Your website is your brand. All of your potential shareholders see it, from your customers, to investors, and even your job candidates. Your website should be the source of truth for your company, so it’s critical that your site is always up to date, accurate, and reflective of your company’s vision and values.
However, managing and maintaining a website requires significant effort and time, and those responsibilities often fall by the wayside (especially when your busy marketing team is focused on 100 other things).
What’s an elegant solution to this problem?
As your company grows, invest in hiring a dedicated website marketing manager to ensure your website is optimized for search engines, engages visitors, and lands conversions.
To give you a better understanding of the importance of this role, let’s go over some of the benefits of hiring a website marketing manager, followed by their top responsibilities, and key considerations when searching for one.
Benefits of hiring a website marketing manager
A skillful website marketing manager brings multiple business benefits, including better website performance, customer experience, and overall ROI.
Improved website performance
The ultimate goal of a website marketing manager is to ensure your website performs at its best.
Your website marketing manager will optimize your website, from its overall performance to its individual pages and elements.
They’ll also monitor website metrics, identify any flaws, and then take action to correct them and make improvements.
Higher search engine rankings
A website marketing manager will take care of implementing SEO strategies to improve your website’s search engine rankings.
Better search rankings result in:
- Increased website traffic – SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than social media.
- Higher-quality leads – Inbound, which includes SEO and blog content, is the highest-quality source of leads for 60% of marketers.
- More sales – According to Databox, 70% of digital marketers consider SEO more effective at driving sales than pay-per-click (PPC) ads.
Better user experience (UX)
Part of optimizing your website’s performance involves testing it for user experience. A website marketing manager will go through every page, workflow, and buyer process to ensure your website has clear calls-to-action (CTAs), pages are sensibly organized, your content is engaging and useful, and it’s easy for visitors to find the information they’re looking for.
Website marketing managers will also take a look at the technical aspects of your website that affect UX, including quick loading times and intuitive navigation.
These components of superb UX bring multiple advantages:
- More engaged users – 38% of users disengage from a website if it takes too long to load.
- Higher ROI – Businesses receive $100 for every dollar spent on excellent UX.
- Lower cart abandonment – 70% of consumers said poor UX caused them to abandon their carts, emphasizing how an excellent user experience can remedy that issue.
More conversions and revenue
Your website marketing manager will find the most effective website design, messaging, CTAs, and conversion paths for your customers and brand, as well as ensure top-notch performance.
They leverage website and other analytics to pinpoint areas where your online presence is lacking. A/B testing is another method they may use to experiment with design elements and determine what does and doesn’t work for your site.
For example, going back to loading time, simply increasing page load speed can boost conversions. A website that loads in one second has a three times higher conversion rate than one that loads in five, and more conversions means more revenue.
Brand consistency
No one wants to visit a website from a social media ad and wonder if they’re in the right place. Or explore a website and find themselves confused about what the brand actually does.
A website marketing manager ensures brand consistency across your website. One of their primary objectives will be to align your site’s design and messaging with your brand’s mission, vision, and values.
This is important, because 87% of customers say brands need to work harder to deliver consistent experiences. Achieve that, and you could enjoy a 33% increase in revenue.
Encourages collaboration
Your teams should not work in silos. I’ve seen companies where the development and product teams have their own internal guidebooks, which differ from the information that sales and marketing has access to. All of these different sources of information, which are updated and altered without the knowledge of the rest of the company, result in chaos. This also makes it difficult to present a united front to customers.
Imagine your marketing assets highlighting a certain benefit that got a customer to sign up for a sales call. Then, in the call sales then tries to promote a different benefit and feature instead of what the customer signed up for. Once the customer is onboarded and in your product, the product team has then prioritized a different feature, because there was no feedback about what the customer actually wanted.
A website marketing manager can circumvent this issue from happening by making your website the source of truth for all of your team members. Someone should be able to visit the website and understand the key benefits of your product or service, and the website should set expectations around capabilities.
Your website marketing manager should also inspire cross-functional collaboration among your teams, as they’ll need to work with your design, product development, and content personnel to execute website updates seamlessly.
Website marketing manager responsibilities
The role and responsibilities of a website marketing manager may vary depending on the growth stage of your company, and the structure of your marketing team. However, there are a few critical tasks you can expect from them. I’ve also listed a few relevant tools that can help accomplish each task.
1) Manage your catalog and pages
Collaboration is necessary to carry out this crucial responsibility. Expect your manager to cooperate with your designers, developers, and your product team to produce and oversee your main webpages, catalog of products or services, blog, and more.
They will collaboratively create and maintain pages for your website, build out templates, and pinpoint other useful content to have on the website.
These website managers should also work to display your offerings in their best light, make them easily accessible to your customers, and keep customers informed of product updates.
Here are a few project management tools that can help keep track of any website updates needed.
