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And, oftentimes, managing these tests and interpreting their results takes away from the things that actually move the needle — like brainstorming and strategizing so that you can better understand and connect with your target audience. 

While this is a reality for many marketing teams, it doesn’t have to be.

What if you could dedicate more of your time to creating meaningful content for your audience that resonates with their needs? What if you could have the space to develop strategic initiatives that drive revenue, instead of executing on something half-baked? What if instead of doing things manually, automation could take care of tedious, time-consuming tasks? 

The good news? This is all possible with the help of AI. AI can do all of that and more while helping you accelerate personalization results and drive conversions and revenue. 

Now let’s take a closer look at how AI in website personalization works and how it can benefit your team.

What is AI?

To set the groundwork, AI is generally defined as machines simulating human intelligence. Further, machine learning is a type of AI that helps software applications more accurately predict outcomes. It works by taking data, training an algorithm, creating a prediction, and then running it in the real world. This process runs in a continuous loop, constantly taking in and learning from new data.

We see many examples of AI in our everyday lives, whether we realize it or not. A few common examples include social media algorithms, predictive searches, and recommendations on streaming services. There are many different ways we use AI in marketing as well, ranging from email automation to real-time personalization. AI empowers marketers by reducing manual work and automating processes — and most importantly — it enables marketers to spend more time doing what they do best — understanding their target audience, developing strategy and hypotheses, and generating creative ideas to appeal to their audience to incorporate into their campaigns and programs.

3 common myths about AI in website personalization

Now that you have a better understanding of what AI is, let’s take a look at how it works in your website personalization program. But first, let’s separate fact from fiction and debunk somecommon myths about AI.

Myth #1: AI is too complicated to use in your personalization program

People tend to think of AI as a complicated concept that will be too difficult to implement and use in their everyday work. This is false, running an AI-based personalization program actually makes your job easier, because the solution automates much of your work and can do things at scale. Rather than running one personalization campaign at a time and waiting weeks or months for results, AI can run countless variations at once and give you results in days or even hours. Plus, these solutions are no more difficult to implement than other website personalization solutions – you typically just need to add a line of code to your website.

Myth #2: AI can completely run your personalization program

While AI is a great way to manage your personalization program, it still needs your creative ideas in order to deliver personalized experiences to website visitors. The combination of AI technology and human creativity is what makes a website personalization strategy the most effective, leading to better customer experiences and higher conversion rates.

Myth #3: Everyone talking AI is telling you the truth

Many companies use AI as a buzzword but often overpromise on what their solution can do in terms of machine learning. Some companies promising AI actually don’t use any at all, while others may provide a data scientist as a service to build some kind of AI model manually. The latter option does create real AI but, since the model is built manually, it is likely not regularly updated or optimized. This doesn’t mean AI is untrustworthy, but it’s important to carefully vet any AI-based solution before making a purchase decision.

Questions you should ask when assessing AI-based solutions include:

• What does the system focus on? Is it optimizing directly for the key metrics you’ve indicated? Or, is it simply providing data or automation that fill a specific task in your overall process?
• How does the system learn? Does it require a lot of data upfront before the system can start making predictions and take action? Or does it start learning in real time as visitors engage with your site?‍
• Is the system transparent? Can you see the personalization decisions it’s making, and can you access the data–your data–reflecting these decisions?

Benefits of AI in website personalization

Now that you know what AI is and what it’s not, let’s dive into the benefits of using artificial intelligence in your personalization program.

• Reduced campaign management: With traditional A/B testing, the majority of your time is spent checking your campaigns to see whether they’ve reached statistical significance. But with an AI-based personalization program, all of that tedious campaign management is done for you. This means your team has more time to analyze results and brainstorm more creative ideas for future tests.  
• Accelerated learning: Since AI allows you to do things at scale, you can dramatically accelerate your learnings from your website personalization program. By running more campaigns at once, you’ll gain a greater understanding of how different messages resonate with your audience. AI-based personalization also yields faster results than traditional solutions, with some tests declaring winners in hours or days.‍
• Increased conversions and revenue: With an AI-based personalization program, you’re able to deliver a more tailored experience to each unique website visitor. By providing your website visitors with messaging and content that makes sense for them, you’ll improve the customer experience and therefore drive more conversions and revenue.

Two common approaches to personalization with AI

The benefits of AI in website personalization are clear, and there are multiple approaches you can choose from to personalize your website and drive more conversions. Here are two common approaches you might consider:

1. Rules-based personalization is where you create “if this, then that” statements for various segments of your target audience. With rules-based personalization, there are often three main components: defining the audience the rules apply to, creating the experience this specific audience will see on your site, and determining which pages the rules will apply to. While AI does help to automate your personalization program with this approach, there is quite a bit of manual work involved in coming up with personalization ideas and then creating the rules.‍
2. Predictive personalization goes a step beyond rules-based personalization by using machine learning to predict what will be the best experience to show each website visitor. Rather than having to manually set up rules, machine learning automatically predicts which is the best combination of your personalization ideas to show each visitor to deliver the optimal experience for them. The machine is constantly learning as it runs your campaigns, and can even update the experience as a visitor’s behavior changes.

With AI-based predictive personalization, your team can vastly improve the customer experience and drive better results. Just see how other marketers have succeeded using a predictive personalization tool:

Using AI to personalize your website

Incorporating AI into your website personalization program is one of the best ways to fast-track success. Harnessing the power of machine learning to serve the most personalized experience to each unique website visitor will ensure an increase in conversions and revenue.

Leveraging an AI tool amplifies not only your marketing team’s bandwidth, but also the impact that their unique campaign ideas can make. As visitor behavior changes, AI automatically adapts to meet these changes to continuously deliver the best personalized experience for each unique website visitor.

To learn more about using AI to create a highly personalized website experience for your customers and prospects, get in touch with our team today.

A great product or service isn’t enough to guarantee success. To achieve sustainable growth and alignment within your organization, you need a vision statement.

Vision statements do more than resonate with external audiences — they inspire and connect internal teams. By clearly communicating your company’s intended direction and core principles, your statement unifies team members and drives them to success.

What’s a vision statement?

A vision statement is a brief, high-level declaration outlining your company’s ambitions and ideals for future growth and long-term goals. It embodies the principles that shape your business decisions.

Defining a clear business vision statement offers value to your internal teams and customers. It motivates employees toward a shared goal and helps ensure their actions align with the company’s objectives. And it helps you establish a strong brand identity by outlining your business’s commitments, like ethical standards, strategic focuses, and unique selling points, to create clarity that attracts customers who identify with these values.

Vision statements often exist at the organizational level, but other types include:

• Project vision statement: Defines the desired outcome and purpose for project teams, offering direction and focus
• Personal vision statement: Focuses on individual long-term goals and aspirations, guiding personal and professional growth
• Product vision statement: Envisions a product or service’s future trajectory by detailing its value proposition, target market, and intended impact

Vision statement vs. mission statement

A vision statement defines your business’s long-term, future goals and the path toward achieving them, while a mission statement clarifies your organization’s purpose and the actions it currently takes to fulfill it.

If your company aims to revolutionize education through accessible learning resources and web apps, your vision statement might be “To redefine the future of learning by building a worldwide community of curious and empowered lifelong learners.” This message shares broad aspirations and motivates everyone involved to contribute to transforming the educational landscape.

But a mission statement for the same company could be “We create innovative digital platforms to make education accessible and empower learners worldwide.” This highlights your commitment to making education available for everyone while outlining your approach to achieving this objective.

4 elements of a powerful vision statement

No two vision statements are the same, but the most effective ones share common elements. Here’s what makes a good vision statement.

1. Ambition

Vision statements set lofty goals that aim for significant impact. Ambitious statements inspire everyone connected to your organization, from employees to customers, by providing a clear sense of purpose. They encourage teams to innovate and strive for excellence by drawing in those passionate about contributing to meaningful change.

For example, Meta’s vision is “to help bring the metaverse to life.” To align their organization with this vision, they changed their company name from Facebook to Meta in 2021.

It’s an ambitious vision statement because Meta aims to revolutionize social technology by building an expansive, immersive metaverse. The company wants to create new ways for people to connect, create communities, and grow businesses in a virtual world with augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and messaging services.

2. Strategy

A strategic vision statement aligns with your company’s overall strategy and direction. This alignment ensures the organization’s endeavors are coherent and unified. Because it’s aligned with your overall strategy, a vision statement can help guide decision-making and resource allocation, drive toward common objectives, and optimize efforts and outcomes.

Amazon’s vision of becoming “Earth’s most customer-centric company” exemplifies a vision statement deeply interwoven with strategic intent. This pledge dictates Amazon’s operational ethos and sets a clear, strategic direction focused on customer satisfaction. By promising an online marketplace where visitors can discover and purchase anything, Amazon highlights their dedication to user convenience and choice. Their vision statement cultivates customer loyalty by prioritizing their needs and galvanizes the Amazon workforce to innovate to meet audience demands — ensuring Amazon stays at the forefront of ecommerce.

3. Feasibility

An effective vision statement sets goals that align with your organization’s capabilities and available resources to ensure they’re achievable. Establishing attainable objectives motivates employees by presenting realistic targets. It also builds consumer trust by demonstrating the company’s commitment to feasible ambitions.

Microsoft’s vision is to “help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.” This statement reflects Microsoft’s goal to provide technological solutions that empower individuals and organizations to grow their businesses. It’s feasible because it aligns with the company’s vast portfolio of tech products, including software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI).

4. Clarity

Clarity in a vision statement simplifies the understanding and execution of the company’s overarching goals. It eliminates confusion and aligns teams by providing a straightforward and compelling direction.

Netflix’s vision to “become the best global entertainment distribution service” doesn’t just highlight their content provider role — it clearly communicates their global ambitions. This concise and broad statement leaves no room for ambiguity, which ensures everyone understands Netflix’s goal to connect with a diverse and international audience through high-quality, on-demand streaming entertainment.

How to write a vision statement: 5 steps

Creating a vision statement requires a structured process — no matter what industry you’re in. Here are five steps to help you get started.

1. Engage with key stakeholders

Identify individuals and groups deeply invested in your company’s journey (employees, customers, investors) and engage directly with them to gather these stakeholders’ interests. This foundational step is pivotal because a vision statement transcends a declaration of goals — it articulates the value your organization aspires to deliver to all stakeholders.

Conduct this engagement using user research tools such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups. Beyond helping you gather valuable insights, this approach also fosters inclusion and respect. It lays the groundwork for a vision that genuinely reflects your community’s collective ambition and shared values.

2. Compile a keyword list

Brainstorm a list of keywords and phrases that encapsulate your company’s ambition, core values, and long-term goals. Reflect on the elements that set your organization apart, like its strengths and competitive advantages. Use these keywords and phrases as a compass as you develop a vision statement that truly embodies your brand.

For a sustainable fashion brand, relevant keywords might be “ethical,” “eco-friendly,” and “inclusive,” while a software-as-a-service (SaaS) firm might include “innovative,” “cutting-edge,” and “accessible.”

3. Answer foundational questions

Explore fundamental questions about the impact your organization seeks to achieve and its target audience to dive deep into the reasons behind its existence. While your keyword list is a good start, addressing these questions lets you truly dig into your company’s core principles to help you articulate your vision clearly.

Consider a startup focused on enhancing well-being. Their mission is innovating within the health and wellness sector by offering solutions that improve overall wellness. Their target audience might include individuals seeking accessible, holistic approaches to health. The startup distinguishes their brand through cutting-edge technology to personalize wellness plans tailored to individual needs, and the impact they aim to achieve is to deliver tangible improvements in their customers’ physical and mental well-being.

For this startup, this process might lead to a vision statement like “To become the leading force in the health and wellness industry by empowering individuals with personalized, technology-driven solutions that enhance their quality of life.”

4. Write a first draft

After collecting insights about your business and gathering feedback from key stakeholder groups, craft a first draft. Starting with a rough version is more about getting your ideas out there than immediately achieving perfection. It puts your team’s aspirations on paper and translates complex ambitions into something everyone can get behind. And it’s just the beginning — feedback and fresh insights will shape it and keep it alive and malleable as your organization grows.

Imagine you’re building an enterprise focused on making cities greener. Your first shot at a vision statement might be “Greening cities, one building at a time.” It’s simple but sketches a clear picture — a future where your work makes urban life more sustainable. This draft is vague and might not be strategic, but it’s a conversation starter and invites everyone to weigh in.

5. Evaluate and iterate

Crafting your vision statement isn’t a one-and-done deal — it’s more like sculpting. Once you’ve got your first draft, it’s time to chisel away and refine it with input from your team, customer feedback, and insights from wherever you can get them. Circumstances change and priorities shift — so your vision must be agile enough to reflect these evolutions.

If your vision involves making website development more accessible, you might start by sharing that draft widely and asking for input from your team and users. This feedback isn’t just about polishing words — it’s about ensuring your vision resonates and reflects the collective aspirations of everyone it touches. By continuously evaluating and evolving your vision statement, you ensure it stays relevant and resonant and continues to guide your organization forward effectively.

Vision statement writing tips

When it comes to writing your vision statement, including some flair and foresight can turn it into a beacon that lights up your company’s path. Here are some tips to infuse magic into yours.

Be ambitious

Don’t let today’s constraints clip your ambitions — picture the grandest vision of your organization’s impact and success. Creating a vision statement that reaches beyond current limitations sparks inspiration and drive across your team and customer base by painting a picture of what could be rather than what is.

Use present tense

Frame your vision in the present tense to make it feel immediate and real. This helps convince everyone that this vision isn’t just a dream — it’s happening. It makes the vision feel more attainable and pulls people in, encouraging them to be part of making that vision come alive.

Embrace approachable language

While it’s tempting to be quick and witty and use industry jargon, clarity will garner the most buy-in from stakeholders. Keeping your vision statement and brand communication easily understandable ensures everyone can grasp it. This makes it more accessible and approachable to a broader audience.

Be passionate

An effective vision statement should evoke emotion and ignite enthusiasm. Your vision should be a rallying cry that excites and motivates by showcasing the bright future ahead and the meaningful impact your business aims to make. It’s about painting a future so vivid and compelling that people can’t help but want to be part of it.

Align your vision with your core principles

You want your vision statement to be exciting and ambitious but also grounded in reality and your core values. When your vision statement mirrors your company’s principles, it strengthens your identity and fosters trust with your audience. This alignment reassures customers and employees that your lofty goals aren’t just words but a road map to what your business genuinely strives to achieve.

3 vision statement examples

Exploring vision statements from companies that broke the mold shows how you can paint vivid pictures of your ambitions and the impact you aim to have. Here are some examples from groundbreaking organizations and why their vision statements work.

1. Disney

Disney’s vision is “to be one of the world’s leading producers and providers of entertainment and information.” This statement works well for Disney because it embodies their vast entertainment and media empire that spans theme parks, merchandise, movies, television networks, and much more. It also underscores the company’s goal to entertain and inform, with the company using their diverse portfolio to reach global audiences. And it highlights Disney’s motivation to continue innovating and expanding their reach across multiple media platforms.

2. Google

Google’s vision statement — “to provide access to the world’s information in one click” — takes the vast concept of the internet and reduces it down to clicking. This vision cuts through the noise by promising to put the sum of human knowledge at your fingertips. It’s straightforward but ambitious. It illuminates Google’s commitment to making information universally accessible and useful. And it speaks to the heart of what the internet can be: a tool that empowers everyone everywhere.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s vision is “to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” This vision is well-suited to the professional network platform. It embodies the company’s goal of helping every professional by providing tools and opportunities for career advancement. LinkedIn offers features like job posting, skill assessments, learning courses, and professional groups so individuals and companies can establish relationships, network, and contribute toward global economic growth.

Enjoy powerful branding with Webflow

Crafting the perfect vision statement helps establish your company’s brand identity, and Webflow has the resources you need to kick-start this journey. With guides on creating a unique brand name and improving brand messaging, plus website templates and no-code design tools tailored for enterprise-level businesses, Webflow provides the comprehensive support your team needs to express your company’s identity.Explore our resources today and embark on your brand’s journey to success with Webflow.

