5 Ways You Can Use Chatbots in Marketing
Lift customer experience
The most significant role that no-code can play for marketers remains using data to lift customer experience. It’s a tricky challenge to make sense of data to inform business decisions; what works, what doesn’t and what you should do next. No code tools let you pull data from multiple sources, compare them, analyse them and present them in easy-to-read formats. PEGA uses AI-powered process automation to create intelligent automation in customer support. Not only can you automate email responses across omnichannel, it will use information about the customer to personalise the experience. Google has a no-code option called Teachable Machine, a web-based tool that creates machine learning models for your websites and apps.
Customer experience is the great differentiator right now, and marketers must find a way to lead the charge. Marketers could use all the help they can get to take on this task, and no-code platforms promise to ease the workload without learning to code.
