Why MOPs and the web team need to be on the same page

Once upon a time, a company’s web team owned anything and everything that was put online.

How could it be otherwise? The web was the only digital channel for some time, and they were the only ones who understood the mysteries of HTML. Therefore, they were the only ones who had the technological savvy to create and maintain the web pages marketers needed to run their campaigns. Marketers had no choice but to work through them.

But times – and technology – have changed.

Technological tools now allow marketers to create and maintain certain things on the web themselves, without having to depend on the web team for support.

Is that a good thing?

Yes!

But change needs to be managed so noses don’t get out of joint.

In this post, I want to explain how everyone benefits when the marketing operations team and the web people get onto the same page, so to speak.

And I’ll throw in some tips on how to set mutually beneficial parameters for that updated relationship.

The way things were

In a recent post, I wrote about how both MOPs people and marketers perform better when they listen to, interact with, and generally support one another.

The same applies to MOPs and the web team.

With MOPs and marketers, the challenge is getting them to interact and create a relationship in the first place.

But MOPs and the web team interact all the time. So here the challenge is managing a relationship that already exists.

That relationship is an old one.

In any company, the web team is probably the oldest and most established part of the marketing department, at least in terms of technology. The web team has been at the heart of marketing ever since the Internet became a thing. Right from the start, they were the ones who built and managed a company’s presence on the web.

Over time, the web team built up a little kingdom inside the company, with responsibility for creating, managing, hosting and reporting on all things web.

But as I said, new tools exist that allow marketers to create on their own certain web-like or web-adjacent things – landing pages or microsites, for example – that in the past could not be done without the web team.

The web team sees itself as the gatekeeper responsible for everything about or near the web.

So it’s no wonder they resist seeing some web page related things taken away from them.

How to get everyone on the same page?

Basically, by making both MOPs people and web people see the advantages – and the dangers – of not updating the terms of their relationship.

First, the advantages

There are four main advantages of updating the relationship.

1. Speed and agility

For marketers, the big advantage of modern tools is speed and agility.

Marketers, by the very nature of their job, need to move quickly. It is therefore a tremendous advantage for them to be able to build something on their own, in just a few hours (or minutes), to be hosted on the marketing automation platform they use. From the marketers’ perspective, this is much better than having to wait days or weeks for the web team to get back to them with a page or site proposal that maybe isn’t quite what they had in mind.

2. Flexibility

There is also an upside for the web team.

By accepting that some web products will get built outside their kingdom, the web team frees up its people from certain tasks and allows them to concentrate on other things. In other words, they have more flexibility.

3. Shared responsibility

If they are creating web pages on their own, marketers need to know how to stay on-brand and avoid errors or omissions.

So if it’s accepted that some web work will be done directly by marketers, the web team can set parameters for marketers to make sure their work is up to standard. Marketers need to remember that the last thing the web team wants is to get blamed for an error in a web page they did not create.

4. Better reporting

For reporting purposes, and to keep track of how web material is being used, the web team needs analytics on interactions with each web product.

One of their objections to marketers creating their own web pages is that the web team won’t be able to track those interactions.

When they renegotiate the terms of their relationship, marketers therefore should agree to embed in their creations whatever tracking codes the web team needs for its own reporting purposes. This will give the web team the analytics it needs to understand what’s going on in its kingdom.

To sweeten the deal, the web team can promise to use those tracking codes to give marketers quick, regular feedback on the performance of the pages the marketers create. That’s information marketers can really use!

In other words, the two teams can share data, something that benefits everyone.

The downsides of not acting

There are also dangers of not accepting the new reality.

The first is that if MOPs and web people are not on the same page, it becomes harder for them to see and take advantage of technological innovations.

Far too often, people do things the way they’ve always done them because they don’t know there’s a better way. I’ve often heard marketers say, "Oh, I’d love to build my own landing pages and not have to wait two weeks for the web team to get back to me! But that’s just not possible in the marketing automation platform I use!"

There is a better way – Knak is one example. It’s just a matter of being open to innovation and improvement – even if the new stuff changes the way things are done. I have talked to so many enterprise marketing teams that made the decision to have their web team create and host their landing pages because creating in their marketing automation platform was just too difficult.

There’s also a danger of losing access to data. Why shouldn’t marketers have access to as much feedback as possible on how their campaigns are performing? Only by truly collaborating with the web team can they access the data they need.

The bottom line is that an integrated marketing campaign always performs better than one where different parts of the work are done in different silos.

If the web team and marketing are aligned, any marketing campaign will be built with higher levels of efficiency (so important in 2024!) and quality, and will perform better. When there’s more consistency and a shared ability to analyze, performance goes way up.

And who doesn’t want that?