One critical piece of modern tech stacks is a content management system (CMS). Used for more than 68 million websites worldwide, a CMS allows users to build and manage website content without needing technical skills or coding knowledge. However, as more players have entered the field over the years, complexity has risen. 

A CMS that doesn’t prioritize self-service for marketers will almost certainly lead to frustration and delays. Unfortunately, the two of the primary types of CMS platforms used for multi-channel content distribution — a headless CMS and a digital experience platform (DXP) — often clip the wings of marketers hoping to launch and iterate new ideas quickly.

Below, let’s explore these two different types of CMSs, walk through the critical requirements marketing teams should look for in a CMS, and explore what it means to have a next-gen CMS. 

What is a monolithic DXP?

A monolithic DXP is composed of an integrated set of core technologies that support the creation, management, and delivery of omnichannel digital experiences, such as Adobe Experience Manager. It consists of consolidated solutions that aim to reduce the number of tools within your tech stack, helping to streamline operations. Its tightly integrated nature simplifies procurement and compatibility with other tools, providing smooth workflows.

However, these solutions come with their own set of challenges. The platform’s rigidity can hinder marketing teams’ flexibility, innovation, speed, and autonomy, blocking them from quickly adapting to evolving needs. DXPs also lack user-friendly interfaces for marketers, creating a heavy burden for engineering. And extracting data from these platforms can also be costly and complicated. 

What is a headless CMS? 

A headless CMS decouples the front-end from the back-end, making it a very developer-driven solution. For companies with extensive developer resources, a headless CMS may offer a high level of control and modularity.

However, similar to a traditional, monolithic DXP, the reliance on developers for even minor updates to a website can take days or weeks, stripping marketers of autonomy and hindering their ability to hit their goals. 

Five essential requirements for a powerful CMS

We recently chatted with Austin Kueffner, a partner at Outliant, to get his point-of-view on the strengths and weaknesses of different CMSs and what marketing teams should consider when assessing how to deliver on their goals and needs. 

During our conversation, he outlined five core pieces of criteria modern teams should look for in a CMS:

1. Be self-service for marketers 
2. Have a powerful front-end 
3. Be extensible 
4. Provides multi-channel support
5. Gives marketers the ability to optimize user interfaces (UI). 

Below, let’s look at how headless solutions and DXPs stack up against these five core requirements.

1. Self-service for marketers

To be genuinely useful to marketers, a website must respond to their needs, but too many marketers are constrained by a slow back-end process. “When marketers can build and manage sites without relying heavily on developers, they can execute campaigns faster and more effectively,” Austin said. Unfortunately, as our survey of 500 marketing leaders reveals, roughly 80% of marketing leaders feel restricted in making even small changes to their site without dev help.

‍Headless CMSs offer flexibility and customization, but they come with a significant engineering burden because each connection and feature must be built, tested, and maintained. As a result, marketers become dependent on engineers for even the simplest of updates and experiences. 

‍DXPs are a tightly integrated bundle of services, and while they are accessible to marketers, it can be difficult or near-impossible to use them to create pages and sites that work in ways your team didn’t initially plan for. As a result, developers are necessary to build more custom web experiences.

2. A powerful front-end

Marketers should be focused on optimizing for the user journey, not fighting with frustrating software limitations. A powerful front-end is the client-facing side of a solution — the part that end-users interact with — and should be both accessible and power highly-custom experiences to be truly powerful. This presentation layer includes the entire user interface (UI), the visual design, and functionality that users can see and use. Examples include menus, buttons, forms, and content. 

‍Headless CMSs are highly flexible and customizable, but anything beyond the default configuration requires an extra round of engineering support. Even if the audience-facing output is beautiful, the backend is likely an amalgamation of inflexible text fields and checkboxes. As a result, it often makes building new web experiences quite time consuming.

‍DXPs provide comprehensive tools that enhance website experiences. This provides more robust support for things like analytics, personalization, digital asset management (DAM). The tradeoff is the heavy implementation burden and limited ability to build templates, requiring a nearly complete reliance on developers.  , but come with a steep learning curve — making them often too complex for marketers to use efficiently. 

3. Extensible

You’re likely going to want your CMS to integrate with the tools you currently or may use to track and optimize your business, such as analytics, eCommerce solutions, and a CRM. Austin explains that “a composable architecture allows teams to stay agile and adopt new technologies as they emerge.” 

Headless CMSs are highly composable, or able to interconnect and integrate with different systems. However, configuring these and maintaining these connections requires a dedicated team of developers. 

DXPs consist of a bundle of components and functionalities tightly integrated into a single, unified system. While they are technically extensible via APIs, each of these implementations is fully custom — which isn’t exactly practical for scale of repeatability.  

4. Multi-channel support

From ads to social posts to newsletters, your content needs to go far beyond your website and support the entire customer journey across touchpoints.  

Headless CMSs support strong omnichannel capabilities but require complex orchestration through APIs. 

DXPs are also able to support multichannel experience creation but require integrations and APIs to successfully execute them — making setup complex.

5. UI optimization

Enhancing their website’s user interface (UI) with features integrated into the building process, such as search engine optimization (SEO) and automated, proactive checks for accessibility, is a critical requirement for a powerful CMS. 

Headless CMS platforms offer limited tools by default for non-technical users, often requiring developer input to make technical improvements or integrate third-party tools for things like SEO and accessibility. 

DXPs typically include native features like SEO tooling, but they can be challenging to use or are limited in their coverage and flexibility. 

A next-gen CMS provide a balance of power and autonomy

Austin shared what he calls a “next-gen CMS” as the solution to delivering truly powerful web and content experiences.

A next-gen CMS is an advanced platform that surpasses traditional CMS platforms, integrating the best and most innovative technology like AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics. It offers a seamless user experience for both marketers and designers with a powerful front-end, enabling them to create bespoke frontend experiences autonomously and without engineering support.

How a next-gen CMS stacks up

When looking at the five core requirements for a powerful CMS, a next-gen CMS checks all of the boxes. 

1. Self-service for marketers: A next-gen CMS allows marketers to build and manage sites and pages with no technical intervention using modular elements, while still allowing customization through code when necessary.
2. Powerful front-end: It combines the best aspects of both by offering a user-friendly front end that supports visual template creation for localized and scaled content, along with customizable code for developers.
3. Extensible: It provides a composable architecture like a headless CMS, but makes it a lot easier to add or remove best-in-breed tools with simple configurations.
4. Multi-channel support: A next-gen CMS makes it easy to plug into a wide variety of channels with minimal engineering effort, ensuring reliable distribution across diverse platforms.
5. UI optimization: A next-gen CMS democratizes SEO, providing tools for non-technical users to optimize content effectively. Automated, proactive checks for accessibility and best practices are also integrated into the site build process, ensuring high standards from the outset. They also integrate well with tools to support personalization and analytics that are essential to optimizing user experiences.

With a next-gen CMS, marketers can move quickly and own more of the website. Designers can create engaging visual stories that are on-brand consistently and at scale. And developers, who are often drowning in constant requests from marketing, can now focus on the highest-impact projects. 

The future of CMS platforms

Reshaping the way you think about your CMS can catapult your team’s efficiency to new heights and help achieve all of your website goals. We encourage you to consider Austin’s framework and evaluate your CMS across these five key requirements — self-service, usability, extensibility, multi-channel support, and UI optimization. Doing so is a powerful exercise that can help you compare your business needs against your tech stack to ensure you have the tooling in place that you need to deliver on your goals. 

For teams who have significant developer resources in place and want to prioritize highly custom web experiences above all, a headless solution may be a good fit. And for those with ample engineers and are willing to trade speed to simplify and minimize the number of tools in their stack, a DXP may fulfill their needs. For marketing teams looking to prioritize usability, composability, and speed, a next-gen CMS is a great solution to explore further.

If you’d like to go deeper into how different CMS solutions stack up, watch our full webinar with Austin to his in-depth industry insights, and to learn more about next-gen solutions like Webflow’s visual, composable CMS, get more details here.

From the tens of thousands of freelancers and agencies who make a living through Webflow, to the companies like IDEO, Docusign, Orangetheory, and Dropbox who are using Webflow to elevate their business, drive revenue, and transform the way that they work  — we’ve been honored to be partners in each of your journeys. 

And now that we’re a decade in, we want to do even more.

We’re building a unified Website Experience Platform, otherwise known as WXP. With it, we’ll be taking the most important digital asset — the website — and creating an integrated and visual-first platform that allows you to operate at even faster speeds and higher efficiency.

In order to achieve that, we’ve been listening closely to you, our community and customers. Your feedback has been our north star, and we’re dedicated to releasing features that help you get the most out of Webflow, and be able to grow your careers and businesses — both on the web, and beyond.  

That’s why today, I, and other members of our leadership team came together to give our customers and community members a recap of the product investments and improvements we made in the first half of 2024, showcase new releases, and give a preview of what’s coming next to support our WXP vision.   

Here’s everything that we covered: 

• How we’re evolving our core platform to be more scalable to meet the needs of our users.
• How we’re continuing to evolve how teams of all shapes and sizes work to unlock more speed and control
• A look at how we’re bringing AI into Webflow from seamlessly personalizing  web experiences to improving your web design expertise as you build.
• And updates across the core platform, Apps on the Marketplace and our partner offerings.

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Now, let’s dive in deeper. 

Improving our design and build foundations  

Over the years, Webflow has been critical in delivering on-brand, content-driven experiences for our customers.  From empowering marketers to move with flexibility and agility, to ensuring developers have the tools they need to seamlessly integrate Webflow with their tech stack — to much more — customers like Fivetran and Vanta have consistently relied on Webflow to help them build differentiated marketing sites that convert.

A first class visual and composable CMS 

We’re committed to continuously improving our CMS to meet the evolving needs of our customers — and the needs of all the teams that bring their websites to life. 

For marketers that are always looking for better and faster ways to ship and iterate on site content, we’ve made the content editing experience in Webflow even more efficient and intuitive with CMS on-canvas editing. 

Now, all content contributors in Design or Edit mode can edit CMS content in full visual context and create new CMS pages without leaving the Designer.

And for developers needing to programmatically serve content in and out of Webflow — whether it’s to connect with best-in-class tools, support multi-channel needs, or create bespoke front-end experiences — we’re deeply invested in unlocking more flexibility and scale. 

As a step forward, we recently expanded our headless CMS APIs to include new /live endpoints and a sort/filter capability that will significantly improve operational efficiency when needing to retrieve or read CMS data. On top of this, we’ve also increased rate limits for select Enterprise customers and partners to 600 RPM all the way up to 1000 RPM.

‍

“The ability to edit dynamic content or spin up new CMS pages directly from the Designer makes it so much easier for all content contributors to see how content fits and flows on a page. The marketing team will be able to ship and iterate faster, and be better empowered to spin up new landing pages on their own!” 

-Laura Barker, Senior Creative Manager, Sojern 

‍

Finally, for users and teams that integrate Webflow with other tools, or need to bulk migrate data into or out of the CMS, we’ve made some small but impactful improvements in the last few months.

First, you can now restore site backups confidently without disrupting API connections keyed off of CMS, Ecommerce, Page, and Asset IDs. HTML code embeds in CMS rich text fields are also now supported when bringing content in and out of Webflow with CMS CSV import and export. 

Webflow’s visual and composable CMS — enhanced with these new releases -— is the ideal solution for modern enterprises that need to ship fast and create differentiated experiences for audiences around the world. 

Learn more about Webflow’s CMS here. 

Drive consistency and uplevel your brand with shareable Libraries 

Web development can be a rewarding and creative process, but to achieve brand consistency across multiple sites, designers often have to spend precious time copying and pasting, followed by manually reconfiguring names, properties, and bindings whenever there’s an update.

We know this creates a lack of speed and consistency, so we set out to change that. 

Starting next month, customers on Growth, Agency, and Enterprise Workspace plans, as well as Enterprise site plans, will be able to share components and variables across a Workspace by using the Libraries feature.

Workspace sharing significantly boosts speed by enabling the reusability of components, ensuring brand consistency, and enhancing the maintenance through a shared source of truth for easy updates. This approach is a cornerstone of a robust design system, making managing multiple sites more efficient and cohesive.

We’re excited to share that Workspace sharing via Libraries is in private beta right now. Keep an eye out for the launch, coming soon. 

Add flexibility to your design system with component slots

Adding space for flexibility within components allows for a much more resilient and adaptable design system.

Enter component slots. 

You can think of them as placeholders that don’t require you to specify the content until you have an appropriate need. This means that your team, or clients, are able to place and swap out other components within a slot while retaining the intended structure and style. And of course, components with Slots are effortlessly shareable across your Workspace. 

The added flexibility allows your team to move quickly by reusing existing components together instead of creating a new component for every edge case or update. This streamlines your workflow by removing the steps of unlinking or creating components from scratch.

Get ready—slots are rolling out next month, and we can’t wait to see how they elevate your design process. 

Empowering teams to build faster and safer 

Building differentiated web experiences that convert site visitors to customers is a team sport. From designers, to marketers, to developers — each team member needs to be empowered with the tools to do their best work, while still maintaining necessary guardrails that protect the website from issues and accidents.

An added layer of security and simplicity with site-specific access

Considering this— we recently released site-specific access to give Workspace Owners and Admins the ability to control which sites their teammates, guests, and clients have access to — directly from the Dashboard.

Soon you’ll also be able to set default site access settings for new sites created in a Workspace based on your preference for open or restricted access — making it even easier to manage larger teams in Webflow and give you peace of mind that the only people who need access to a site will have it. 

In the coming months we’re excited to continue to invest in roles, permissions, and guardrails that allow teams to build safely without sacrificing speed to market — so be sure to watch this space.

You can learn more about site-specific access here. 

Increase speed to market for web campaigns with page building

While guardrails to reduce the risk of issues on the site are crucial, speed to market is a non-negotiable for web teams aiming to capture the attention of their audience at the right time. 

In every team there are less-technical teammates and clients of all kinds – typically marketers – who constantly need new landing pages for events, products, campaigns, and so forth. The problem is that they have to rely on designers and developers for the majority of their requests which creates a bottleneck and can slow down their ability to deliver on campaigns quickly.

Enter Page Building — coming soon to Webflow.

Page Building will allow designers and developers to empower their marketing teammates or clients to be able to safely build brand-consistent landing pages on their own, using page templates and designer-approved building blocks. 

Marketers and clients will get a drag-and-drop experience where they won’t be able to break designs, and designers and developers will be able to maintain control over the designs and frameworks for the website but spend more time working on strategic projects and less time on simple landing page creation.

Page Building will be available in private beta in the coming months, and will GA later this year. 

Bringing the power of AI into your workstreams

At Webflow, we believe the power of AI is set to transform web development, and we’re committed to bringing it into your workflows in thoughtful and relevant ways.  

Today  we gave our customers and community a closer look at how AI is already — and will increasingly — power your site within Webflow. From giving you the ability to create personalized, engaging web experiences to helping you through the process of a build, and more, our team is hard at work building AI-powered features that will continue to uplevel your experience in Webflow. There’s more to come in the coming months, so stay tuned.

The power of website personalization and optimization — directly into your hands 

With our recent acquisition of Intellimize, we’re tackling the challenge of website optimization — and we’re doing it with AI. 

Intellimize, a Webflow company, unlocks the ability for teams to create personalized, engaging website experiences with A/B testing, personalization using rules, and landing page optimization. The platform also integrates with popular marketing tools like 6sense, Salesforce, and HubSpot — making it a game changer for anyone driving business metrics on their site. 

The foundation underneath it all is AI Optimize, our proprietary AI that delivers real, dynamic 1:1 personalization at scale — and the best way to maximize conversions.

AI Optimize is constantly learning, refining, and adjusting — so that with every change in visitor behavior, AI Optimize is able to adjust the personalization on the site to better fit the visitor — instantly. 

