Who owns the website strategy within your org? PMM, Demand Gen, Design, etc? Assuming all are involved, but curious about who drives for you. Which models work well?

Whoever controls the budget for the website owns the strategy, and that is typically Demand Gen since the website is the foundation of digital marketing. However a corporate website serves many different audiences and purposes, thus the role of the web manager is to coordinate the requirements of multiple stakeholders, including PMM (product pages), Business Development (partners page), Finance (investor relations page), HR (careers page), etc.

As the driver of GTM strategy, in addition to the product, solution, industry and customer pages, often times PMM is also responsible for the Home Page and heavily involved with the design team on website navigation. Additionally, as the owners of positioning and messaging, we work closely with Demand Gen on campaign landing pages, designing CTAs, and recommending the most relevant and impactful content to curate off every page.

Interestingly I have found the best way to foster a strong working relationship with the web team is to collaborate early on SEO. In fact, I like to describe SEO as PMM's silver bullet. Too often SEO is relegated to a final checklist item during product launch when pushing out new product pages. But rather than being the last thing done, it should be thought of more strategically and be one the first. SEO provides a market signal for intent and the actual voice of the customer, through the terms and keywords they are using to search for products similar to yours. Therefore SEO should be a key input to messaging before any web copy is every written!

I've seen this play out a few different ways:

• PMM owns content, Design owns design/dev, Marketing ops owns analytics/reporting
• PMM owns content, Web team owns design/dev/project management/analytics/reporting
• Brand owns content, PMM assists, and other teams own other things

I'll start off with a few lessons learned:

• If you try to be the gatekeeper of the website, you will eventually become the bottleneck of the website
• Not all web pages are the same, and some are just not worth your time and energy
• The more cooks in the kitchen, the less responsibility anyone feels toward anything

My favorite dynamic has been:

1. You define the most critical pages on the website (usually homepage, pricing, and pages that made it into your header nav). If it's related to how a user/buyer would consider and buy your product, PMM owns. If not, it's owned by Brand or Growth.
2. Everything else on the website is owned by the team that is most impacted by it (i.e. Field owns events pages, Growth owns SEO pages, HR/Recruiting own the About page).
3. A centralized web design/dev team (and contractor group) works on all these things for visual cohesion and ownership when things inevitably have bugs or break.

Because core web pages aren't shipped every day, you can focus on nailing the pages that are most strategic for the business. As someone who has owned the website for extended periods of time at 4 companies... trust me... you do NOT want to be the person who owns the entire website for any longer than you absolutely have to. It's not where your PMM strengths are best used, and is a huge distraction from core work. 

The role PMM plays in the website depends where PMM sits in your organization. If PMM sits within marketing, they may own website metrics, budget, and responsibility but if PMM sits in product, they will likely have to work with marketing on website updated and iterations. Whichever is the case for you, ensure the website has a clear owner so that you can partner with them and that there are clear R&R for updates and measurement. 

At the small companies I've been in... it's usually demand gen that owns the website with PMM contributing heavily in terms of content ownership (that includes creating structure, creating content for pages, and blogging). This works really well, though the design part could be owned by any part of marketing equally well. Working with an outside agency, design is more about project management than it is about having creative people on the team directly. Demand gen and PMM parter on SEO.

At larger companies, much of design is in-house and there's a team that owns the site itself. Brand has a large part to do with it, often owning the entire site. In that case, demand gen is more of a customer of the brand team / website team. PMM provides content, but the content provisioning is "less intense" because the brand team owns SEO.