How does your website impact the marketing team?

Your website is the central piece of your company’s marketing, allowing you to introduce prospects to your offering, capture leads, and more. Since your website is the central hub for your marketing, your marketing team should have deep involvement with every aspect of the website. Whether your marketing team is building out a content library, or streamlining funnels to land more deals, this effort should be reflected in the website.

Let’s talk about what capabilities a website should have to enable the marketing team to work smoothly and drive revenue for the business.

Every part of your website should be editable by the marketing team, with as little involvement from developers as possible. This includes landing pages, content pages, and banners that showcase special offers. Typically, a headless Content Management System (CMS) will be leveraged to enable modifying the content of the website without editing code.

Enabling the marketing team to manage the website’s content will allow you to refine your message and build out content libraries without burdening developers, since development time is a limited and expensive resource. In the early stages of starting a product or business, it takes time to establish product-market fit, so being able to dynamically change the copy on the website will help you attract and target the right prospective customers.

The main purpose of a marketing website is to capture leads. Lead capture starts with a call to action (CTA) like “Contact us” or “Click here to learn how we can empower your business”. The marketing team should have full control over these CTAs, since the text, visual appearance, and position of the CTA can have a big impact on engagement.

CTAs will often link to a contact form or a booking widget that allows setting up an introductory meeting. For contact forms, the marketing team should be able to control where form submissions go. Usually submissions will be sent to a CRM platform, but you could send them to Zapier to implement more complex integrations.

Some companies may prefer a multi-step lead capture form that asks the user to answer basic questions about which product they’re interested in, the size of their business, and the purpose they hope to use the product for. Collecting this data allows you to prioritize the most valuable leads and provides you with useful data on what use cases are the most important to prospective customers.

Analytics is an essential component in understanding and adapting your website to your customers needs. Client-side analytics tools like Google Analytics can be used to track your users' behavior on the website. This type of analytics allows you to track the user’s path through the website, identify popular content, and see where users drop off in conversion funnels.

Another popular aim of analytics data that you collect on the website is retargeting, which means showing the user ads for your company after the user has left the site. It basically works by tracking social networks users (like LinkedIn or Facebook) activity on your website. Analytics tools can be used to build a custom audience for ads displayed on Google and LinkedIn.

It’s important to note that you are obligated to notify your users about the data that you collect. Please comply with your local law, such as GDPR  or CCPA  .

For companies with a large international presence, the content of a website should be localized (translated) to multiple languages. This provde to be crucial for interaction with regional customers.

Advanced CMS tools provide support for localization. Even if you don’t plan to localize immediately, you should keep localization in mind when selecting which CMS to use. If building parts of the website in code, you should use a localization framework in your code to avoid hardcoding English strings.

This post covered the features that your website should have to allow your marketing team to work effectively. Developers should work to empower your marketers to own the content of the website, fine-tune CTAs and contact forms, and monitor engagement with analytics. These efforts will pay dividends in allowing you to capture more leads and make more conversions.