And that’s not all. AI provides seamless boosts to your workflows across the personalization and optimization journey.  Generative AI powers content creation — making it easier to test calls to action or create body copy for your site. And once your experiment is launched — you can lean on AI to find actionable insights in your data.   

Whether you’re a marketer driving leads for your organization, an ecommerce site that’s looking to increase sales — or an agency supporting clients in creating personalized web experiences — Webflow’s capabilities give you the superpowers to truly create a strategic, differentiated site that drives results. 

Our teams are working hard on integrating Intellimize natively in Webflow by the end of this year, so be sure to watch this space. 

To learn more about personalization and optimization on Webflow, click here. 

Introducing the Webflow Learning Assistant — powered by AI 

We’re also integrating AI directly into the Webflow platform with the idea that everyone on your team should be able to  build sites and experiences faster.

We’re kicking this initiative off with the Webflow Learning Assistant  — an AI powered chatbot inside the Webflow Designer that you can use to access information and unlock ideas when creating your site.

So, for those moments when you’re mid-build and need some assistance, or have a question that you can’t quite answer, or just need to learn Webflow faster — the Webflow Learning Assistant can give you what you need to keep building your site, growing your business, and getting you to where you need to go by pulling relevant Webflow University content. 

And even better, the Webflow Learning Assistant is available for everyone — so that for whatever your needs are, you’ll have answers.

Webflow Learning Assistant is available now to everyone in the Designer, or for enterprise customers, by request. 

What’s new in the Webflow Marketplace 

We haven’t been the only ones who’ve been busy — in 2024 alone the Webflow Community have contributed over 1200 new templates and 40 new Apps to the Webflow Marketplace — bringing even more power and functionality to the Webflow platform. 

Here’s some of our favorites that have launched recently: 

• Relume’s AI-powered site builder import that allows you to generate full sitemaps and wireframes in Relume and then import them as native elements into Webflow. 
• The LottieFiles App which lets you search 100,000+ Lottie animations and add them to your Webflow site. 
• Asset Bae which helps you streamline SEO tasks like bulk editing file names, writing AI text, and more. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the incredible Apps built by our community. Check out the Webflow Marketplace to see more. 

The bigger and better partner program — coming soon

And we’re not just upleveling the product. Since launching the partner program in 2017, tens of thousands of companies and organizations like OrangeTheory, Upwork, and Docusign have partnered with Webflow Experts to build transformative sites that elevate their presence online. 

But as the world changes — and freelancers and agencies push the limits of what’s possible with Webflow, the Webflow Experts program needs to evolve as well to support that. 

With this in mind, we announced today that we’re doing a complete overhaul of our Webflow Experts program — rolling out over the coming weeks and months. 

We’ve already launched some of the foundational pieces of the relaunch like improved application and certification, and brand new freelancer, agency, and global alliance pages —and now we’re looking forward to giving you more tools and resources to earn more as a Webflow Partner, and improve processes to help build your practice, reputation and client roster. 

We’ll also be investing in new partner enablement, enhancing the Marketplace, training, events, and more. 

There’s more to come, so be sure to follow us for updates. 

A “tiny but mighty” roundup 

Finally, in case you missed it — here’s a rollup of all the other great features and launches our team has been up to. 

• Figma to Webflow rem/em support for added power when syncing designs
• Pinned ruler ad crosshair so you can be sure elements are aligned
• Canvas scroll and outline speed improvements
• Custom code limit increase from 10,000 to 50,000
• Upgraded Style Panel layout controls 
• Support for `overflow: clip` and more `box-sizing` natively in the style panel
• Dynamic lightbox so you can bind CMS multi-image fields to your lightboxes
• Rich text improvements such as Nested Lists, Inline Code, Inline Code Block
• An updated bandwidth dashboard that gives better visibility into bandwidth usage and the ability to optimize performance by understanding the biggest drivers of usage by page
• A CMS asset WebP conversion to help decrease asset sizes where needed  
• Align-y to tune vertical alignment with inline and inline-block elements
• CSS Preview improvements
• Custom translation terminology and branching support in Localization
• Keyboard navigation improvements

To get the nitty gritty on what we released, check out our Updates page. 

Building the future of Webflow 

Our team has been so excited to get everything that we’ve been working on in the hands of you, our customers and community. And we’re just getting started. We’ll have more updates coming later in the summer, and at Webflow Conf in October — we can’t wait to see what you all build! 

Register for Webflow Conf 2024 here. 

No matter the size or duration, every project needs a plan to track its moving pieces — you must consider team members, resources, budgets, and timelines to complete the project successfully.

An implementation plan puts things into gear, helping you identify problems before they escalate and maximize your resources to deliver the right results.

What’s an implementation plan?

An implementation plan is a document that guides the strategic steps required to execute an initiative. It focuses on a project’s who, what, when, where, and how, and breaks larger initiatives into manageable tasks. You can also refer to your plan when assigning responsibilities to team members, setting timelines, allocating resources, and establishing mechanisms to monitor progress and address roadblocks.

Why every project should start with a strategic implementation plan

Whether for a short-term marketing campaign or an enterprise-scaling initiative, an implementation plan:

• Provides clarity — The plan should clearly define objectives and outline the steps to achieve them. It eliminates ambiguity by assigning tasks and ensuring everyone understands what their responsibilities are and how to approach them.
• Keeps everyone accountable — Openly detail task assignments, timelines, and deadlines. This transparency fosters accountability, where individual team members can take ownership of their roles and contribute to the project’s success.
• Improves collaboration — Whether sharing updates, discussing challenges, or engaging stakeholders, an implementation plan establishes a common reference point that aligns everyone.

The differences between project, implementation, and release plans

Project, implementation, and release plans are all crucial for successful project management, but each has a distinct purpose for different stages of the project’s life cycle.

• A project plan lays the foundation for a project, defining its scope, objectives, deliverables, and timelines. It also outlines the resources it requires and each team’s roles. Think of it as a blueprint — a high-level overview guiding the entire project from start to finish.
• An implementation plan also considers project scope and objectives but narrows in on execution and details specific actions based on the predetermined deliverables and timelines. In this phase, you break a larger project into smaller, more achievable items and manage resource allocation, timelines, and individual roles.
• A release plan is the final stage, where you release completed project deliverables to the intended audience — whether employees, new website visitors, or customers. This plan prioritizes testing and quality assurance according to stakeholder and audience expectations, ensuring a seamless transition from development to launch.

Consider a company building a new enterprise application. The project plan defines the goals and scope through key milestones like design, development, and testing. The implementation plan details each phase’s specifics and outlines individuals’ assigned tasks. And the release plan focuses on launching the product to an audience and teaching them how to use it — in this case, in-house employees.

Essential components of an effective implementation plan

For a well-written implementation plan that ensures you don’t overlook any potential opportunities or risks, you must include the following critical components in your document.

Project scope statement

Similar to a project plan’s high-level blueprint, an implementation begins with a scope statement that defines the project’s boundaries — what it will and won’t include. This part of the plan clarifies the objectives, deliverables, and success criteria, leaving room for flexibility and ensuring all parties have realistic expectations and the bandwidth to deliver.

For example, a website redesign’s scope statement would outline the specific pages to change (landing page, product pages), features to add (live chat support, responsive design), and any constraints, like budgets and deadlines.

Milestones, goals, and objectives

Milestones are checkpoints marking progress toward project goals, goals are your company’s overarching, long-term aims, and objectives are specific, measurable targets informing those goals, which then aim to meet the objectives. Together, they guide implementation and planning and help you track progress.

When redesigning a website, milestones might include completing wireframes and publishing a new homepage design. Increasing website traffic by 20% could be a goal, while a key objective may be faster page loading through content delivery networks (CDNs).

Resource allocation plan

Resource plans summarize the total means the project requires across all resource types. They specify elements like team member responsibilities and bandwidth, budget and resource allocations, and material needs.

In the website redesign scenario, the project manager responsible for overseeing the site’s overhaul would:

• Determine and assign the developers and UI/UX designers
• Establish funds for outsourcing design experts
• Acquire software licenses and hardware upgrades

Estimated implementation timeline

A timeline organizes tasks and their due dates, dividing the project into manageable phases and giving team members a certain period to complete them. Timelines help manage expectations and give you a realistic idea of the project’s completion.

For the web redesign, you may assign two weeks for wireframing and prototyping, two months for development, and another two weeks for A/B testing and final checks before launching it by the end of the third month.

4 steps to create an implementation plan

Regardless of project or company size, here are four tips to follow during the implementation process.

1. Back your strategy with data

With your project’s goals defined, form a research-backed execution strategy to achieve them. Gathering relevant data and analyzing market trends ensures each action item contributes to meaningful outcomes by aligning your implementation plan with broader goals.

For a marketing campaign with a new digital product launch, research might involve studying competitors and conducting customer surveys to understand what the target audience wants.

2. Identify risks for each execution phase

Now, identify potential risks to execution progress, such as resource limitations, technical challenges, and external factors like market volatility. Anticipating these obstacles early lets you mitigate their impact and complete tasks successfully.

Say you launch the new product in specific regions, like Canada and the U.S., and target certain demographic groups, like 21–35-year-olds with disposable income. Typical risks associated with this launch could include production delays, lack of time, or server issues impacting the implementation timeline. 

For example, network problems may cause your website to crash. A contingency plan that involves having third-party vendors on hand, like consulting IT experts to get your website up and running immediately, can reduce the waiting period. This proactive plan B means you can get back to implementing your plan more quickly.

3. Assign tasks and responsibilities

Split the project into smaller tasks and assign them based on skill set, experience, and availability. And establish secure communication channels to share updates where members can voice concerns and seek assistance.

Your project tasks might include creating marketing material like ads, launching social media campaigns, and coordinating with sales teams for product distribution. You can also assign a team leader to delegate tasks. 

4. Choose a project management tool

Suitable project management tools like Asana and ClickUp help you plan, track, and collaborate at all levels. You can assign and schedule tasks and communicate securely, promoting organization-wide transparency and accountability. 

Choose a tool tailored to your workflows and conduct training workshops to ensure all team members know how to use it to reduce the learning curve and maximize its benefits.

Maximize impact with Webflow

By following the above best practices, you can create an actionable implementation plan that turns project goals into tangible results. But your plan is only as effective as the sustainability of its outcomes. To craft functional, enduring sites, you need flexible tools that maintain your end product.

Webflow offers a user-friendly interface with scalability, customization, and migration options. Plus, marketers, editors, and designers alike can collaborate with edit mode — meaning everyone’s on the same page about scaling and maintenance changes.

Plan strategically with Webflow and grow your business today.

The sales landscape is constantly changing — it can look drastically different within a span of just five years. As consumers migrate online for purchasing and move away from brick-and-mortar stores, your sales management strategy must keep pace. To do so, you’ll need to embrace customer relationship management (CRM) tools, team performance analytics, and even artificial intelligence (AI) in your sales strategy, whether you’re running a startup or scaling an enterprise.

Learn the best practices and strategic approaches to keep up with shifting market demands, customer trends, and increasingly online sales experiences.

What’s sales management?

Sales management is the process of coordinating and overseeing sales department activities to meet or exceed sales targets. Through recruiting, training, and motivating personnel, managers create teams that can achieve a company’s revenue goals.

Sales operations also involve navigating intricate landscapes like online customer behavior, market trends, and evolving technologies. As such, sales management strategies extend beyond building a sales team to include data control. With the right tools and technologies, you can manage client relationship data and keep tabs on lead generation strategies.

Since sales management’s core function is to boost your bottom line, you might design strategies that maximize customer satisfaction or increase your market share. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat buyers, leading to a consistent revenue stream. And an increased market presence enhances brand visibility while revealing new opportunities to reach untapped audiences. So, as your brand becomes synonymous with quality and consumer satisfaction, it attracts more potential customers.

4 types of sales management

Here are a few common sales management types, each with its own unique characteristics, challenges, and specialized techniques. Determining the one that best aligns with your team will help you create more effective strategies.

1. B2B sales management

In a business-to-business (B2B) model, your company sells products or services to other businesses.

Unlike business-to-customer (B2C) sales, B2B interactions require thoroughly understanding complex organizational structures and decision-making processes. This is because you’re selling to an organization with multiple stakeholders instead of an individual buyer. Selling to businesses involves various departments, and it’s complicated by hierarchies that weigh each stakeholder’s decision and preset budget allocations. This means B2B sales usually have long cycles due to the complex decision-making process.

Businesses often seek long-term partnerships rather than one-time purchases. Due to these nuances, B2B sales management strategies should focus on building mutual trust and providing continued value through bespoke solutions.

Challenges in B2B management may include navigating lengthy sales cycles and building rapport. Effective communication is essential — it ensures that all stakeholders remain informed and engaged to reduce misunderstandings and objections that could derail agreements.

Some specialized B2B sales techniques include:

• Account-based marketing (ABM), which targets specific high-value accounts with personalized marketing messages and content to increase engagement with key decision-makers.
• Solution selling, which focuses on understanding the client’s pain points and offering valuable solutions through smooth negotiation processes. By removing friction, you set yourself up for successful outcomes and lasting relationships.

2. B2C sales management

B2C focuses on selling products or services directly to individual consumers.

Unlike B2B, B2C typically has shorter sales cycles, larger customer bases, and strategies that resonate with the particular buyer. This is because in B2C sales, individual consumers make the decision to buy something and don’t need to negotiate or get approval from multiple stakeholders. Direct interaction allows for quicker decision-making and a faster conversion process — resulting in shorter cycles.

And B2C businesses often target a broader audience of consumers to maximize reach and market presence. This results in a larger customer base.

B2C sales management faces unique challenges compared to B2B, like managing a diverse and large customer base and staying competitive in a crowded marketplace. As a result, B2C strategies emphasize understanding user needs. This helps you write compelling, personalized marketing messages that reach a large number of users — all while appearing to speak to each customer individually. Personalization demonstrates your brand’s interest in individuals, and users can reciprocate this loyalty by continuing to buy your products.

Understanding consumer preferences also fosters a stress-free purchasing experience. Reduced user friction prevents website visitors from abandoning their shopping carts because it’s too difficult to make a purchase. This lowers your bounce rate and leads to more purchases.

Specialized techniques in B2C management include:

• Personalized marketing, which leverages data on user preferences and behaviors to create individualized content like marketing messages and product offers.
• Omnichannel marketing, which provides a coherent and consistent shopping experience across various channels like your web shop, social media, and physical stores. This lets you meet customers wherever they are.

3. Enterprise sales management

Enterprise sales is a subset of B2B sales that focuses on selling high-value, complex solutions or services to large corporations.

As with B2B, enterprise sales tackle lengthy cycles due to complex decision-making processes and prioritize building long-term partnerships. Because enterprise sales target large organizations, these decisions involve more stakeholders, making cycles more complex than with small and medium-sized businesses.

A unique challenge is to deliver scalable solutions that fit your clients and grow with them. You need to understand the company you’re selling to (like in B2B sales) and grasp your client’s industry and its pain points. Enterprise sales strategies generally call for a consultative approach where you work closely with your client and tailor your solution to their needs.

You can use ABM and solution selling techniques as you would with B2B sales. Also consider building cross-functional teams within your organization to include individuals from various departments (like marketing, product development, and customer support) — this lets you deliver integrated solutions to swiftly meet client needs.

4. SaaS sales management

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) management is a subset of B2B sales that delivers software-based solutions to businesses on an online subscription basis.

Like B2B, SaaS sales also have long cycles that are usually complicated by the decision-making processes involved in adopting new software solutions. Integrating new technologies often means a business needs to adjust existing workflows and possibly hire personnel in the process.

SaaS sales management strategies focus on demonstrating the software’s value in resolving specific pain points and delivering measurable return on investment (ROI) for the client. By doing so, you can address and offset the immediate adoption pangs of migrating from a legacy system to a new tool.