Jira
Jira is a project management software with features designed to simplify your catalog management, including:
- Customizable workflows for easy collaboration
- Agile boards to help teams visualize their work
- Integrations with tools and services like Slack, GitHub, and many others
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that helps organize tasks. It offers:
- Kanban boards for easier project management
- Collaboration features such as commenting, tagging, and task assigning
- Power-ups that allow Trello to integrate with other tools and services for extra functionality
2) Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
The key metric of your website’s success is conversion rate. Does your website get visitors to do what you want them to?
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) will be one of the key responsibilities of a website marketing manager. They will A/B test on your website’s design and messaging to learn which variations of color, copy, placement, and more will get the best results.
Below are some conversion-boosting tools that you can test out.
VWO
VWO is a website optimization tool that provides:
- A/B testing capabilities for trying out various conversion paths
- Personalization features that help boost conversions
- Behavioral analytics to help you understand visitor motivations
Optimizely
Optimizely is another website optimization platform that offers a range of features for testing and behavioral targeting, as well as integrations.
It lets your manager find the best conversion paths, customize them according to specific audience segments, and integrate supporting tools and services.
Sumo
Sumo is a tool that helps you get email submission conversion through:
- Popup forms that appear after certain user behavior
- Embedded subscribe forms that you can place as CTAs throughout blogs
- Sticky subscribe CTA bars that remain at the top of select pages
3) On-site and technical SEO
In my experience, organic search has been the top traffic driver for most of my clients. This type of traffic is free (as in, it doesn’t require any ad spend or PPC), and content generates compounding results the more time you put into it.
Your website marketing manager will help to boost this organic acquisition channel by optimizing website content and structure for better search engine rankings.
To help identify SEO opportunities, your manager can use the following tools.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool that monitors and helps optimize a website’s position in Google’s SERPs using its:
- Search performance reports that show what queries your site appears in, as well as which pages drive traffic
- A URL inspection tool that lets you see how Google crawls and indexes specific URLs
- Security issues reports that alert you to threats such as malware or hacking attempts
Semrush
Semrush is an all-in-one digital marketing tool with functionalities for SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing. These include:
- A keyword research feature that lets you target and track relevant queries
- A site audit function that identifies technical SEO issues and recommends solutions
- Competitor analysis capabilities so you can study competitor websites and strategies
4) Manage and carry out requests for web changes
These requests will typically come from other teams, and, again, cross-functional collaboration will be necessary to execute effectively.
For instance, changes to your offerings, such as new launches, will require your website marketing manager to cooperate with your product team. They’ll work hand in hand to make updates or create new pages alongside your design team.
The following platforms can help your manager properly accommodate and execute requests for website updates.
Asana
Asana is a project management platform with a user-friendly interface and a wide range of functionalities, making it a popular choice for businesses of all sizes. It provides:
- Task lists and calendars to help team members stay on top of web changes
- Collaboration and communication tools that enable people to work together in real time
- Project tracking features that monitor deadlines and generate reports for evaluating success
Basecamp
The Basecamp tool is designed to enhance teamwork and streamlining project management with its robust features that include:
- Message boards let team members share updates, ask questions, and discuss tasks
- To-do lists to assign tasks and set deadlines
- Automatic check-ins that ensure everyone is on track through consistent status updates
WordPress
WordPress is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) that powers millions of websites. It’s known for its user-friendly interface, flexibility, and customizability — all of which are perfect for executing changes to your website. On WordPress, you can enjoy:
- Thousands of templates for numerous design options
- Customizable building blocks to get the exact designs you want
- Built-in SEO tools and plugins to help optimize your website for search engines
- Intuitive content management tools and dashboards for easy web changes
Shopify
Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform for creating and managing online stores. If your site is built on Shopify, your manager will have access to the following features.
- Customizable templates and themes to align store design and branding
- Built-in eCommerce functionalities for aspects like payment processing and shipping to enhance UX
- Marketing tools that ease email marketing, SEO, and social media marketing
5) Set rigorous quality standards
Your website marketing manager is the person who will make sure everything on your website works, makes sense, and is up and running at all times. They will uphold brand consistency and ensure a positive brand impression for anyone and everyone who visits your website.
To do all of this, your website marketing manager will work with your marketing, product, design, and developer teams to ensure your site is always aligned with your brand identity and ethos.
They will run regular checks for broken links, monitor user sessions to see where people leave your website, and investigate the reasons (did something break? Was something unclear?).
You can use the following tools to ensure a high quality web experience.
FullStory
FullStory allows you to watch session replays, seeing exactly which pages different visitors navigated to, what they clicked on, how far they scrolled, and more. These insights allow you to see things like visitors often clicking an unlinked element, thinking there is more information behind it.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a behavioral analytics tool that helps you observe where your visitors are getting frustrated, what they want to see instead, and which content resonates the most.
You can leverage:
- Heatmaps to show which content visitors pay the most attention to and what can be cut
- Session recordings to catch any website errors or confusing elements
- Feedback tools such as surveys and interviews to get the pulse of your visitors and how well your website communicates value
6) Write and refine web copy
Finally, your website marketing manager should have a strong content background. They should be able to spot grammar and spelling mistakes that have slipped past your writers and editors, and identify where things can be better said to fit the web design. Writing to design is a valuable skill, as sometimes copy doesn’t fit well into your web design.
