You’re the CMO. Your plate is overflowing with campaigns, metrics, and brand decisions, and your web presence is demanding attention. It’s tempting to hand off your website strategy to someone else—maybe the IT manager, your marketing team, or that graphic designer who makes everything look slick. But here’s the hard truth: your web strategy is a marketing decision. Abdicating it to anyone else is a recipe for failure. I’ve seen it happen too many times—CMOs step back, and the result is a site that’s pretty but useless, or a technical ghost town that buries your brand.
Let me take you back to a moment early in my marketing career. I was working with a company where the CEO decided the IT department should spearhead the website overhaul. The logic? “They know tech.”
Six months later, the site was a fortress of code—secure, sure, but impossible to navigate and devoid of any message that spoke to customers. The IT team built what they knew, not what the business needed. That’s when I realized: your web strategy isn’t about servers or code. It’s about your brand’s voice, your audience, and your marketing goals. What's especially sad is that this experience wasn't unique.
Why Web Strategy Is Your Job
Your website is the digital face of your brand. It’s often the first impression a potential customer gets, and it’s where your marketing either shines or flops. As the CMO, you’re the one responsible for ensuring that your web presence drives marketing goals, connects with your audience, and delivers results. Nobody else in your organization has your vantage point—or your accountability for the brand’s success online. Handing off that responsibility is like letting someone else craft your campaign strategy. They might get the pieces right, but the heart of the message? That’s on you.
When I talk with CMOs about their web needs, I’m amazed at how often they want to defer critical decisions about their digital presence. Your job is to ensure that the website aligns with your marketing strategy and speaks to the right audience. If you’re not involved, you’re gambling with your brand’s future. Your website amplifies who you are—good or bad—and no amount of tech wizardry or design flair can cover up a misaligned strategy.
The IT Trap
“Let’s get IT involved before we make any decisions.” I’ve heard this one too many times. I suppose you asked your electrical engineer to design your building and draw up the blueprints for you, too. As far as I’m concerned, IT has no place in Web decisions. They definitely shouldn’t be involved in the decision on what coding language it is written in or what framework is being used. More often than not, they probably shouldn’t even be involved in what server technology is chosen because you shouldn’t have the public web server on your internal network.
IT teams are brilliant at keeping systems running and data secure, but their focus is infrastructure, not storytelling. Asking them to shape your web strategy is like asking a mechanic to design your car’s exterior. They’ll prioritize technical efficiency—server specs, coding frameworks, or internal network integration—over what actually matters: how your site speaks to your customers. The result? A site that’s bulletproof but invisible to your audience. Your web strategy needs to prioritize messaging and user experience, and that’s not in IT’s wheelhouse.
The Marketing Misstep
“I want my marketing team to make the decisions on the web. I don’t want to be involved.” This is a common mistake. With small businesses that aren’t big enough to have a full marketing team, it usually means the decisions are relegated (notice that I didn’t say delegated) to the administrative assistant that answers the phones, works at the reception desk, and creates fancy company brochures in Word or Canva.
Your marketing team is great at executing campaigns and crafting content, but they’re not always strategists for your entire digital presence. If you delegate too much, they might focus on what looks trendy or what’s easy to produce, not what drives your core marketing objectives. I once worked with a client whose marketing team built a site full of flashy banners and buzzwords. It looked great, but it didn’t convert because it didn’t speak to the audience’s pain points. Your team should coordinate and contribute, but you need to own the vision as the CMO. I’ve written about how to ensure strategic marketing alignment in another post, which can help you avoid these delegation pitfalls.
The Graphic Designer Pitfall
“Making this site pretty is very important. I really want it to POP. Let’s get the designer involved.” Are you kidding me? Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of talent out there that can make some very incredible artwork. Look at the art in my book. Don did a great job illustrating it and he does a great job designing Web sites for our company, but I would never ask him to make critical decisions about my company.
Graphic designers are artists, not marketing strategists. They’ll make your site visually stunning, but beauty doesn’t guarantee results. A gorgeous site with poor messaging or navigation is like a sports car with no engine—it looks nice but goes nowhere. Your web strategy needs to start with content and purpose, not aesthetics. Designers should execute your vision, not define it.
How to Own Your Web Strategy
So, how do you take charge without getting lost in the weeds? You don’t need to learn code or become a design expert. Your role is to set the direction and hold your team accountable. Here’s how:
- Define your primary objective. What do you want your website to do? Drive conversions? Build brand trust? Generate leads? Nail this down first, and everything else flows from it. You need to have a singular focus.
- Stay involved in key decisions. Approve the content outline, review the wireframe, and ensure the design aligns with your brand. Check out my post on key questions for web projects to guide your team effectively.
- Delegate execution, not strategy. Let your marketing team write content, your designers create visuals, and your IT team handle tech. But you set the guardrails. Understand the skills that every strategist should have.
- Test and iterate. Once the site’s live, use data to see what’s working. My post on brand awareness dives into why testing matters—your site needs to evolve with your audience.
You don’t have to do it all, but you have to own it. Think of yourself as the general contractor of your web presence. You’re not laying bricks, but you’re ensuring the house gets built right.
Your Website, Your Responsibility
Your web strategy isn’t just another task to check off—it’s the digital heartbeat of your marketing efforts. Abdicating it to IT, your team, or designers is like letting someone else run your campaign strategy. They might keep things moving, but they won’t capture your vision. By owning the strategy, you ensure your website doesn’t just exist—it delivers. It speaks to your audience, drives results, and amplifies your brand’s truth.
Take a moment to reflect: who’s really steering your web presence right now? If it’s not you, it’s time to step back in. What’s one step you can take today to reclaim that control?