Another unique challenge for SaaS sales is that solutions must be scalable, flexible, and customizable to meet the clients’ changing requirements as their businesses grow and evolve. Like enterprise sales management, SaaS strategies require a consultative approach. This may include offering personalized demos to clients, conducting in-depth needs assessments, and providing your team with ongoing support and training to ensure successful product implementation.

The sales management process: 4 essential steps

While your sales management process will differ based on the type of sales management your business needs, here are the primary steps most teams adopt.

1. Set goals

Establish clear and achievable objectives for the sales team, like revenue targets or market share growth. These are goalposts that keep your team on track as you implement your sales approach.

2. Create a strategy

Develop a sales management strategy that includes precise tactics for targeting specific market segments, implementing pricing strategies, and expanding product offerings. Your plan can also determine which tools you’ll introduce to your sales workflow.

Say you’ve set a goal to grow your market share by 15% over the next year. You might implement a new CRM tool that tracks data on customer interactions, preferences, and purchasing behavior in real time. This helps you identify trends and target potential leads more effectively. It also lets you tailor your sales approach to maximize conversion rates, ultimately growing your market share.

3. Enact your plan

Now, implement your strategy while overseeing and motivating the sales team. This involves assigning tasks and role responsibilities while providing continuous training and support.

4. Evaluate and report

After you’ve implemented your sales strategy, assess its efficacy. You can analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics like revenue, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction. Based on these results, determine if you need to adjust your strategy to reach your goal.

Let’s say you’re growing your market share. You might evaluate metrics like customer acquisition rates, market penetration, and competitive positioning to gauge your strategy’s effectiveness.

Sales management best practices

Effective sales management requires a combination of strategic planning, skillful execution, and continuous improvement. Here are some general best practices to ensure your strategy leads to success.

Identify your team’s strengths

Understanding each team member’s unique assets lets you assign tasks accordingly. This results in greater employee motivation and job satisfaction and encourages successful results.

Invest in training

Ongoing training and development programs keep your teams informed and equipped with the latest industry knowledge and techniques. Sales training sessions can cover a range of topics like product knowledge, customer relationship management, and negotiation skills. By providing regular learning opportunities, you empower your team to continuously improve performance.

Use the latest tools

Technology and tools can significantly enhance sales efficacy and efficiency by automating redundant tasks and highlighting useful customer insights that direct data-informed strategies. Consider the latest CRM software, data analytics tools, and automation technologies.

The benefits of using an advanced sales management system

Sales management’s role in your business’s success is to create a system that drives sales. But beyond focusing on the people aspect, you can use tools to flesh out a sales management system that complements the human touch. These tools might include cloud-based platforms like Salesforce and automation tools like HubSpot.

Here are four ways a robust sales management system can boost your ROI.

1. Better sales data consolidation

Solutions like Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, provide detailed customer insights.

Imagine having a comprehensive record of every customer interaction from initial contact to the latest purchase. This level of detail offers your team key insights into your customers, helping anticipate needs, tailor pitches, and build stronger relationships. A strong customer bond can translate to increased sales because satisfied and engaged customers are more likely to become loyal advocates — they drive repeat business and attract new customers through word-of-mouth referrals.

2. Automated workflows

Sales management tools can streamline workflows by automating repetitive tasks like data entry and lead follow-up. This frees up your team to focus on strategic, revenue-generating tasks that require personal efforts, such as building customer relationships and closing deals. Consider a tool like HubSpot, which automates email sequences and lead-nurturing processes.

3. Straightforward analytics and reporting

Sales management platforms like Zoho’s CRM tool provide comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities. This allows you to evaluate sales performance and identify improvement areas. By understanding historical data, current trends, and future projections, your team can make informed decisions to allocate resources effectively and align sales strategies with broader business objectives.

4. Improved interaction management

Experience better interaction management with sales system tools like Drift and Intercom. These tools let you systematically track every customer interaction — whether with new leads or repeat buyers — and understand their journey through the sales funnel.

Insights into your audience’s preferences, pain points, and communication history empower your team to tailor engagements based on user needs and behaviors. This can mean providing personalized website content, addressing inquiries, and nurturing leads effectively. It lets you guide leads through their customer-to-conversion journey.

Supercharge your sales game with Webflow

Sales management strategies rely on optimizing your sales team and providing a sturdy toolkit — and a strong web presence is one of the sharpest tools in the box.

Webflow is a complete visual web development platform for building stunning websites that convert. With our platform, tools, and resources, you can elevate your online presence, streamline customer interactions, and boost sales. Choose Webflow Enterprise for a dynamic, user-friendly website that aligns with your sales management goals.

Whether you’re in the early stages of your business or looking to strengthen your position in your industry, you might think spending a fortune on online advertisements is the only practical approach to drive traffic to your site.

But with the right mix of ad spending, digital marketing tools, and well-curated strategies, you can promote your website without solely relying on high-cost methods. Read on to discover how to craft a website promotion strategy that attracts visitors and convinces them to convert.

How to promote your website online: 10 methods

Here are 10 website promotion strategies to increase brand awareness and conversion rates.

1. Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves optimizing your website’s content and technical structure to improve its ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). When promoting your site, you should conduct both on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is everything on your website, including text, images, videos, meta descriptions, and the logical layout in which they appear. Best practices for on-page SEO include:

• Focusing on high-quality, relevant content that addresses your target audience’s needs.
• Ensuring technical elements, like website structure, metadata, and multimedia, allow search engines to crawl your site.
• Using responsive layouts and navigation elements to improve multi-device compatibility and user experiences.

Off-page SEO refers to behind-the-scenes activity, like who’s linking to your site, how authoritative it is, and the engagement it gets from readers. Here are a couple of off-page SEO improvement tips:

• Increase inbound links (links from external websites to yours) to boost your site’s domain authority and search rankings.
• Share links on social media platforms to direct organic search traffic to your site and improve its online presence.

For more complicated SEO techniques, like editing schema markups, updating sitemaps, and optimizing 301 redirects, you can use automated SEO tools without relying on developers or engineers.

2. Guest blogging

Guest blogging promotes your website by leveraging existing audiences of established platforms in your industry. You create and publish articles on external blogs, and this allows you to share your expertise while introducing your brand to a broader audience.

For example, a head of marketing at an email marketing platform company might write a guest post for a prominent digital marketing blog about the latest email personalization trends.

Successful guest blogging hinges on the quality of articles you contribute and the relationships you build with other companies. Each guest post should include links to your site, called backlinks — these drive traffic to your site while providing value to the publishing blog’s readers.

3. Content marketing

Content marketing goes beyond traditional blogging to embrace video production, podcasts, infographics, newsletters, and other content formats. To stand out, you must ensure content is attractive, relevant, and compelling enough to encourage people to click your calls to action (CTAs).

Conduct thorough keyword research to understand your audience’s pain points. You can use popular SEO tools to find queries related to your field or locality, and answering these questions in your content ensures the content is informative, persuasive, or entertaining.

For example, you might create a newsletter series explaining complex design concepts after identifying the most common questions in your area. That way, you establish your brand as a thought leader by consistently providing this valuable content.

4. Social media

Social media is one of the best free methods for promoting your website to a broad or targeted audience. Each platform has unique advantages and caters to different business needs, demographics, and psychographics.

Here’s a quick summary of factors to consider for the most popular ones:

• Facebook. With its vast user base, Facebook is ideal for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. It has a dedicated marketing space with ad targeting options, making it suitable for demographic and behavior-based campaigns.
• X (formerly Twitter). X thrives on real-time engagement and virality, making it ideal for B2C companies that want to create content around trending topics. While X is primarily text-based, you can create multimedia content and link to it on X.
• Instagram. Known for its visuals and short-form videos, Instagram appeals to a younger demographic, but any marketing team can use it for B2B purposes and show off a brand’s creative side.
• TikTok. TikTok is a short-form video platform popular with Gen Z and millennial audiences. You can create video content to show off your products and services — or work with TikTok influencers to build brand awareness and drive traffic to your site.
• Reddit. Before promoting your website on Reddit, its audience will expect you to join conversations on subreddits (specific interest forums). Actively participating in these niche communities and adding value to conversations builds your credibility.
• LinkedIn. The go-to platform for professionals and B2B marketing, LinkedIn allows you to establish thought leadership through articles, lengthy posts, and company updates. It’s ideal for networking and reaching decision-makers within various sectors.

When creating content, remember that each platform requires its own engagement and marketing strategies. Polls and live videos perform better on Instagram and TikTok, while text-based content suits Reddit and X.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing lets you directly communicate with your audience before and after your website launch. Here are a few advantages of this tactic:

• You can personalize emails and make them relevant to each recipient.
• You can measure email campaign performance through metrics like open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates.
• Email marketing is an accessible and cost-effective promotion strategy that offers a potentially high return on investment (ROI).

With these in mind, here are several email marketing strategies to consider when promoting your website:

• Prelaunch engagement. Build a buzz for your website launch event by connecting with potential visitors early. For example, share an email sign-up link across your social media platforms so people can join your email list without visiting the site.
• Launch promotions. Apart from link-sharing, you can implement creative email campaigns like a countdown to launch, sneak peeks, and exclusive prelaunch offers. This attracts interest and encourages people to engage with your site once it’s live.
• Follow up. Keep engaging with subscribers after the launch by sharing updates, blog posts, and special offers. You can also add email sign-ups into your site design to steadily grow leads while keeping your audience informed and involved.

6. Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a marketing tool for improving local visibility and attracting traffic to your website. This free and user-friendly service helps your business appear in relevant local searches, which is crucial if you rely on local footfall or want to increase awareness in your region.

With a Google Business Profile, you can attach your website to other information about your business, like opening hours, contact details, and location. This allows potential customers to find your company quickly and engage with your offering.

7. Quora

Quora is a popular question-and-answer (Q&A) site that often ranks highly in search results for common queries. Despite its reputation for occasionally being overrun with promotional content, you can use Quora to improve visibility and drive targeted traffic to your site by answering questions on Quora and linking back to your site.

Quora’s strong SEO presence means well-crafted answers can appear on Google’s first page, especially for long-tail keyword searches. This exposure introduces your brand to a broad audience actively looking for information. And by answering questions in your field, you show expertise and offer value to readers, helping you become a credible source.

You can also strategically link back to your website in your Quora answers. For example, you might reference a detailed blog post on your site that goes into greater depth about a question. That way, readers receive more value while you enjoy more traffic.

8. Online communities

Online communities, business listings, and media aggregators allow you to promote your website by tapping into niche audiences actively looking for specific content.

Websites like Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Designer News are platforms where you can introduce a broad audience to your tech, product, or design innovations. For example, posting on Product Hunt can help create a buzz around a new product or service. Similarly, Hacker News is ideal for sharing tech-related news.

Like Quora, you can use these forums and online directories to post backlinks to your site with the potential for high engagement if your content resonates with the platform’s community.

9. Pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a digital marketing strategy where you pay a fee each time someone clicks one of your ads. It’s a way to buy visits to your site instead of earning them organically.

Most PPC platforms, like Google Ads, use a bidding system — you bid on keywords relevant to your target audience, products, and services. When someone searches for a keyword that matches your keyword list, the PPC platform runs an action to determine how to display ads and their order.

PPC advertising is an excellent, cost-effective option for enterprises and startups alike. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, while most platforms allow you to set a budget cap to control spending. After hitting the budget cap, the platform prevents your ads from entering auction until the next budget period begins.

10. Giveaways

Giveaways can quickly generate excitement around your brand, attract new visitors, and encourage repeat actions. But remember that, as a marketing strategy, giveaways must deliver a positive ROI to be worthwhile. And make sure you lay out terms and conditions upfront to avoid issues or backlash later.

Be thoughtful about the prize you offer when designing your giveaway. You must make the entry cost equal to or less than the prize’s perceived value, or customers won’t take the time to enter. So, if you aim to build website traffic, you might offer a 5% discount on services, and participants must sign up for your newsletter on your site. With a couple of clicks, they get a chance at decent savings. But traffic coming from this contest greatly outweighs that 5% discount for the winner.

Since the goal is to encourage people to visit your website, it should be the hub of your giveaway where people go to find more details. And add engaging CTAs on the giveaway landing page to encourage visitors to explore more of your site.

The right platform to grow your website

Promoting your brand requires a well-balanced approach, with a mix of strategic ad spending and organic channels. Each traffic-driving technique noted above is crucial for attracting the right audience to your website, which you can create in Webflow.

With built-in SEO features and a dedicated content management system, Webflow lets you build, optimize, and maintain sites to promote your services and improve your online presence.

Hi everyone,

Ahead of our Webflow Together meeting later today, I wanted to share some very important news with you all. I’m passing the CEO baton to Linda Tong — our fearless COO and President for the last two years — to bring the full force of her deep experience and infectious energy to lead Webflow in this next chapter. 

To be clear, I’m not going anywhere! I’m taking on a new full-time role as Webflow’s Chief Innovation Officer, and will dive deep into what I do best — helping our teams build a world-class Website Experience Platform, exploring new product innovations, learning from our incredible customers and community, recruiting new folks to this amazing team, spreading the Webflow message externally, and partnering closely with our leadership team to build an enduring company. I’ll also continue as Chair of Webflow’s Board of Directors, which Linda formally joins this week as well.

You might ask – why Linda, and why now? 

For those of you who’ve had the privilege of working with her over the last few years and seeing her take on more and more responsibility across the company, Linda becoming our next CEO might feel entirely obvious. In fact, after her fiery and inspirational closing keynote speech at our team retreat in Quebec City just a few weeks ago, many of you pulled me aside privately and expressed how much you want her unquenchable desire to win together and her infectious energy to permeate throughout Webflow. And it’s so clear why that sentiment exists — because from day one, she has been my #1 partner in navigating scale, tackling unprecedented challenges, and chasing new opportunities. Linda deeply understands our team, our customers, our partners, our community, our business, and our culture. And she has led businesses many times larger than Webflow in the past, and has a proven track record of navigating the kinds of scale that are still ahead of us. She’s the perfect fit for this role. 

Why now? Webflow is at a pivotal moment in our journey. Thanks to your hard work — and our incredible community of passionate customers — we’ve reached milestones that the vast majority of startups only dream of. We serve hundreds of thousands of customers all over the world, have scaled our business to hundreds of millions in revenue, and we’ve created a platform that countless people rely on every day to make a living. But to achieve our grand ambitions, we need extraordinary collaboration, execution, and innovation. With Linda and I focusing on our strengths, I’m confident that we’ll be able to get there much faster. And with my pre-planned sabbatical already scheduled to start next week, it felt like there’s no better time than now for Linda to fully lean into her role as our new CEO.

So it’s with immense confidence and gratitude that I — along with resounding support from our board and co-founders — entrust Linda to foster and grow Webflow’s mission, team, culture, and business to new heights. And it’s with humility and optimism that I step into my new role, in close partnership with Linda and the rest of our leadership team, to make Webflow better than ever.

When I first had the idea for Webflow, I never imagined that a fledgling idea to empower more people to build for the web would turn into the powerhouse that it is today. What Sergie, Bryant, and I began to build in a grungy co-working space in Silicon Valley in 2012 has become something truly transformational. And it’s thanks to incredible people like you who have chosen to take a bet on Webflow and bring so much of your energy and dedication to our mission of bringing development superpowers to everyone.

Webflow is already extraordinary, and in many ways we’re just getting started. I’m so proud of how far we’ve come and I can’t wait to see this new chapter unfold. With Linda now at the helm — along with hundreds of the smartest and hardest working teammates that I’ve ever met all across this company — I know that nothing can stop us from realizing our full potential. Together, we’re unstoppable!

From the bottom of my heart, thank you all for trusting me to be Webflow’s CEO for well over a decade. I deeply love this company and our mission, and it’s out of that love that comes a very heartfelt request: I’m asking each of you to fully rally behind Linda and give her tons of support as she steps into this tremendously important role.

And Linda — I can’t ever thank you enough for everything you do for Webflow. Thank you for sharing my love for our mission, our team, and our customers. For being such an incredible partner and friend. And for your passion and courage to lead Webflow in this next chapter. I truly can’t wait to keep building this special company side by side with you. 