They will also need to create compelling copy for A/B tests, understand your brand messaging, set the standard for the copy you allow on your website, and more.
Since your website is the window into your brand, your website marketing manager should be able to check, verify, and edit for the voice and tone you want.
The following tools can help to ensure seamless web copy.
Grammarly
Grammarly can help you check your spelling and grammar live as you type. You can use it to double check Google Doc drafts of your new webpages, blogs, and more.
Hemingway App
The Hemingway App is an easy way to check for grammar, spelling, and readability. You can paste your copy directly into their web-based interface and get suggestions at a glance.
Who to hire: Key considerations and attributes
Now that we’ve gone over the core responsibilities of a website marketing manager, let’s talk about what to look for when hiring one. You must be confident that your candidate has the know-how to maximize your website’s potential, or will require minimal direction to do so. Here are some core characteristics to seek out in a potential hire.
Has extensive website experience
This is a no-brainer. A candidate should have prior experience working with websites, preferably in a marketing or related capacity.
They should have a solid understanding of:
- Design
- Development
- Maintenance
- Brand alignment
- Strategies to drive traffic, engagement, and conversions
Maintains attention to detail
Even the smallest detail can make a huge difference in your UX and conversion rates. Find a website marketing manager who pays close attention to nuances and can spot potential issues before they manifest into real problems.
Follows established processes and instructions well
Website marketing often involves staging websites for quality checks and testing new processes and workflows to implement.
Your manager is the one who oversees this process and ensures everything runs smoothly, so look for a potential hire who can follow directions and has experience collaborating with other teams.
Holds high standards
Your website is your brand’s digital home, so it’s essential you find someone who can consistently maintain high-quality design and content.
Look for a website marketing manager with a keen eye for your brand’s aesthetics and messaging and a knack for crafting compelling content that resonates with your audience.
Able to execute CRO initiatives
I’ve mentioned the importance of CRO multiple times, so it’s vital that your potential hire possesses the ability to develop and execute initiatives for it.
A strong candidate can analyze data, identify areas for improvement, and introduce changes that drive conversions.
Grasps SEO strategy
As briefly discussed, SEO is another element of website marketing. It’s essential for driving traffic to your site, so a candidate must understand how to formulate and implement SEO strategies.
Some vital skills and concepts they should know are keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and technical SEO.
Understands good web UX
Excellent UX is critical to your website’s success, as it determines the ease of navigation and whether visitors continue to use it.
Your potential manager should take a user-first approach when it comes to website design and optimization. They should have knowledge on conducting user research, creating wireframes and prototypes, and streamlining user flows.
Able to write compelling web copy
Web copy and engaging content play a large role in the overall visitor experience because they compel people to take desired actions.
Find a candidate with proven writing aptitude who can produce work that strongly resonates with your audience. Their experience should revolve around content creation for websites, specifically, landing pages, blog posts, and product pages.
Website marketing manager candidate profiles
Not everyone will have all the skills you want. However, you may find a top choice in other types of roles. To help you out, here are some profiles of potential candidates that could fit the description.
The growth marketer
You may come across a growth marketer with lots of website experience and a high bar for design and content quality. With those traits, they should be able to ensure your website is compelling for visitors and reflects your brand.
Their background may also revolve around data-driven experimentation and decision-making, as well as customer acquisition and retention strategies. This means they’ll likely excel at personalizing your customer’s journey and A/B testing.
The product marketer
Another excellent applicant would be a product marketer who has a strong grasp of CRO, SEO, and website navigation and structure. They may even be used to handling most of the web content creation and writing themselves.
If this is the case, they should be skilled in conducting user research and making buyer personas, then developing content strategies that drive engagement and conversions.
The content marketer
Those with competencies in content marketing and SEO, primarily, may also be among your choices. Their skill set revolves around drawing traffic to your website and improving its search engine rankings through on-site optimizations and engaging content.
Characteristics of a website manager with a content marketing background would consist of someone who:
- Stays on top of the latest SEO trends and techniques
- Has experience using tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Ahrefs
- Possesses strong analytical skills and can identify opportunities for increasing traffic and engagement
The UX specialist
Candidates who specialize in designing and optimizing your website’s UX and performance could be top contenders in your manager selection. They’re experts in producing user-centric designs that enhance the overall visitor experience.
This type of specialist should possess knowledge in A/B testing, personalization, and optimizing your website’s overall speed, plus have experience in:
- Conducting user research
- Creating wireframes
- Developing prototypes that communicate design concepts
Additionally, they should also have a proper understanding of languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to work well with your website’s developers.
Wrapping up – A website marketing manager can solidify your online presence
Initially, hiring a dedicated website marketing manager can seem like a significant investment for your brand. But, when they fulfill their duties well, the benefits quickly overtake the cost.
Hunt for the right attributes and skills and you’re sure to find a candidate who’ll hit the ground running and prove their value. With their well-honed skills and experience, you’ll soon receive an optimized, brand-consistent, and revenue-generating website.