The most important part of your content marketing plan? Your website.

You probably have a love-hate relationship with your company’s website. Most clients we work with do. Maybe it’s glitchy, or there’s some complicated process to add or update anything. Maybe it’s overwhelming or outdated or just plain bad. 

How do they get this way? 

• Organizations build a site just to have one. They don’t consider what their website should ultimately do, facilitate, and achieve. 
• They treat the website as a massive once-every-five-years redesign, a painful push that everyone dreads. In between, there’s no process for evolving the site incrementally, so new additions and updates get tacked on haphazardly. 
• No one owns the website. Marketing, IT, operations, your web agency—everyone has a hand in it, but those hands aren’t working together. Marketing is at the mercy of whoever has command of the “publish” button. 

None of this is marketing’s fault, but marketing, of all departments, tends to depend most on the website. As a marketer, you may not have full control over your organization’s website. But if you make the most of what you can control, you can still hit your goals. In this blog, we’ll show you how. 

The common mistake

Content campaigns are dynamic and ever-evolving, but the website remains static—this is how drift and sprawl happen. 

Social platforms and other media channels are distribution outposts. The website is home base. On social media, search engine, and LLMs, your visibility is subject to the whims of the algorithm and generally that platform’s priorities. When a customer comes to your website, they’re on your turf. They’re in your story. 

Whatever you’re doing, from PPC ads to executive thought leadership posts on LinkedIn, the goal is to drive someone to your website. Yet if the ads are great, but the site is bad, prospects will be confused and skeptical. They’ll bolt. In this way, great marketing is hamstrung by a terrible website every day of the week. 

Ideally, your website’s value compounds over time. Strong articles and resources, case studies and product pages, they stay evergreen long after a campaign ends. They fill in gaps for different types of customers, for different stages of your marketing funnel. If the site has a clear and easy-to-navigate structure, it can turn attention into perspective, then perspective into action. 

This isn’t so much about aesthetics. Plenty of sites and companies have great branding but confusing or overwhelming structure. Marketing should have influence over how products are bucketed, how one section or offering links to another, and the messaging that points the way for prospects.

Build content around audience journeys

The way that you view and categorize your offering internally is not always how customers see it. Customers are problem-first. Marketing should think about marketing from the perspective of a customer searching for a solution, rather than the perspective of explaining everything you offer. 

It must be said that good marketing comes from a healthy dose of self-knowledge and at the company level. Ideally, you have a good bead on your personas, value proposition, and key differentiators. If not, spend some time shoring up this foundational messaging, or let Content Workshop help. 

Ok, so back to the customer journey. Map the questions your prospects ask at key moments: 

• Top-funnel researching
• Comparing solutions
• Comparing vendors
• Making a decision 

Create a body of site content that answers those questions. No small feat, we know, but once you have it, you have the resources you need to stock new campaigns with minimal lift. 

But the work isn’t done there. You should treat the content program as a continuous practice. Audit existing pages, identify gaps, publish, measure, refresh, and improve. A lot of you out there are a marketing department of one—that’s ok. Take small bites and make sure the content is good. It will last longer that way and make your job in the future much easier. 

The goal is not to publish more, everywhere. It’s to build a website that is useful, credible, and informative, and grows increasingly so over time. 

The problems you probably have

Marketing can be quite dysfunctional (lol). But you can save yourself some sanity in the following ways. 

Make publishing predictable

If every time feels like the first time, like you’re making it up or you don’t know what to expect with each publication, this tips are for you.

First, define routine changes and higher-tier changes. Routine changes are simple, like publishing blogs and landing pages or making tweaks to existing site copy. Marketing should be able to make these on their own, at will. Higher-tier changes require someone else’s involvement (legal, technical, exec review), like high-level navigation changes, attribution tooling, major design updates or product claims. 

Outline processes for executing each type, including how long it tends to take. 

We understand it’s not always ideal. For example, one marketing director we used to work with had to completely build out blogs and pages in a staging environment, then that had to be approved by other internal stakeholders, then the director had to rebuild it again in the actual site, and then harass the web team to push it live.

This isn’t a fix for such realities, but a process can solidify expectations. If you can establish a baseline, even a sub-optimal one, you can know when something goes off track, and if someone asks why content can’t be done faster, you have a ready-made answer.

Template, template, template 

Starting from scratch is the enemy of all marketers. So make a template whenever possible. 

Landing page sections 

• A few different header types
• A few different body copy types (e.g., columns and blocks, or image-left text-right, big paragraph, whatever)
• A comparison table section
• A call to action section or book a demo section 

Social media graphics

• A big stat graphic
• A customer quote graphic
• A general branded image graphic

You get the gist. 

Overcome bad branding

Sometimes you’re stuck with a stale brand. That’s OK. You can take liberties with the design in order to make compelling ads and graphics, as long as the improved assets are consistent with each other and use enough core design elements (e.g. color palette and type set) of the brand to remain familiar to customers. 

As long as customers can go from your ad or post to your site and know they’re in the right place, that’ll do.

Keep in mind that the homepage of your website is the starting point of the customer journey. An ad or email campaign shouldn’t direct users to the home page, because clicking from an ad/email is a step on the journey. Outbound campaigns should direct them to the next step. For example, an ad targeting CFOs should direct to CFO-relevant content or case studies on the site. 

Have good ideas

Once you have a library of evergreen content on the site, this content can serve as the foundation for more current and timely content. You can bring coherence to a breaking industry development or an executive brain dump. We talk a lot about process in marketing, but process must amplify ideas that are actually good. 

The truth is, good ideas are easier to work with. They have power and momentum. It’s easy to recast them into several formats. If you find yourself asking, “What should we talk about?” Chatter can help. As a content intelligent platform, Chatter gets to know your brand and target audience to surface relevant stories and ideas, then speeds up the process of converting those ideas into content worth consuming. 

A good website isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s table stakes. 

In 2026, the general sentiment among consumers and prospects is that there’s no excuse for having a bad website. The website serves as a litmus test to the quality of the product and experience. Think of your own instincts and experiences, and you’ll find this to be true. The website can’t be a barrier to conversions. 

When marketers can optimize the factors within their control, they can move the website closer to the living, high-value business asset that it should be. It’s all about knowing the value you provide—your organization’s knowledge, skill, and experience—and creating a process to market that value with clarity and consistency.

At Chatter and Content Workshop, our goal is to reduce marketing friction so you can tell your story loudly and easily. If producing compelling content feels harder than it should be, we’d love to talk. Tell us more about what you’re working on here.