With immense optimism and gratitude,

Vlad

Email campaigns are a primary marketing technique used to communicate with potential and current customers. Successful campaigns keep active customers interested, reengage those who’ve stepped away from a brand, and bring in new leads.

An email’s open rate (how many people opened the message) is one of a handful of metrics marketers use to gauge campaign success. Understanding where this rate should be — and how to improve it — means you can make the most of these messages.

The impact of email open rates

When your email open rate trends upward, you’re gaining traction with your target audience and generating leads. If your rate declines, something isn’t resonating with consumers, and they’re losing interest. These trends give you vital clues about which strategies are working and which need rethinking.

Say you A/B test an email advertising an update to your time-tracking software. The first iteration includes a compelling subject line about exciting new features, plus brief preview text teasing the software’s retooled functionalities. The second version’s subject line is vaguer, and the preview text doesn’t mention new features. Instead, recipients must open the email to learn about the software’s updated value. If your open rate is higher for the first version than the second, you might rework subject lines and preview text across all email campaigns for increased engagement.

What’s a good email open rate?

According to Mailchimp, the average email open rate is 30–35%. Some industries, like sports and nonprofits, enjoy a higher average open rate of around 40%, but most sit near the 30% mark. Religious emails have the highest average rate (at 44%), and emails about electronics have the lowest (27%).

Here are some average email open rates across industries and niches:

• Religion: 44%
• Sports: 42%
• Arts: 42%
• Nonprofit: 40%
• Software and web apps: 28%
• Vitamin supplements: 27%
• Computers and electronics: 27%

How to calculate your email open rate

The platform hosting your email campaigns should have an open rate metric. For instance, in HubSpot, you’d click on the specific email to open the performance tab and see your open rate.

Here’s a formula to calculate the metric yourself:

Emails opened / (Emails sent – Bounces) x 100 = Open rate

First, subtract bounced emails from the total number of emails sent. You should try to eliminate bounces, but for now, just remove them so they don’t interfere with your calculation. Then, divide the number of emails opened by the total. Multiply the result by 100 to convert it to a percentage, and you have your open rate.

So, if you sent 1,000 emails and 40 bounced while 300 were opened, your calculation would look like this:

300 / (1,000 – 40) x 100 = 31.25%

How to use your email open rate

Your open rate provides valuable context about your campaigns’ successes and failures, as do unsubscribe and click-through rates. These three figures paint a detailed picture of how your audience receives your email marketing, and you’ll need all three to make data-driven decisions about future email marketing campaigns.

For example, if you have a 25% email open rate but only a 1% click-through rate, you know your email’s copy is bringing people in, but the call to action (CTA) isn’t convincing them to click through. Likewise, you know you’ve done something wrong if you have a 10% open rate and 1% unsubscribe rate. In that situation, only one in 10 people opened your email, and one in 10 of those did it to leave your mailing list entirely.

Observe the relationship between your open rate and other marketing metrics long enough, and you’ll notice patterns. You might discover that some email subject lines did well for getting people to open emails in one campaign, and a CTA got them to click through in another. With that information available, you’ll know how to design an email campaign that combines those two elements into one more successful attempt.

4 tips for increasing your email open rates

Your emails are just one of multiple touchpoints with your audience, but they’re vital to your brand’s success. Improving email engagement metrics translates to increased brand awareness because these metrics measure how many customers you’re reaching — and how many are engaging.

With that in mind, here are four tips for improving email open rates.

1. Craft compelling subject lines

An effective subject line is eye-catching and enticing without appearing spammy. Here are a few good rules to follow to increase opens:

• Include no more than two exclamation points
• Use sentence case
• Hint at something interesting to discover in the email
• Mention new features
• Use 30–50 characters

Here’s an example that puts these rules to use: “An exciting update is coming to your device!”

2. Fine-tune preview text

The preview text follows after the email subject line to give the reader a peek into the email’s content. Strong copy further entices the user to open your email.

Preview text should follow many of the same rules as your subject line but should be 50–90 characters long. For example, using the previous subject line example, a well-crafted bit of preview text might be: “Learn how these changes will affect how you use your device.”

3. Segment your audience and personalize content

More than ever before, personalized content is paramount in email marketing. Customers expect a touch of personalization in every interaction with brands, so you’ll need to meet that expectation to get your foot in the door. Fortunately, there are a couple straightforward ways to do this:

• Use variables that are replaced with users’ names, locations, and products
• Create separate versions of emails based on the products users own or how long they’ve been on your mailing list

4. Refine your email list

Maximizing email open rates starts with ensuring you have a quality mailing list. You want to contact people interested in your content, not send emails to those who always ignore them. Refining your email list ensures you’re reaching out to interested customers and keeping your costs low.

It might seem counterintuitive, but unsubscribes can help. Users who unsubscribe from your email list will no longer decrease your open rate. Don’t encourage readers to unsubscribe, but place a visible link in your email that lets them do so. Readers who want to unsubscribe will use it, and they’ll remember how convenient you made the experience for them.

Streamline your email marketing with Webflow

Boosting your email open rate requires a strategic email marketing campaign that encourages clicks, engages repeat customers, and generates quality leads. And the right email integration tools support campaign success.

Webflow integrates with email and marketing automation apps like Campaigner, which lets marketers and website owners engage with their audience by directly syncing customer contact information to their Webflow forms. You can also organize new email lists, customize message recipients, and filter out inauthentic contact information.

Discover other Webflow app integrations to automate and enhance your marketing efforts.

Data is a vital resource that helps you understand your customers, but it’s often useless without a strategy to refine it into insightful conclusions. That’s why data manipulation is an essential step in the data pipeline. It lets you transform information, categorize it into useful groups, and perform calculations that derive meaning from it.

To manipulate data like an expert analyst, learn about the different types of manipulation, how they differ from modification, and some best practices to get started. With this information and some helpful data manipulation examples to learn from, you’ll be better prepared to handle data ethically and present it intuitively for any audience. 

What’s data manipulation?

Data manipulation occurs when administrators and analysts maintain databases and extract valuable insights from them. These manipulations merge databases to surface correlations or add additional context to data points, revealing new insights.

Here are three typical ways analysts manipulate data:

• Data mapping — Merging sources to prepare them for data integration into a target application like a CRM.
• Data aggregation — Collecting values from many databases to create a comprehensive dataset serving a particular purpose.
• Data enrichment — Adding new fields that separate or combine values to a database to reveal additional insights.

What’s the difference between data manipulation and data modification?

These terms are two sides of a coin that represents what data professionals do. Here’s what they mean in the context of database management:

• Data manipulation is a collection of tactics analysts use to derive conclusions from data. Manipulation includes all the transformations that combine data points, such as writing a formula that adds values together or plotting them to determine a trend. Manipulation doesn’t change the values. It simply uses them to discover insights.
• Data modification involves changing values in the database itself. This process includes validating data, deleting erroneous entries, and updating values to incorporate changes. These modifications are necessary to clean a database and maintain its accuracy.

How does data manipulation work?

When data professionals need to analyze metrics or create reports, they pull information from a database, perform the necessary calculations, and output results. They do this with data manipulation languages (DML), the most common of which is sequenced query language (SQL). Alternatively, you can use data visualization tools like Infogram and ChartBlocks to perform these manipulations without writing SQL.

Regardless, the first thing you need is structured data, preferably organized into spreadsheets. These spreadsheets should have clearly labeled columns and rows that enable you to query for specific cells.

When your database is ready, you can use the column and row names to pull from it. For example, in SQL, you can write a SELECT statement to pull a specific group of data points:

SELECT column3, column5

FROM customer_records;

Now that you’ve identified the values you want, you can perform calculations, such as adding the values of column3 and column5 or averaging the total of each column. You can complete these calculations with SQL or in the tool of your choice — the output is the same.

Types of data manipulation

You can manipulate data in many ways using SQL functions and some basic math, but there are critical differences based on the task you’re completing. Analysts perform the following types of data manipulation in their day-to-day activities. 

Filtering

Filtering involves refining your database to surface particular results, such as customers who’ve purchased in the last month or products that haven’t sold this quarter. You can save these filters for future use, calling upon them when you need to perform calculations or generate reports.

Sorting

Sorting involves organizing your database to make it more functional. This process includes categorizing, alphabetizing, or surfacing results with specific values. Typically, sorting categorizes email recipients by their email provider or organizes products by color, shape, or size. 

Aggregation

Aggregation gathers data points from different sources for evaluation. It’s often an end goal but also a necessary step in many analysis projects that need to pull from disparate sources. For example, when developers need to determine the stability of their software, they might aggregate crash logs from databases for each operating system.

Calculations

Calculations mathematically draw conclusions from data. Sometimes, they have a numerical output, while other situations call for a graph illustrating the relationship between values. 

A typical application is in profit and loss reports, where analysts add and subtract numerous factors from one another to evaluate how profitable a business has been. The result is generally expressed numerically. But if you wanted to determine the relationship between price and profitability, your calculation might result in a graph representing the correlation between the two.

6 best practices for data manipulation

It’s easy to get overwhelmed while extracting, evaluating, and sorting data, especially when working with thousands of data points across a dozen sources. Here are six best practices to help you stay organized.

1. Optimize for understanding

Begin every data project with a thorough review of your database to understand its sources, data points, and structure. You don’t want to spend hours on a project before discovering you made an incorrect assumption about which fields or sources your database relies on, especially when mapping sources and fields together that have similar names.

2. Keep data clean

Cleanliness refers to accuracy and completeness. Always ensure your data is free of errors, typos, and empty values before manipulating it so your results are accurate every time.

3. Handle data ethically

Follow regulations regarding the retention and use of data to keep your company safe from legal trouble. This process includes scrubbing personally identifiable information (PII), removing possibilities for bias, and accurately tracking when you can delete a piece of data.

4. Use intuitive visuals

Color codes and shapes are helpful visual indicators that make your data easier to understand at a glance. These practices reduce the likelihood of errors; because this organization system creates a more intuitive experience, errors are more visually apparent.

5. Leverage automation

Wherever possible, automate steps in your manipulations to reduce the manual workload and overall process time. Use formulas that automatically update as you sort spreadsheets and rely on templates that format sources into consistent structures — without any manual effort.

6. Write documentation

Keep a living document as you manipulate data. This practice helps you draft formulas and explain their functions, track sources and provide links to them, and establish a process you can follow again later.

Examples of data manipulation

Here are a few examples of how data manipulation helps companies quantify results and surface valuable insights to make data-driven decisions.

Profit and loss reports

Most enterprises keep detailed records of expenses (like labor costs and equipment) and revenue (like funds coming in from sales versus subscriptions). To balance these figures, accountants input data into detailed spreadsheets that use pre-configured formulae to perform calculations. Or, they might use an AI-powered data management system like Tableau or Power BI to complete this work.

Lead generation

Marketing teams accumulate a generous amount of customer data, ranging from demographic details to purchase history. Marketers analyze this data using tools like Salesforce and HubSpot to identify distinct customer segments. They then tailor campaigns to these segments, optimizing message relevance and timing to improve lead generation efforts.

Understanding behavioral data

Online shopping businesses rely on many minor data points to understand user behavior. This includes clicks, purchases, and time spent on a page. Through sorting and aggregating common results, analysts surface similarities in these points. Similarities help businesses create user personas, such as early adopters or methodical shoppers. These personas help identify how a target market reacts to changes in site design.

Grow your business with data-driven design

The best decisions are backed by accurate and organized data — and Webflow helps you glean these insights with integrations like Nocodelytics and Google Analytics for collecting and analyzing web traffic data. When you’re ready to take your data analysis strategies to the next level, check out Webflow’s Apps marketplace to find the right tools or watch our free webinar on unifying data and design.

But instead of penning novels, they create any array of resources — blog posts, ebooks, microsites, whitepapers, videos, webinars, podcasts, and the like — to engage and educate your target audience. 

Since content marketing is about building relationships and trust — rather than direct sales — it’s a long game. And that means it can be easy to overlook the immediate, urgent impact that content marketers can have on your organization’s growth and revenue. 

Especially when your content marketers’ impact is undermined by an all-too-familiar challenge: a lack of autonomy and control over your content. So, let’s unpack the role content marketers play in driving growth, why autonomy is so crucial, and the tools they need to succeed. 

Content marketers are crucial for growing the business

Throughout the buying journey, content marketers play a pivotal role in helping your audience get to know and learn to trust your brand. They work with demand gen marketers to attract leads, nurture prospects with engaging and educational campaigns, lay the groundwork for productive sales conversations, and optimize content for search engines, and drive retention and brand loyalty. 

And that role is becoming more important. As buying journeys become more fragmented and independent, 76% of enterprise marketers report an increased reliance on content marketing within their organizations. 

Especially with the advent of AI, today’s content marketers are under intense pressure to keep up with ever-increasing demands. They’re expected to publish fresh content quickly, create personalized and dynamic digital experiences, generate organic traffic, drive greater ROI from content, and keep existing content up-to-date and visible across channels. 

But too many content marketers lack the autonomy needed to get these important jobs done. 

Autonomy is vital to driving growth — but a constant challenge

Even the most creative and productive content marketer will be hamstrung by a lack of autonomy, especially around the company website. When content teams have to rely on developers, IT, or outsourced teams to create new pages or make changes to the website, their performance will suffer. 

Unfortunately, this is a common scenario — many marketing teams regularly experience roadblocks around creating, publishing, and managing web content. According to our 2024 State of the Website report, 81% of marketing teams say website ownership is a persistent challenge. And 35% of companies report needing two weeks or more to make simple copy edits to their website.

These mind-boggling bottlenecks typically occur because the company’s website is hard-coded or relies on complex databases. In both cases, content marketers have to work with developers or outsourced support to create even simple web experiences or make meaningful changes. 

But regardless of the underlying reason, when development cycles or external teams have to be involved to update the website, content marketers’ performance plummets in three important ways:

• Speed: It takes them longer to create and publish content
• Creativity: They often have to simplify their creative ideas in order to meet development timelines or requirements
• Flexibility: They struggle to be proactive and agile in response to timely opportunities or market demands, such as adding a new banner or landing page

This lack of autonomy can feel incredibly frustrating for talented content marketers, who know their work is suffering because of these technical and procedural limitations. And for most, it’s beyond their control, since marketing leaders further up the chain are typically responsible for decision-making around the tech stack. 

Organizations who want to retain and empower good content marketers need to understand this need for autonomy — and find a better way to equip their teams to do their best work.

How a visual-first, composable CMS keeps content marketers in control of content

This is where a visual, composable CMS can make all the difference. A robust, visual CMS empowers designers and marketers to quickly ship engaging content experiences using a visual editing interface, and gives developers the power of flexible APIs to build custom, front-end web experiences as needed. 

Content marketers — along with the designers and writers they work with — can use these visual-first platforms to build new layouts and styles, create or edit content, and publish straight to the web or share production-ready code. They no longer need to hand off wireframes or diagrams to developers, submit tickets for simple copy changes, or spend their budgets on outsourced technical support. Likewise, developers can focus their precious time on complex, technical initiatives. 

In other words, a visual, composable CMS allows your content team to stay in control of their content. This autonomy helps content marketers create dynamic, content-driven experiences that fuel business growth, fast. Additionally, they can create more unique and memorable experiences, as well as have the agility to make the most of time-sensitive opportunities. 

Let’s dig deeper by following the golden rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell. Here’s how real-life content teams are delivering on their business goals with a visual CMS. 

Smaller Earth Group achieves localization at scale

Cultural exchange organizers Smaller Earth Group originally relied on a custom hard coded website — but as the organization grew to operate across six brands in more than 17 countries, their marketing team needed the ability to localize and refresh content easily. 

