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Websites Move From IT to Marketing Departments

missing_pieceOver the past five years, I’ve noticed a strong transition from websites being controlled by IT departments to the marketing team. Why? The website is easier to update than ever before and you do not need to know HTML to update your website. Websites are much less about technology now and more about content. Also, IT departments have become strategic leaders in their companies and less of the order takers so updating the website for someone else has no become someone else’s role.

Why is this good?

  • A Website is Not Just Technology, It’s a Marketing Tool – We’re past the 1990s when it took a technology genius to create a website. It is a marketing tool.
  • Marketing Should Control the Message – The marketing team control’s all the marketing materials, why not the website? Your website should be your hub of all marketing & company communications because of its near infinite size and ability to be update quickly.
  • Marketing Needs to Be Real Time – In today’s connected world with social media, companies need to be near real time. If an event with magnitude impacts your company today, you can’t wait 3-5 days to respond.
  • Efficiency – We are all doing more with less nowadays and marketing probably has the largest burden because they are tapped for all “special projects”. In the time it would take you to write an email with the updates to your company’s website, you could do it yourself. It can’t get more efficient than that.
  • Constantly Tweaking – In marketing school, one of the methods taught is testing different messages with test group A and test group B. It is hard to do this online since everyone comes to your homepage, but you can tweak the homepage slightly over periodic intervals to see your response level to create something similar to A & B test.
  • IT has better things to do – Hopefully, your IT team has a voice in your company has works more on the future than reacting to today’s issues alone. They shouldn’t want to maintain the website because it is an unnecessary chore to them.

In the end, it is marketing’s role to position the company and to control the message across all marketing materials. The website should be in their hands because its their neck on the lines and IT has other things to do.