Is Your Website Making Marketing Harder Than It Needs to Be?

A website can look good, generate enquiries and give customers a perfectly good experience, while still being incredibly frustrating for the marketing team responsible for managing it.

This often becomes apparent when the business wants to do something new. A campaign is ready to launch, but creating the landing page requires development support; the marketing team wants to change how a service is presented, but the CMS only gives them control over certain parts of the page. Over time, small limitations like these begin to influence what the team can do and how quickly they can do it.

For Marketing Managers and Directors, this can be particularly frustrating because the website sits at the centre of so much marketing activity. Campaigns lead people towards it, content is published through it, and enquiries are generated through it, so being unable to make straightforward changes without external support can slow down far more than the website itself.

The problem often starts much earlier, during the website project, because considerable attention is given to what the website needs to look like and how customers will use it, while less attention is given to how the marketing team will work with it once it is live.

A website shouldn’t simply meet the marketing requirements that existed when the brief was written; it needs to remain useful as those requirements change.

How much control does your marketing team have?

There is a balance to be found between giving marketing teams freedom and maintaining the structure of the website.

A CMS that offers very little flexibility can make simple marketing activity unnecessarily difficult. When a new landing page, case study or change to the structure of a page requires development support, the marketing team becomes dependent on somebody else’s availability. A task that could have taken an hour can stretch over several days once it has passed through briefing, scheduling and development.

Giving the marketing team unrestricted control creates a different problem. Websites develop consistency because decisions have been made about their structure, typography, spacing, components and the way information is presented; allowing all of those things to be changed freely makes it difficult to maintain that consistency over several years and hundreds of updates.

The answer sits somewhere between the two.

A well-designed CMS can give a marketing team control over the things they need to change without requiring them to make design and development decisions every time they create something new. Reusable components are particularly useful here because they allow existing elements to be combined in different ways, giving the team flexibility within an established design system.

This becomes much more effective when the website is planned around the way marketing works within the business. A team that runs frequent campaigns will have different requirements from one that invests heavily in long-form content, for example, and those differences should influence the way pages and components are built.

The important question isn’t simply whether the website is editable. Most modern websites are. The more useful question is whether the marketing team can comfortably make the changes they need to make as part of their day-to-day work.

Your website is part of a much bigger picture

The website also needs to work alongside the other technology the marketing team relies on.

Over time, businesses tend to accumulate systems as different requirements emerge. A CRM is introduced, an email platform is added, analytics and reporting tools develop, and other software is brought in to support sales and marketing. Each platform might serve a clear purpose on its own, but the experience becomes far less efficient when information doesn’t move easily between them.

The website is an important part of that relationship because it is often where a potential customer first identifies themselves. Somebody might arrive through a campaign, spend time exploring the website and eventually make an enquiry; the value of that information extends well beyond the moment the form is submitted.

Marketing needs to understand what brought that person to the website and what contributed to the enquiry, while sales needs enough context to continue the conversation. When information is passed between the website and other systems effectively, both teams have a clearer picture of the customer journey.

Disconnected systems make that picture much harder to see. They also create work, because people end up transferring information manually or building processes around gaps that technology could handle for them.

This is why a website project shouldn’t begin and end with the website. Understanding the systems already being used across the business, how information moves between them and where people are carrying out unnecessary manual tasks can reveal opportunities that would otherwise be missed.

It can also prevent a common problem: adding more technology in an attempt to make marketing more efficient, while creating another system for the team to manage.

Can marketing tell what the website is contributing?

Access to data isn’t the same as having useful information.

Marketing teams can measure an enormous amount of activity across a website, but reporting becomes difficult when that information doesn’t answer the questions the business needs to ask.

For a Marketing Director, knowing that website traffic increased last quarter is useful context, but it doesn’t explain what that increase contributed. Understanding where valuable visitors came from, what they engaged with and which activity led to an enquiry gives the team far more to work with.

The website needs to be set up with those questions in mind.

Measurement should reflect the role the website plays within the wider marketing strategy, rather than being treated as something to configure shortly before launch. That means understanding what represents meaningful engagement for the business and making sure the journey towards it can be measured with enough clarity to support future decisions.

This becomes particularly valuable once the website has been live for some time. Marketing teams can see which content is supporting customer journeys, where campaigns are performing well and where people are encountering friction; the website can then develop in response to evidence rather than opinion.

Without that visibility, conversations about improving the website become much more subjective, and marketing teams have less confidence when deciding where to invest their time and budget.

The real test comes after launch

Launch naturally receives a lot of attention during a website project, but it represents a very small part of the website’s lifespan.

The more revealing point comes a year or two later, when the business has changed, and the marketing strategy has moved with it. New services may have been introduced, different audiences may have become more important, and the technology used across the business may have evolved.

A website that was built around a fixed set of requirements can begin to create friction as those requirements change. The marketing team starts developing workarounds, new tools are introduced to compensate for limitations and activities that should be straightforward begin requiring more time than they deserve.

Building flexibility into a website doesn’t mean trying to predict every future requirement. It means understanding that the website will continue to change and making sensible decisions that give the marketing team room to work.

How we approach it at purpleplanet

We want to understand how the marketing team works, how the website fits into the wider technology being used across the business and what the team needs to be able to change, create and measure once the website is live.

Those conversations inform how we approach the CMS, integrations, measurement and the structure of the website as a whole; the aim is to create something that remains useful as the business and its marketing develop.

A website should give a marketing team more scope to execute its ideas, understand its results and respond to change. When the team spends more time working around the website than working with it, the website has become part of the problem.