After switching to Webflow Enterprise, Smaller Earth’s content marketers were able to:

• Launch 11 locales in two months
• Create a Spanish-language site in three hours (thanks to AI machine translation)
• Save $150k+ on additional developer hires

“Webflow allows us to scale much quicker and put control in the hands of our marketing team,” said Dean Maddocks, Smaller Earth’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Fivetran quadruples content production

When data solution Fivetran launched in 2012, the company’s website was custom-coded and required engineers to build or edit pages — undercutting the marketing team’s agility and efficiency. As the organization entered a hyper-growth stage, they needed a more flexible and scalable approach to executing demand generation programs. 

Once they made the switch to a visual-first CMS, Fivetran’s content marketers drove results like: 

• 98% increase in speed-to-market for content assets
• 4x production increase of SEO articles
• 130+ new web pages launched in one year

“Our ability to refine and scale our demand gen programs was a game changer. With Webflow’s CMS, we were able to put systems in place that improved efficiency, while making our campaigns more performant,” said Cat Origitano, Fivetran’s VP of Product & Portfolio Marketing. 

NCR sees 3x faster time to launch

For years, web development at enterprise tech provider NCR involved disjointed processes between designers and developers working in a cumbersome digital experience platform (DXP). But after using Webflow as a temporary stopgap to create one-off landing pages, the team upgraded to Webflow Enterprise and to build stunning web experiences powered by the visual-first CMS. 

Since then, NCR content marketers have achieved:  

• 3x faster time to launch
• 50% fewer people needed for content production
• 10x cost savings in agency fees

“Upgrading to Webflow Enterprise gave us the peace of mind and power to scale and deliver new web experiences rapidly,” said Dan Dawson, NCR’s Sr. Manager of Digital Properties.

Give your content marketers the autonomy they deserve

The moral of the story: giving your content marketers autonomy makes a huge impact on your business. 

They can increase reach by publishing content at scale that speaks to your prospects and customers at every stage of the buying journey. They can drive growth by quickly responding to urgent needs. And they can improve engagement by flexing their creative muscles — without custom coded experiences restricting ability to scale their output or bring their best ideas to life. 

To learn more about how our visual-first, composable CMS can supercharge how your teams build for the web, get in touch with our team today.

This includes everyone from a solopreneur building their agency, to a Fortune 500 marketing team shipping to millions of people, and everyone in between. We plan to achieve this in multiple ways, but one very important method is to expand the capabilities of our App ecosystem. That’s why in August of 2023 we launched our new developer platform to enable our community to build Apps that can be used by every Webflow customer. 

One piece of our developer platform is our Designer APIs that power Designer Extension Apps. Designer APIs allow developers to directly interact with the Webflow canvas by managing elements, styles, page metadata, and more. These APIs need to be exposed in a secure way, while allowing developers to feel the same power as our Designer. To bring this idea to reality, we needed to come up with a way to concisely and powerfully allow developers to interact with the internal logic of our frontend architecture — the Webflow Designer.

Seamless App integration

To ensure we maintain a secure connection between the client (a third-party developer’s App) and the host (the Webflow Designer), we needed a way for developers to build an App in their IDE of choice but launch it in the Designer with access to all APIs. When thinking of a frontend SDK, typically developers would install it via npm or reference a JavaScript bundle via CDN that exposes various global methods. This works great for some use cases, but we wanted the ability to immediately ship new APIs or bug fixes without needing to publish a new npm package and forcing developers to install it. We landed on an architecture to securely serve Apps that have all of the latest and greatest Designer APIs available immediately as they are shipped. It works like this:

• Build: A developer builds their App as a single page application, bringing along their choice of technology (React, Vue, JavaScript, etc.)
• Bundle: We published a CLI tool to allow developers to run a single command to bundle their App and upload it to Webflow. There’s also a command that can be used when developing an App on localhost.
• Launch: Apps in the Designer are injected into an iframe. Before their entry point (index.html) is rendered, we first inject our own Designer API JavaScript bundle into the head of their HTML. This exposes all of the Designer APIs to the App and allows the latest version of each API to be available as soon as it launches.
• Secure: The App is hosted on a separate domain from the Webflow Designer to help mitigate cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Additionally, we have set up a content security policy to ensure the App is only loaded where we expect.

App ⇔ Webflow communication

Once an App is launched and we inject our JavaScript bundle into it, we need a way to communicate between the iframe (the App) and the host (the Webflow Designer). For this, we use window.postMessage (MDN docs) along with an internal JSON-RPC library to send JSON between the two sources. We need to ensure the payload sent from the App is valid, so we have an intermediary layer that validates the JSON payload. Here’s an example of what happens when you set the title of a page using page.setTitle():

Processing the request

The central logic of Designer APIs lives within the Webflow Designer codebase, referred to as the “host”. Internally, we use a Flux architecture to manage state across the entire application. Therefore many of the Designer APIs are augmenting state or dispatching a Flux action. A high-level example of how we process a request would be this example below for updating the title of a page:

// logic in the "host" (Webflow Designer codebase)

designerApiResponder(setPageTitle, (state, payload) => {

  const {pageId, title} = payload;

  const page = state.PagesStore.getById(pageId);

  if (!page) return {status:'Error', value: 'ResourceMissing'};

  const updatedState = {

    ...state,

    PagesStore: updatePageTitle(pageId, title),

  };

  return [

    {status: 'Success', value: null},

    updatedState

  ];

});

The above code can be broken down into these components:

• We set up a “responder” that listens for the setPageTitle API to be executed. 
• Once the API has been executed (and we have already validated the payload), we get the page by id from the PagesStore.
  • If we don’t find the page, we return an error response that the client handles.
• We then merge in the updated state to the PagesStore.
  • Internally we are listening for state updates and syncing data to the server if changes are detected.
• Finally, we return a tuple (an array with two items).
  • The first item in the array is the response we want to return to the client. In the above example, we return null for this API.
  • The second item is the updated state. We have a Flux reducer that grabs this second array item and merges it with the primary state of the Webflow Designer.

The host handles both fetching and updating state, depending on the API being executed. Internally we have a queue of requests to ensure we keep track of the successes and failures for each API so that we can return the appropriate response for the executed API. The host responds with a status as well as the response data so that the client knows if we should throw an exception or return the response. Each API has a defined response (we publish some TypeScript types to help with this). If the response is an error, we have a list of possible error “causes” that a developer can read to determine what went wrong. Here’s an example of handling an error:

try {

  const style = await webflow.createStyle('Heading');

  await style.setProperty('someIncorrectProp', '10px');

} catch (error) {

  const tag = error.cause.tag;

  const message = error.message;

  if (tag === 'InvalidStyleProperty') {

    alert('Invalid style property used');

  }

  console.log(message);

}

We’re just getting started

Apps throughout the Webflow ecosystem grow stronger and more impressive by using Designer APIs. We continue to expand the capabilities of Designer APIs and strive to bring much of the power of the Designer into the hands of developers. Since launching our APIs, developers have created powerful Apps that have increased the productivity of their users and made previously complex tasks easier. There are Apps on the marketplace that bring the power of AI into the Webflow Designer, help build complex SVGs by dragging and dropping a file, and so much more.  

We keep developer experience, performance, and security top of mind as we iterate. We believe that by enabling developers to create new and effective Apps, we’re bringing development superpowers to everyone. Stay tuned for part two of this series where we dive into optimizing the performance of various Designer APIs and how we’re working to make the experience faster and easier to use for developers.

From a marketing and branding perspective, your domain is the linchpin that ties your brand and offering together. It’s the hub that customers head to to make purchases, access subscriptions, and check orders. And without a thoughtful domain management system, it’s also a potential cybersecurity weak spot.

Thankfully, cybersecurity experts have developed best practices for domain management to safeguard your domain. With precise configuration and an intelligent strategy, you can prevent typical impersonation attacks and avoid service interruptions.

Why domain management is so critical

Domain management involves safeguarding your company’s online spaces. When you don’t manage domains well, scammers might copy your site and create one that looks nearly the same but with a slightly tweaked domain. This tricks customers into thinking they’re on your site, leading them to give away personal info like passwords and credit card numbers.

Say a scammer sets up BestTechs.com to imitate a popular store called BestTech.com, with a site design that mimics the original. Unsuspecting customers might purchase items from the fake site and give away their payment details in the process. When these customers realize something’s amiss, they’ll likely call on the real BestTech to complain, which can harm the brand’s reputation.

Having a strong domain management strategy means you’re ready to deal with these situations. You can act fast to take down fake sites and support affected customers to reinforce your image as a secure and reliable company.

How domain protection works

Your domain is the web address your brand uses for its website, and it’s often just your brand name.

Basic domain protection typically involves two things:

• Reserving other domain names scammers could use to imitate your site
• Configuring your domain security to reduce vulnerabilities

When you register your domain with a registrar like HostGator or Web.com, they provide domain name system (DNS) options that enable you to reserve more domain names and configure security options. That’s where you’ll do the bulk of your domain management.

Here are a few security features you’ll usually interact with when managing your domain:

• Domain locking. When your domain is locked, no one can transfer ownership — not even you. If someone hacks your account, they could still change a few options but can’t adjust the domain owner.
• Domain name system security extensions (DNSSEC). Security protocols like DNSSEC add a step to the DNS lookup procedure that authenticates digital signatures to prevent spoofing and cache poisoning.
• Two-factor authentication (2FA). Adding 2FA to your login ensures hackers can’t access your domain management account even if they learn your password. Just remember to save your backup codes so you don’t lock yourself out.

7 domain management best practices

Cybersecurity has never been more important with scammers constantly finding clever ways to break into systems. Luckily, you can protect yourself with a few smart steps. Although no method is foolproof, these best practices can stop the most common tricks.

1. Unify your domains

If your company already has a collection of domains, your first step is to unify them under one top-level domain name. There are two ways to do this:

• Place all your content into a single site. For example, Zoho offers many different services that all fall into directories under one top-level domain name, like Zoho.com/enterprise and Zoho.com/crm.
• Select similar domain names. For example, Virgin oversees various brands that all have their own domains. Each one consists of the word “Virgin” followed by the brand name, like VirginGalactic.com and VirginGames.com.

2. Establish domain naming conventions

Define naming conventions for how your domain and directory names are structured. Say your company name is Exemplify and you have a few different business units. You’d establish a similar syntax for their domain names, like exemplify-enterprise.org.

If your sites follow the conventions consistently, customers know to be suspicious if they see Exemplify_Enterprise.org because it doesn’t match the pattern. The same principle applies to directory names like exemplify.org/enterprise-edition.

3. Register diverse variations

After establishing naming conventions, consider all the ways those conventions could be slightly tweaked. Then, register those variations as well.

Here are a couple common variations:

• Misspellings. Domain registration is precise, so even a slight misspelling can land a user on the wrong site. NameHero.com, for example, also registered NamHero.com to ensure people find the right site.
• Different punctuation. Register domain names that use hyphens where you don’t and vice versa, such as Virgin-Galactic.com instead of VirginGalactic.com or Example.us.com instead of Example-us.com.

4. Enhance domain security protocols

In your DNS security options, enable 2FA and lock changes wherever possible. If a hacker manages to access your domain management profile, they’ll be prevented from wreaking havoc on your settings or unregistering domains they want to hijack.

5. Trademark your domain name

Trademarking your brand name — and its domain name — is an excellent way to protect against imitators. If you don’t have a trademark, negotiate with the person imitating your domain to purchase it from them. And if you have a trademark, you can make a legal case that the domain name they’re sitting on (called cybersquatting) represents copyright infringement.

6. Select the best domain provider

Excellent domain registrars (like IONOS and DreamHost) let you check for similar domain names and configure your domain for maximum security. It’s important not to cut corners here. The security of your domain affects more than how people view your brand. For example, if your site stores company data, weak security could expose this sensitive information to hackers.

Think about a store with a weak lock on the door — it’s an easy target for theft. Similarly, if your domain isn’t secure, it’s like leaving the door open for cyber thieves to sneak in and steal customer data.

7. Opt into auto-renewal

If you don’t renew your domain name on time, it becomes available again for others to register. Setting up auto-renewal keeps your domain secure and continuously registered under your name, preventing cybersquatters from grabbing it.

The most critical domain security risks

While hackers continuously find new ways to steal sensitive data, these are some of the most common strategies to watch out for.

Phishing

Phishing sites closely resemble a reputable site so customers are none the wiser. Scammers usually select a domain name similar to another site, such as ExampleDomain.com instead of Example-Domain.com. Since the user interface (UI) looks identical, customers might try logging into the site, which gives the scammers their login credentials.

DNS spoofing

DNS spoofing (sometimes called DNS cache poisoning) takes the above approach a step further. Rather than selecting a similar domain name, hackers use your cache to manipulate back-end DNS records. As a result, users get redirected from the reputable site to their phishing site.

Domain hijacking

If your domain name registration lapses or hackers gain access to your profile and remove it, they can scoop up your domain name. Usually, they do this to ransom it back to you for a sizable sum. In 2018, many GoDaddy domains were hijacked through their DNS service, and the hackers demanded $20,000 to return each domain.

Typosquatting

Sometimes, a domainer will purchase domain names similar to those of established brands to sell those domains for a profit. Goolge.com and Amizon.com are good examples, and those companies already reserved those domains expressly so a domainer couldn’t.

Secure site hosting with Webflow

A great domain management first step is to host your site on a reliable platform like Webflow. Leverage enterprise-grade security like single sign-on, security audit compliance, and advanced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection.

Head to Webflow University to learn how to connect your current domain with Webflow, or explore other ways to secure your website.

Psychographics look deeper than surface-level demographic factors like age, location, and gender to reveal intimate details about your target audience. They delve into the psychological aspects of consumer behavior — like lifestyle, interests, personality, and values — to help marketers understand what motivates their target audience to buy.

With psychographic marketing data, you’re better prepared to employ more effective marketing strategies that resonate with consumers on a deeper level. We’ll explore what psychographics are and how to use them, along with the different types of psychographic characteristics that can help you further segment your audience to make your marketing efforts more targeted.

Psychographics defined (and why to use them)

Psychographics is a market research method that classifies people according to lifestyle, values, and interests. This valuable information helps you accurately understand ideal buyer personas and your target market.

Say your target demographic is middle-class, employed American women in their 30s. You can narrow your focus further by asking psychographic questions like:

• What does this audience value?
• What are their interests and hobbies?
• What does their lifestyle look like?

Understanding your audience psychographically clarifies details about purchasing decisions in a way that demographics can’t. Demographics are still important, but adding psychographic data to user personas brings new specificity you can use to pivot marketing strategies accurately.

Here’s why it’s important to capture and use this data.

Aligns your values with your audience’s

Your target audience might think and act very differently from you, and psychographic data helps you bridge that gap. When you know what your audience values in a brand, you can learn how to align your content and marketing strategy to better resonate with them. 

Saves money with cost-efficient targeting

While conducting psychographic research has a high upfront cost, it often provides data that saves money in the long run.

Targeting vague demographics like “women in their 30s” might mean pouring resources into reaching the wrong people. But focusing on more precise segments like women who value data privacy, enjoy reading LinkedIn articles about technological advancements, and tend to live in metropolitan cities increases the chance you’ll reach the right audience — those who are interested in your offering.

Psychographic traits also often persist even as demographics shift (like this same audience moving into their 40s). So you don’t need to update and validate psychographic research as often as demographics, and you can generally use it longer.

Fine-tunes your marketing strategy

Your audience’s lifestyle and personality significantly impact how you should market to them. Learning how they use social media, whether they enjoy reading or prefer video content, and if they respond well to ads helps you choose more effective advertising tactics.

How to find psychographic data

Psychographics examine intimate details about your audience, so typical research methods like location analytics won’t help. You’ll need to get creative and go straight to the source.

Here are a few ways you can conduct psychographic research.

Interview current clients

Everyone is a source for psychographic data — why not start with people who already love your offering? Interview current clients to discover who your audience is (and what initially drew these happy customers in) so you can adjust strategies to accommodate these insights.

Explore website analytics

Website analytics help you deduce psychographic data without having to collect it explicitly. For example, if your audience denies optional cookies on your site 90% of the time, they likely value data privacy. This approach is assumptive, but you can always take these theories to your target audience through client surveys and website polls. You can also integrate test marketing into your marketing strategy to see which approaches and ideas resonate most strongly with your customers.

