A Digital Strategy Podcast

The IT Guy Ain't Doing It

Episode Summary

"The IT guy ain't doing it." A client said that to us about his own company's website, and he was the IT guy. At a 60-person consulting firm with no marketing team, the person who kept the site online had ended up deciding what went on it. He picked the platform, cut the blog because nobody was writing for it, and sat on finished case studies with no way to publish them. Nobody decided IT should run marketing. It just happened. In this episode, Symon and Marcello get into who actually owns your website when marketing isn't anyone's job. If every change needs a developer, your developer is running your marketing strategy, whether anyone decided that or not. The hosts don't fully agree on the fix. Marcello's view: take the developer out of every change and an owner shows up. Symon's: he's seen more websites die from no owner than from a slow developer, and a better CMS just gives you a faster way to let content go stale. This one is for lean B2B teams without a dedicated marketing function, and for the IT and dev people who inherited the website by default. Disclosure: Tennis is a Webflow partner, and this isn't a platform pitch. If you're a developer and think we've got it backwards, tell us.

Episode Notes

💡 Key Topics:

• "Responsible for the website, don't want to do content": how one IT admin ended up picking the platform, designing the blog out of the site, and leaving years of analytics unused
• The five-minute job that isn't: a headline change becomes a ticket, a queue, a scoping call, QA and a deployment. The bigger cost is everything that never gets published, like the campaign with no landing page or the CTA nobody tested
• The slow-launch numbers: 53 days on average from campaign start to launch, 13 days for a landing page, and 87% of marketers wanting more control over web content (Netlify, 2024 survey; Netlify sells a web platform and most respondents worked at 1,000+ employee companies)
• Your website sells before anyone calls: 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience and 45% used AI during a recent purchase (Gartner, 646 B2B buyers)
• Does freshness matter for AI search? AI assistants cite pages about a quarter newer than what ranks on Google, yet the average cited page is still almost three years old (Ahrefs, ~17 million cited pages). The hosts aren't sure how much it matters
• Why a better platform won't save you: the IT guy had Webflow and still wrote the blog out of the site, and 68% of developers think marketers don't fully use the tools they already have (Netlify)
• Governance belongs on the website: locked components and set roles, not a rule buried in someone's inbox or a Google Doc
• The one test to run this week: list your last five website changes with who asked, which department, who made it and how many days it took. Developer in every row means a tool problem. Blanks in the "who asked" column mean an ownership problem

📖 Chapters:

• 0:00 — The IT guy ain't doing it
• 1:03 — No marketing team, so IT owns the site
• 3:15 — Why slow changes cost more now
• 6:41 — Developer problem or owner problem?
• 8:57 — Governance built into the website
• 10:06 — Verdict: the five-changes test

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