In every business’s growth plan, performance goals are set for specific business units with corresponding resource budgets allocated to support the plan. It used to be assumed that anything “tech” was under the purview of the IT department. So responsibility for building and maintaining the first corporate websites naturally evolved in the IT area.
“As digital tactics have become major channels in business marketing today, key ‘tech’ performance requirements have shifted,” says Kevin Hourigan, President and CEO of Web design, Web development and Internet marketing agency, Bayshore Solutions. “A critical element in today’s business growth plan is to make sure resources, ‘ownership’ and accountabilities are properly aligned when it comes to your website.”
Smart Business spoke with Hourigan about how to align the accountability and ownership of your business website to bring your business its best results.
Who should ‘own’ my business website?
Companies excel when marketing generates leads and sales. Increasingly, this lead generation and customer acquisition is accomplished by leveraging the company website as a tool, a facilitator, or a direct driver of results.
Businesses that are not using their website to its fullest potential as a lead and sales generator are missing out. It is only a matter of time before not addressing the situation will allow competitors to pass you by, and put you out of business.
For most businesses, website results expectations have transitioned from the IT realm to the marketing realm. If you are expecting marketing to deliver web business results, then marketing has to have the ownership to enable their accountability
How does IT technical expertise contribute?
The technical knowledge and skill base of IT and Marketing professionals is still an “apples and oranges” type of scenario. However, the skill sets of today’s digital marketers and IT professionals are closer than in the past, such that they can coexist, communicate and complement each other on the same corporate team, in pursuit of the same company goals: leads, sales and growth. Most marketers are not tech experts. IT professionals aren’t typically marketing experts. However, because of the very technical nature of digital marketing, a good relationship between IT and marketing needs to exist to ensure successful web results.
Marketing will be best at the dynamic and continuous iterations of market messaging, content and design that drives digital channels including online advertising, web page optimization, content marketing, and social media marketing and integration. An essential tool to enable your marketers to “market” your website is a Content Management System (CMS). This tool facilitates quick and easy messaging, styling, and implementation of proper coding for tracking, analytics and user experience functionality.
IT is best positioned to set up and deploy the infrastructure of your business website to help it optimally deliver the results that marketing (and you) expect to gain from it. IT support for a business website is often essential in implementing the recommendations of webmaster tools and other website monitoring discoveries. These include implementing ongoing redirects that avert SEO error penalties in the search engines, preventing hacking attacks and spamming to your site, and seamless handling of website stress loads (like ensuring the bandwidth to allow thousands of holiday shoppers to purchase through your website shopping cart simultaneously.)
How do I bring this all together?
Unfortunately, I have seen marketing and IT divisions within organizations that are non-communicative and even adversarial. A common factor I see in these instances is a perspective of territorial resources, misaligned expectations and communication barriers.
I have also seen many examples of great collaboration between IT and Marketing arms of a business that uncover opportunities for educating each other on the dynamics of their respective specialties, and discover ways to implement better, track better, interpret metrics better and produce much greater business results though best utilizing each other’s talents.
Executive clarification of the lines of responsibility, creation of the resources to fulfill that responsibility and enabling the means for cross-functional communication with IT and Marketing will improve your business results. Often a business may find that it is not able to quickly or economically accommodate the time or staff necessary to synergize IT and marketing with respect to driving website results. This is where partnering with a firm that specializes in digital marketing (and is fluent in the technical language involved) can alleviate overhead costs and streamline the integration of technology and marketing that brings next-level business results from your website.
In my experience, I have seen that businesses who are getting the best web results have assigned website accountability to marketing, and have forged a synergistic relationship between marketing and IT. This relationship allows IT to help evaluate, set up and implement the tools that marketing needs to produce great results. It also alleviates a burden on IT to keep up with the constant flux of digital market dynamics and focus on the IT infrastructure central to the business. Most importantly, the relationship provides for the communication and cross training that assures mutual understanding of each team’s processes and contribution to the company’s goals.
Assigning responsibility and resources for website presence and performance to your marketing team will free up your IT team to better focus on the infrastructure management items that are mission critical to operating your business. A healthy IT-Marketing relationship and the right tools for the job will allow your marketing experts to use the best digital marketing techniques to grow your business.
<< For a snapshot of Bayshore Solutions Web marketing methodology, visit: http://www.BayshoreSolutions.com/method
Kevin Hourigan is the president and CEO of Bayshore Solutions. Reach him at (877) 535-4578 or www.BayshoreSolutions.com.