Use focus groups

Assemble a focus group to observe and question your target audience. Ask pointed questions, like “How do brands earn your trust?” and “What makes you stop trusting a brand?”

Ask open-ended questions, and consider asking them in both a group and one-on-one setting to see how answers shift.

Gather data from market research firms

Market research firms like Oracle gather and broker data. But, while purchasing data is currently the easiest acquisition option, it’s also the most expensive and least monitored regarding data privacy.

The relationship between demographics and psychographics

Demographics create simplified user personas, and psychographics paint a richer picture. So, while demographics help you select a target audience according to location or spending power, psychographics identify who within those categories might buy your product. Together, both data points help you craft brand messaging that resonates with your target audience.

Here are a few ways these data points differ.

Access

Demographic data is readily available and easier to acquire than psychographic data. You’ll need to conduct interviews and host focus groups to gather psychographic data, which can be expensive and time-consuming.

Qualities

Demographic data measures quantitative factors like how many people live in a particular city or what percentage are married. Psychographic data measures qualitative details, such as what people care about or do in their free time. This information works well together and offers a more holistic view of your audience.

Purpose

The purpose of demographic classifications like “unmarried” and “30–35” is to broadly categorize your audience. And the purpose of psychographics is to add specificity so you can get to know them better (and, in turn, market more effectively to this group).

Various types of psychographic audiences

When you classify your audience psychographically, your audience becomes segmented in interesting ways. Here are some psychographic segment examples you might discover.

Lifestyle

How people live their lives has an enormous impact on their purchasing decisions. It determines what they need and how they go about getting it. Here are a few lifestyle segment examples:

• Travelers. People who travel for work, fun, or as a permanent lifestyle might look for portable, compact solutions to everyday problems.
• Entrepreneurs. People working solo or in startups likely care about money-saving options and effective time management.
• Caregivers. Professional caregivers and those living with family members will want products and services that help them better care for clients and loved ones.

Personality

Prominent personality traits say a lot about one’s attitudes and purchasing motivations. Here are a few examples:

• Nurturing: Caring, empathetic people who want to better themselves and others
• Ambitious: Goal-oriented folks who wish to progress in life, work, and social circles
• Independent: Self-motivated people who value autonomy and self-reliance

Values

Your audience’s values indicate how to build trust with them. If your values don’t align with theirs, you’ll cause unnecessary friction.

Here are a few examples of audience values:

• “Animal testing is unacceptable.” Especially for beauty and pharmaceutical products, these people won’t buy from companies who don’t follow ethical testing practices.
• “Corporations should invest in surrounding communities.” Creating volunteer programs and making charitable donations is a great way to appeal to people who value corporate responsibility.
• “Sustainability is imperative to mitigating climate change.” Highlight when your company substantially improves its environmental impact, and you’ll win this audience over.

Activity, interest, and opinion

People’s hobbies and interests provide cues about what they buy and where. Seasonal hobbies, such as certain sports, can even help you determine when they make purchases.

Here are a few examples of interests, along with the cues each might indicate about your audience:

• Sports. Health-conscious, physically active people might resonate with a “go hard or go home” ad.
• Crafting. Creative, often quirky, individuals with niche interests might respond to a funny ad that teaches them something new.
• Video games. Tech-savvy people who enjoy solving puzzles could enjoy an ad that challenges them to try something difficult.

Build content that resonates with Webflow

Robust psychographic research helps you develop a clear target audience. And the next step is to track that audience’s behavior as they interact with your site, which is where Webflow comes in.

Webflow supports integrations with analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Nocodelytics, which can give you critical insights about how your audience interacts with your website and, therefore, your brand. These tools can show you how many users and page views your site gets, where your traffic comes from, how long people stay on your site, and more.

Our visual web development platform’s collaborative workflows and scalability give your team the power to build and manage your site. Get started with Webflow Enterprise today.

Whether you’re rebranding, shifting your market focus, or updating outdated functionalities, redesigning your website redefines how you interact with your audience. It’s an opportunity to refine your digital operations, boost your digital marketing, streamline processes, and declutter, making your website more user-friendly and functional for both your internal teams and external audience.

While this process brings excitement and potential for innovation, it also demands careful planning and thoughtful execution to ensure the final product reflects your vision and business objectives.

Here’s how to get your website redesign right the first time, as well as six mistakes to avoid when embarking on the journey.

How to redesign your website in 9 steps

Redesigning your website requires a structured approach, similar to initial website design, that’s focused on improvement and updating. Project plans help organize your efforts, define the scope, allocate resources, and set achievable goals and timelines. Detailed plans also help produce project documents and road maps that clearly communicate the process and objectives to ensure your team remains aligned and focused.

Check out these nine steps to build a project plan and successfully redesign your site.

1. Start with “why”

Starting a website redesign plan begins with understanding the core reasons driving change. A deep understanding of your business, its goals, and your current web presence can help you assess your existing website and articulate why you’ve decided on a redesign.

Key questions to determine the “why” for your redesign include:

• What’s your brand story?
• Are you rebranding?
• How is your brand currently perceived or performing?
• What are your company’s objectives for this year?
• What specific goals do you aim to achieve with this redesign?
• How does the redesign align with and support these goals?

Analyzing these aspects pinpoints the exact requirements of your website redesign and makes every change and update purposeful and aligned with your broader business. It also helps set a clear direction for the project so you can strategically plan each step to reach your desired outcome.

2. Set clear goals

After establishing the “why” of your redesign, use this understanding to articulate clear, achievable goals. The “why” helps you understand why you’re redoing your site, and goals establish what you want to achieve with the process by translating your broader organizational objectives into tangible redesign-specific targets.

For instance, if your current website doesn’t get much organic traffic, don’t just aim to address this issue broadly. Set a quantifiable goal, like implementing search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to boost organic traffic by 20% by the end of Q4.

Common website redesign goals include enhancing conversion rates, improving website performance, reducing bounce rates, or showcasing a rebrand. Whatever your goals are, defining and documenting them before you begin the website redesign helps guide the process and measure its success.

For example, Dell initially developed and maintained its website through an in-house team, but they moved to Webflow in search of a more user-friendly, responsive platform that could bridge the design-development gap. They had their “why” — increased user-friendliness and responsiveness — and their goal — find a web development and maintenance platform to get them there.

3. Create a plan to meet your goals

A project plan transforms your “whys” and goals into actionable steps, such as building new features, revamping existing ones, or refining certain design elements, like a hero section, while preserving the original site structure.

For instance, let’s say you want to increase web traffic with the specific goal of designing a site with built-in SEO features to increase organic inbound traffic by 20% by the end of Q4. With your goal clearly defined, you can break down the larger objective into smaller, more manageable tasks, like keyword research and on-page content optimization, and develop a project timeline that outlines when you should complete each task, setting specific milestones along the way. This systematic approach helps you track progress and adjust as needed, ensuring each step brings you closer to achieving that 20% increase in organic inbound traffic.

Regularly revisit and reassess your plan, and adjust it as needed to adapt to unforeseen challenges or emerging opportunities. Creating a detailed and adaptable project plan sets the stage for a website redesign that meets and exceeds your goals.

4. Establish a project team

Bring together individuals with specialized knowledge for a successful website redesign. Here are three key team members you should consider bringing on board:

• Project managers oversee timelines and tasks. They keep your project on track and ensure team members work together cohesively. For instance, a project manager might foresee potential delays in content migration during a website redesign and implement strategies to maintain the project’s momentum.
• Designers, including user experience (UX), user interface (UI), and graphic designers, craft the website’s user journey and focus on aesthetics and functionality. For a redesign, they might enhance the user interface to improve navigation and reduce user friction or update images and graphics to reflect a new brand identity.
• Developers build and support the digital infrastructure behind your website’s functionality and performance. They work on web development, problem-solve, and ensure the site’s performance meets current web standards. In a redesign, developers might implement new features, optimize site speed, and address coding conflicts to maintain the website’s functionality and performance.

5. Update website design elements

Part of a redesign is keeping up with design trends and standards. However, updating design elements isn’t just a cosmetic touch-up — it’s a process that involves understanding user behavior and preferences to create designs that capture and retain attention.

To do so, you’ll need to thoroughly evaluate existing design components — like color schemes, typography, imagery, and layout — and analyze their impact on the overall user experience. For instance, a color scheme should reflect your brand’s personality, while typography design choices must ensure readability and convey the right tone. Imagery should be relevant and resonate with your target audience, and the layout should be intuitive, with a visual hierarchy that naturally leads users through your websitFor example, a tech company might opt for a sleek, minimalist design with bold imagery and clear typography to convey innovation, while a children’s educational site might use bright colors and playful graphics to engage its young audience. By scrutinizing each element for its impact on overall interaction and engagement, you ensure every design decision purposefully contributes to a cohesive, captivating user experience.

6. Improve user experience and website functionality

Even though “design” is in the name, a website redesign doesn’t stop at aesthetic updates — it also focuses on improving your site’s overall usability and performance.

Look at how Skuid worked with creative agency Whiteboard to revamp their site. Before, the homepage displayed a “Get a demo” button. Now, a more positive “Start building for free” button replaces it with new colors that are more cohesive with the site. The design is also more generous with white space, letting bold text and statistics stand out to attract potential customers. Overall, the redesign adopts modern design trends through small tweaks without disturbing the brand’s visual identity.

In other words, don’t just make your website prettier — make it usable, too. To improve user experience, consider:

• Incorporating accessibility features like captioned videos and detailed alt text for images to make your site more inclusive
• Developing a robust search function that enables quicker access to information people are looking for
• Placing vital information prominently on the homepage or in the navigation bar for better user guidance

Since website performance also influences site functionality, your redesign should also address issues such as:

• Reducing slow page load times to improve user retention
• Ensuring mobile responsiveness for a seamless user experience across devices
• Strengthening security measures to protect user data and build trust

7. Build an SEO strategy

An effective website SEO strategy ensures your redesigned site ranks well in search engines, which enhances your site’s visibility and organic traffic. When updating your SEO strategy, it’s vital to:

• Benchmark current site performance using metrics like bounce rate, organic traffic, ranking keywords, backlinks, and domain authority to identify improvement opportunities and track your SEO efforts’ impact.
• Set up 301 redirects for old URLs and create a sitemap for efficient search engine crawling and indexing to ensure they’re discoverable in searches, maintain link equity, and improve site visibility.
• Ensure your site includes comprehensive management of SEO metadata, like meta titles, descriptions, and alt text, to enhance your site’s SEO and make it more likely to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).

8. Craft a style guide

A style guide is a living document that’s a comprehensive reference for your brand’s personality and visual identity. It covers a wide range of things, including writing tone and specific design elements like button colors and shapes, ensuring all future content and pages align with your established brand aesthetic.

Maintaining a consistent design across your website is crucial. By sticking to your website style guide, you ensure that every page reflects the hard work you put into your website’s redesign.

For example, before switching to Webflow, Mural’s team faced challenges in maintaining brand consistency without the help of a designer. To overcome this, Mural used CMS Collections to design templates that enabled their team to create landing pages that adhere to brand style guidelines without always relying on designers. This approach streamlines content creation and upholds brand consistency across the website.

9. Optimize site maintenance workflows

Optimizing website maintenance workflows is as crucial for your team as it is for your users. Streamlining processes like publishing blog posts or updating images improves organizational efficiency and helps you deliver a more resonant user experience to your audience.

For example, before Mural’s website glow-up, their marketing team had to loop in designers and developers for minor website updates. After the redesign, their content team can independently manage blogs and edits. This provides content management autonomy that speeds up the process and reduces the workload on design and development teams.

Incorporating such optimizations into your redesign can dramatically enhance your team’s productivity and website management. To cover all technical aspects of your website redesign, review our performance optimization guide and security checklist.

6 website redesign mistakes to avoid

A redesign is the perfect time to improve your aesthetic, rethink the tools you’re using, and optimize your team’s workflow. But as you assess your current site and decide what to keep or scrap, the process can seem daunting.

Here are six mistakes to avoid when you revamp your website.

1. Skipping planning for design

The first mistake that often happens in a redesign is diving straight into building your site without taking the time to plan. This can be especially tempting if you’ve just switched to a visual development tool like Webflow that empowers multiple team members to construct pages without consulting a designer or developer. Your final result will be better if you prepare first and set up systems to help your team collaborate.

Besides creating a project plan, as mentioned above, you’ll need to standardize a few technical elements. Consider standardizing class nomenclature by using systems like the block, element, modifier (BEM) method for clarity and consistency so any team member can jump into the project and understand what’s going on.

You also want to figure out what the basic building blocks of your pages will look like and how they will function. Consider elements like nav bars, buttons, columns, alerts, and inputs. Then, decide on a design system that gives your team a shared source to draw from. This preliminary organization will speed up development and maintain order throughout your site’s life span.

2. Assuming visitor preferences without user testing

Instead of redesigning your website based on assumptions about what your visitors want, turn to user testing and research. This approach helps you identify impactful changes that will actually optimize conversions and profits.

For instance, user research helps you create detailed personas that give you a deeper understanding of different audience segments. Follow this up with A/B testing tools to assess specific changes, like refining a call to action (CTA) that resonates more effectively with the target audience. This enables you to tailor your website’s features and content to meet their specific needs, ultimately enhancing user experience and engagement.

On a related note, ensure your tracking and analytics still work after you relaunch your site so that you can continue testing, tracking, and improving your site’s performance over time.

3. Starting a website redesign from the outside in

When you start a website redesign from the inside out, you prioritize your core content and landing pages — in contrast to starting from the outside in with the homepage or external elements, like branding and messaging.

While visitors typically encounter the homepage first when they land on your site, they’re often less critical to the user experience than the deeper, content-focused elements like individual landing pages or product information sections. The purpose of the homepage is to get visitors to that content as quickly as possible, so it doesn’t make sense to start building from your homepage before you know where it’s directing users.

For example, Edgar Allan’s website uses a content-first approach. The site’s portfolio section has several visually appealing example homepages on display, with a heading highlighting their design philosophy: “We believe our work should be story-first, but that the browser is a close second.”

4. Forgetting about your existing content

Make content strategy part of your website redesign to ensure you don’t end up breaking backlinks or losing content — both of which can negatively impact your SEO and domain authority.

To successfully port over your content, thoroughly audit your existing content. This includes listing all current URLs for setting up 301 redirects and creating a 404 page for broken links. A content management system (CMS), like Webflow’s, facilitates this process.

Additionally, use this opportunity to review your content for relevance, update or remove what’s outdated, and create evergreen content that remains valuable over time. This approach ensures content continuity and contributes to a stronger, more effective website.

5. Not managing site bandwidth upfront

During a redesign, adding unoptimized images to pages for quick design reviews might seem harmless. But it can result in slow-loading pages that frustrate users. To prevent this, optimize images and digital assets early in the process. Treat bandwidth like a budget and use it judiciously to ensure your site’s accessibility to users with varying internet speeds. This foresight in optimizing content and other resources ultimately contributes to a faster, more user-friendly website, enhancing the overall user experience.

6. Leaning too hard on trends

When redesigning your website, it’s important to balance trends with your brand’s identity. Chasing after the latest web design trends can be tempting, but they might not always align with your brand’s core values or resonate with your audience. An overreliance on trends can lead to a generic look or quickly outdated designs as the trend cycle evolves.

Still, a particular trend may be perfect if it compliments your brand story and identity. Your website should reflect who you are as a brand. Adopt design elements or trends with intention, ensuring they enhance the authentic representation of your brand to your audience.

Mural’s site design clearly aligns with their brand messaging: being a flexible and visual-first collaboration hub. The primary design element on the homepage is an interactive video — reflecting Mural’s visual approach — and the simple CTA button “Start a whiteboard” invites viewers to customize and collaborate on their platform. Plus, it has a modern, sleek appearance that aligns with today’s design trends.

