The Gist
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Clear ownership wins. Assign clear ownership of website updates and define roles to improve collaboration and streamline decision-making across teams.
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Empower your team. Give marketing teams the tools to act independently. This reduces reliance on IT and enables faster A/B testing, content updates and personalization.
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Leverage visitor data. Use intent signals, heatmaps and conversion data to guide decisions, refine customer journeys and drive impactful results.
Digital marketing has transformed dramatically in the last 15 years, shifting from basic banner ads and email campaigns to a complex ecosystem driven by data, personalization and multi-channel engagement. Advancements are moving faster than ever with AI and automation now enabling marketers to deliver highly targeted and personalized customer experiences at scale.
At the same time, marketers are under immense pressure to apply agile marketing tactics in the pursuit of staying up to date with real-time intent signals.
While the ever-changing marketing landscape is exciting, it feels like we don’t have a chance to take a beat for the sake of strategy. When do we get to inhale, exhale and decide which new marketing tools and techniques make the most sense for our marketing goals heading into 2025 and beyond? The answer is right now.
Here’s your chance to take a digital deep breath and think about three practical moves you can make to improve marketing agility.
Clarify Roles to Streamline Collaboration
One of the most common barriers to marketing agility is the lack of clear ownership over the website experience. With stakeholders and owners across various departments (i.e., growth marketing, product marketing, content marketing, brand marketing, SEO and digital customer experience), the responsibility for website changes can become bogged down by communication gaps or layers of approvals. The result is that making meaningful changes and measuring outcomes to the website experience either takes too long or simply does not happen.
To improve your team’s agility, establish clear roles and governance structures that define who’s responsible for what. This starts with assigning ownership to team members who can make decisions about updates. Prioritize cross-team communication over siloed contributors. Consider who takes responsibility for creating and updating content-rich pages like blogs and case studies. Do the same for other key areas like your homepage and product/program pages. Build a framework for what creating new pages and assets entails and how often those materials should be updated.
Once you have owners for different areas of your website and governance frameworks for how updates are made, you’re on your way to becoming a well-oiled machine. The ultimate goal is a team that’s equipped with the guidelines, communication and autonomy to make informed, real-time adjustments to your website.
Related Article: How Cross-Department Collaboration Fuels a Customer Experience Model
Enhance Marketing Agility by Reducing IT Dependence
To remain agile, marketing teams must be able to make updates to the digital experience without relying on lengthy IT and development cycles. There’s an inherent tension between marketing’s desire to provide valuable content to website visitors and IT teams who are already overloaded with requests.
It’s important to identify what your marketing team can take control of without the technical know-how of pushing code. More control in marketing’s hands translates to greater responsiveness and allows them to stay ahead of shifting consumer expectations and preferences.
Here are some areas where your team should have the power to implement tests and updates independently:
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A/B testing: If your team is not testing because of development delays, this is your call to take more strategic action. A/B tests empower marketers to make incremental improvements to their websites, and modern testing tools allow you to do this with little to no IT support.
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Content discovery: Your team needs the ability to modify promoted content and navigation paths on your website. Connecting visitors with the content they need is essential. Your team should be able to make impactful changes like navigational link updates, on-page CTA tests and search results that can adjust for campaigns and seasonality.
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Personalized promotions: You should be empowered to set up dynamic, personalized promotions using first-party data collected throughout the customer journey. This creates a more valuable experience for the customer, who gets tailored recommendations and is more likely to convert (or take your desired action on the page).
With greater control, your marketing team can reduce the time between receiving intent signals and making changes with that customer data from days to minutes.
Use Data Insights to Drive Smarter Decisions
Marketing requires a keen understanding of the data that fuels visitor engagement and conversion. Accessing that data should be the easy part.
Here are the data sources that your team should monitor to improve their marketing agility and inform their decision making:
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Intent data: Your website data is trying to tell you a story; it’s your team’s job to make sure that you’re listening and reacting accordingly. From clicks to navigation paths to searches issued, there’s so much to be gained from monitoring how visitors interact with your site. Once you have a grasp on how they discover content, you can make adjustments to cater to their needs in a more personalized approach.
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Heat mapping and session recording: There are plenty of easy-to-use (and even free) tools for seeing exactly how visitors interact with your webpages. Heat mapping shows high density click areas and scroll depth to help you understand where emphasis is placed on your pages. Session recordings can help illuminate where the website experience is going well in contrast to frustration points in visitor sessions. This information is invaluable for gaining a deeper understanding of your visitor intent as it provides both qualitative and quantitative views into your website performance.
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Traffic alerts: We all know driving more organic and paid traffic to your site is invaluable; it widens the net for your organization. But it’s easy to slip on monitoring traffic, so you should have alerts set up to ping you with unexpected spikes or dips in traffic. This can reveal website performance issues (or wins) in real time.
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Click-through and conversion rates: These are core performance metrics that measure the success of your website. Click-through rate goes beyond what Google Analytics measures; there are crucial onsite click-through rates that matter for internal pages and search functionality on your site. Conversion rates, on the other hand, allow you to see which pages on your website are leading to key actions taken by your visitors.
By leveraging data to inform decisions, marketing teams can prioritize actions that yield the most impactful results and align with their agile initiatives.
Related Article: The Worst CX Ever?
Equipping Your Team for Marketing Agility Is More Essential Than Ever
Digital marketing as a whole isn’t easy. But it’s important to get the easy things right and set the building blocks your team needs to meet website visitors where they’re at. Across generations, particularly with Gen Z and younger, demand for efficient website experiences is only growing, and marketing agility is increasingly necessary to meet these demands.
It’s less looking, more finding. Fewer clicks, more immediate value. Less generic content, more personalized messaging.
If your team isn’t set up to collaborate efficiently, make moves without heavy development lifts and learn quickly from visitor data, you’re certain to fall behind.
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