When you were a kid, your parents bought a pencil for you. You started using it. When the pencil ran out of lead, you asked your parents to buy another one. Now even though they would buy you the pencil each time, they were not the owners of the pencil, ‘you’ were the owner.
Now compare the same thought with your website. Even though the CTO takes the call on what platform/technologies to use to build it, it’s you the marketer who uses it to generate leads/sales from it. If the website is down (pencil runs out of lead) it’s the leads/sales that suffers – which by the way is your KRA and not the CTO’s. So you will have to ask the CTO to fix it but still, the ownership resides with you, the marketer!
I’ve worked in organisations where the access to Google Analytics remained with the tech teams and they would be the ones who would report data each month. Really? What would CTO do with traffic insights? Or what content performs? Or which keywords bring the company best ROI in advertising? It’s you, the marketer, who needs to be on top of it!
Similarly, if you’re planning to redesign your website, it’s the marketing team which should be the ‘first’ to know. Forget after designing, you’re too late (in informing them) even if your wireframes are done. They need to be in the discussion when the first chat about a redesign happens.
A lot of organisations come to us (asking for digital marketing services) as soon as their new website is up. Believe it or not, there has not been a single case when we have not asked for technical changes on the website, and in a lot of cases, that’s where we begin our marketing from.
So dear digital marketer, please take ownership of your company’s website – after all it’s your pencil and you want to write stories with it, don’t you?