Redesign with confidence

Website redesigns are involved processes that require cross-functional collaboration and a structured approach. Webflow is here to help you get started. Our visual development platform enables teams to collaborate quickly and securely, to launch redesigned websites that fit their brand needs.

Check out our design courses, layout tips, and perspectives from designers before getting started on your enterprise site redesign.

Whether it’s a startup or a scaling enterprise, you’ll rarely find a business without some kind of online presence. Standing out among this crowd requires thoughtful internet marketing strategies that engage a more diverse — and distracted — audience.

This pivot toward digital tactics allows companies to transform every online interaction into an opportunity for impactful connection. And it also means your team can leverage valuable insights, like website traffic and social media engagement metrics, to better understand and target potential customers.

What’s internet marketing?

Internet marketing, also called online or digital marketing, encompasses strategies and techniques to promote products, services, and content over the internet. It uses diverse digital marketing channels like websites and search engines to connect with and captivate target audiences.

As more and more people go online to work, socialize, and interact with the world, internet marketing becomes essential. The good news is that internet marketing tactics, like social media posts or email campaigns, are often less expensive than traditional advertising methods like billboards or TV ads. Marketers can take advantage of these cost-efficient solutions and use real-time analytics to monitor performance across multiple digital platforms. This makes internet marketing a dynamic way for businesses to engage with customers.

Internet marketing vs. traditional advertising

Marketing strategies are evolving from traditional methods to digital approaches. Let’s explore the advantages online advertising offers over conventional marketing:

• Global reach. Internet marketing breaks geographical barriers and helps you reach customers worldwide. With a significant portion of the global population online, businesses can market their products and services to anyone with an internet-enabled device, regardless of location — a common barrier physical stores face. You can use localization and internationalization to make your site engaging to audiences across the globe.
• 24/7 accessibility. Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar stores with fixed operating hours, online businesses operate around the clock. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for personalization and automation, you can engage with customers anytime, enhancing convenience for your business and its audience.
• Precision in targeted advertising. Internet marketing lets you target people with specific demographics, interests, and behaviors with tailored messages. This focused approach helps you address relevant pain points to draw in more leads than traditional advertising. Unlike conventional advertising, which often disperses messages too broadly and misses the mark with uninterested audiences, targeted digital advertising provides the right message to the right audience, which can increase conversion rates.
• Measurable outcomes. Digital marketing solutions encompass tools and platforms that store data online and in analytics tools. These solutions let you track real-time metrics, such as website traffic, conversions, and engagement, so you can measure and refine campaigns with unmatched precision.
• Enhanced brand visibility. Strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing boost your online visibility and domain authority, which positions your brand higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This visibility attracts organic traffic more effectively than conventional marketing methods, broadening your brand’s reach.
• Cost-effectiveness. Internet marketing offers more budget-friendly options than traditional marketing methods like print and television advertising. Digital strategies like email, social media, and content marketing let you allocate resources more efficiently and often drive a higher return on investment (ROI).

9 popular examples of internet marketing

You can adapt internet marketing strategies to all organizational sizes, but some may be more effective than others depending on your industry and objectives. Here are nine internet marketing strategies worth considering.

1. Search engine optimization

SEO boosts a website’s visibility and SERP ranking. By weaving SEO into your internet marketing efforts, such as incorporating relevant keywords into your platform, you’ll draw organic traffic to your site and enhance your brand’s visibility.

Some SEO best practices include using relevant and trending meta tags, keywords, and other metadata to help visitors find what they want. If your business specializes in fitness services, using terms like “best outdoor exercises,” “home fitness tips,” and “how to stay fit” in your content can help your site show up in SERPs when potential readers search for similar queries.

2. Email marketing

Email marketing involves sending emails to engage subscribers, promote products, and nurture customer relationships. By delivering targeted promotions and tailored recommendations directly to subscribers’ inboxes in well-designed email campaigns, email marketing helps to strengthen brand awareness, foster customer loyalty, and drive sales.

Consider a web design agency that boosts leads and site traffic through a monthly email newsletter. This newsletter might include design tips, case studies, and exclusive discounts on their service offerings.

By consistently providing valuable content that subscribers look forward to receiving, the agency establishes itself as a trusted resource in the web design community. This consistency and value create a sense of anticipation and exclusivity among the brand’s audience, which deepens their brand engagement and encourages a sense of belonging and loyalty.

3. Social media advertising

Social media advertising leverages platforms like Facebook and Instagram to target specific demographics with ads and curated content. This strategy stands out for its ability to segment audiences based on detailed criteria, such as interests, behaviors, and demographics, which allows social media marketers to craft highly targeted and resonant campaigns.

A local bookstore might use Facebook ads to connect with book lovers by targeting visitors who’ve shown interest in literary social pages and events. By creating engaging ads that highlight new arrivals and author events, the bookstore precisely reaches people most likely to respond. This approach ensures that market resources go toward engaging audiences most likely to convert, ultimately increasing marketing ROI.

4. Content marketing

Like social media advertising, content marketing focuses on crafting and sharing valuable content like blog posts, articles, and infographics to engage specific audiences. But unlike social media advertising, which is platform-specific, content marketing spans various channels, including websites and apps, to offer a broader reach.

This content strategy excels in helping you establish your brand as an industry authority. Consider a tech company. They might create an in-depth infographic about cybersecurity trends and share it on LinkedIn for professional networking, Instagram with tailored adjustments for visual appeal, and their website to enrich their content library.

Content marketing boosts not only visibility but also audience trust. Whether you’re publishing timely pieces in response to current news and trends, or crafting evergreen content that’s timeless and always relevant, by consistently delivering content that adds value, you enhance your brand’s reputation and appeal. This also increases your domain authority — your site’s credibility and trustworthiness according to search engines — leading to higher search rankings and more organic traffic.

5. Pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing involves launching targeted ads, selecting specific keywords on search engines and social media platforms, and paying a fee each time users click on an ad. When someone enters a specific query or term, the highest bidder’s ad appears as a top-ranking result, immediately giving them an advantage by driving traffic to their website and other digital channels.

If your business specializes in digital marketing services, for instance, your PPC strategy might involve bidding on keywords like “digital marketing strategies” or “online marketing services” within Google Ads. If you bid high enough, your ad appears at the top of Google search results when potential customers look up these terms. This boosts your site’s visibility and engagement potential.

6. Blogging

Blogging centers on regularly writing and publishing insightful content on a company blog. By crafting blog posts that provide helpful tips, answer common questions, and explore relevant topics, you position your brand as an industry authority.

Beyond building trust, this strategy also fosters strong relationships with your dedicated audience. Engaging content invites readers to interact, share their thoughts, and become regular visitors, transforming them from casual readers into loyal readers.

Optimized blog content also increases visibility on search engines, which draws more organic traffic to your site. As readers engage with your content by spending more time on your pages and sharing your posts, these positive signals to search engines further boost your SEO efforts.

Imagine a gardening supply company that publishes weekly blog posts. Their topics might cover sustainable gardening practices, innovative tools, and step-by-step guides for various planting techniques. Through these efforts, the company not only educates their audience but also establishes their brand as a trusted expert in the gardening community.

7. Influencer marketing

In influencer marketing, businesses partner with well-known personalities and entities within their industry to market their offerings to the influencer’s followers. This strategy taps into the influencer’s credibility, extensive reach, and established audience trust. By working with trusted influencers, brands can enhance their brand visibility and connect with new, receptive audiences.

A fitness apparel company might collaborate with a fitness guru on Instagram to showcase their latest workout gear. Through sponsored content, like posts and videos featuring the influencer wearing the brand’s apparel during workouts, the brand gains exposure to a broader audience of fitness enthusiasts.

8. Video and podcasting

Videos and podcasts are dynamic multimedia content formats that you can distribute across various platforms, including YouTube and Instagram for videos and Spotify and Apple Podcasts for podcasts. These mediums serve as effective channels to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Through videos and podcasts, you can offer insights, entertainment, and information that enrich the audience’s experience.

As your content gains traction, integrating influencers and notable industry figures into podcasts or videos can introduce your brand to broader audiences. A tech company, for instance, could launch a podcast series discussing the latest trends in technology that features interviews with industry experts.

This strategic move demonstrates the company’s active role in shaping and discussing key topics, which can elevate the organization’s status to a thought leader. Such positioning attracts a more engaged audience that values insightful analysis and will likely become brand advocates.

9. Web design

Effective web design focuses on creating websites and landing pages that are visually appealing, user-friendly, and functional. The goal is to guide users toward specific actions, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, and ultimately convert them into customers.

If your website doesn’t meet your target audience’s expectations, leverage data visualization and heatmap tools to make targeted improvements. This data informs strategic adjustments to the site’s layout and user journey.

For a design services company, this might mean observing the user journey to identify improvement areas. Taking this data, the company could redesign their site to showcase their portfolio more effectively, simplify the consultation process, and make the site more responsive to mobile users. These refinements showcase the company’s deep understanding of effective service business marketing by demonstrating their ability to apply design principles in ways that meet user needs and elevate the overall customer experience.

How to implement an effective internet marketing strategy: 3 steps

Whether you’re focusing on a single campaign or juggling multiple projects, here’s how to market your business online with a successful internet marketing strategy in three steps.

1. Establish your objectives

Determine the specific goals you aim to achieve through your internet marketing efforts while considering the resources at your disposal. You might target a 25% uptick in website traffic over the next six months or aim to increase your email subscription list by 15% within the same period.

Whatever your marketing objectives are, explicitly outline these goals and share them with your team. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). By identifying your objectives upfront, you provide a clear road map for your internet marketing strategy that allows you to accurately track and assess progress against your plan.

2. Identify your target audience

An effective strategy requires analyzing your target audience, including their pain points, preferences, and behaviors. This understanding helps you develop detailed buyer personas that represent different segments of your customer base, and you can use these buyer personas to enhance your ability to meet customers’ needs effectively.

Conduct market research, analyze competitors, study existing customer data, and gather insights from surveys and social media to understand your audience’s needs. Before moving to a public release, you can also deploy test marketing and A/B testing to trial your internet marketing campaigns with smaller sample groups. When your internet marketing strategies align with your audience’s interests and motivations, your ROI is higher.

Let’s say you have a food preparation app and usage data reveals that most users close the app if they can’t find high-protein meals they can prepare in 15 minutes or less. By strategically featuring quick and protein-rich meal options in your app and emphasizing their preparation ease in your marketing messages, you cater directly to the preferences of users seeking efficient meal solutions.

3. Choose the right internet marketing strategies

Opt for the internet marketing strategies that best align with your audience’s preferences and your objectives — whether that’s SEO, email marketing, social media advertising, or all of the above. If you aim to educate, leverage blogs and podcasts. But to maximize viral potential, explore influencer marketing and paid social media partnerships.

Consider both your available resources and budget when choosing which strategy to use. And integrating multiple tactics often proves more effective in engaging and converting users. Implement a marketing plan with key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to monitor performance and fine-tune your approach for optimal outcomes.

Reach new audiences with Webflow

Whatever your business’s internet marketing strategy might be, no approach is complete without a great website. Every marketing campaign ultimately directs traffic to your site, where its design and usability directly influence visitor conversions.

With Webflow, you can create a site that’s visually appealing and highly functional — ensuring an engaging and captivating experience that converts users.

Build and launch your company’s main site, reach new audiences, and grow your business with Webflow today.

When crafting a content marketing strategy, industry statistics can support resource allocation and tactic choices. Reading through what’s working (and what’s not) ensures you’re tapped into viewer preferences, behavioral patterns, and trending topics. You can then craft a thoughtful and data-driven marketing plan that helps you reach your audience and improve your return on investment (ROI).

Whatever your marketing goals, the following statistics show that content marketing is an effective way to achieve them. Despite any ebbs and flows in the top-performing marketing content types, the future promises to remain bright for this stable and well-established strategy.

What’s content marketing, and why is it so effective?

Content marketing involves creating content — like articles, visual media, and audio — that cover topics related to your business’s offering. The goal of content marketing is to engage, inform, and entertain your audience so you can establish your brand as trustworthy and ultimately convert visitors. Content marketing helps your site to rank highly in organic search results, leading to more web traffic and conversions.

Thanks to Google’s increasing attention to authoritative content, content marketing has become the cornerstone of many marketing campaigns. As of 2022, Google’s search results algorithm favors websites offering knowledgeable editorial content, and companies that have successfully pivoted their strategies to content marketing have seen massive gains.

Content marketing statistics

According to a 2022 study from the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing has grown to become the most effective marketing strategy for generating leads. This points to the impact website content can make — it’s rapidly eclipsed other marketing methods like advertisements in web, TV, and print.

Explore the following comprehensive statistics to learn how content marketing helps businesses achieve top performance.

Active blogs generate more leads

Unsurprisingly, an active blog is more successful than an inactive one, but you might be surprised to learn just how stark the difference is. Explore these statistics to learn how regular blogging impacts your reach.

• Businesses that post at least 16 articles monthly generate leads 4.5 times faster. Businesses with blogs also get 55% more organic search traffic.
• 96% of surveyed businesses use blogs in their content marketing strategy.
• 51% of companies that use content marketing publish content every day.

Content marketing leads to sales

Leads generated by your content can translate directly to purchases if you provide customers with a satisfying experience. The key to converting visitors is effectively guiding them from your articles directly to making a purchase.

• 83% of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers said content marketing is their top source of leads.
• 44% of consumers reference at least four blog articles before making large purchases.
• 58% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers successfully leveraged content marketing in 2023 to increase sales.
• 50% of marketers say content marketing builds brand loyalty with existing customers.

Social media drives traffic to your content

A robust social media presence is increasingly important as more consumers look to social media platforms for blogs, podcasts, and video content.

Top search results get more engagement

Web traffic is an excellent way to measure engagement, but you need to climb the search engine results pages (SERPs) to get the most from it. Businesses that consistently hit the top slot in SERPs enjoy an incredible surge in web traffic.

• The #1 result for a Google search enjoys a 27.6% click-through rate (CTR), 50% more than the #2 slot.
• 93% of internet users begin their session on a search engine.

Google accounts for nearly 80% of all internet searches worldwide.

Stats for different marketing content types

Video marketing, infographics, and audio content are all rising in popularity as social apps gain larger shares of audience attention. Here are the primary content types marketers use and some valuable statistics about each.

Written articles

Online articles are a widely successful marketing content form, though videos are rapidly overtaking them. Still, an active blog is an essential aspect of content marketing.

Visual

Videos and original images have skyrocketed in popularity thanks to the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels. As a result, many marketing teams partner with influencers on these platforms to market their products.

Audio

Emails and social posts promoting audio clips and podcasts don’t generate the most web traffic, but audio content still makes an impact. Including audio content is a great way to add a sizable boost to your marketing efforts.

B2B content marketing statistics

When it comes to B2B purchases, business leaders research vendors and partners extensively before deciding to partner with them. When B2B organizations offer robust content, they have more opportunities to win over companies. Here’s how content marketing specifically impacts B2B relations.

B2B uses a wider range of marketing tactics

B2B marketing uses a broader array of marketing tactics than B2C. Generally, this is because courting enterprise customers is more involved than engaging consumers.

• 58% of marketers report that virtual events, webinars, and online courses have been the most effective tactics.
• Four of the top five marketing tactics for B2B marketers are uniquely suited to B2B marketing. Virtual events are #1, but research reports, whitepapers, case studies, and long-form articles are also in the top five.
• 90% of B2B marketers use their organization’s website to distribute their content, and more than 50% also use blogs, email newsletters, and email. And 52% use media/public relations and speaking or presenting at events to distribute content.

B2B content marketing prioritizes information over promotion

When attempting to draw businesses to your brand, your content must deliver value that appeals specifically to other businesses — not consumers. That’s because companies tend to have specific informational needs, such as how to use enterprise features or scale strategies, and they prioritize content with that information over promotional messaging.

Optimize your content with Webflow

These statistics confirm that combining multiple content types makes for the best content marketing strategies. It also helps to have a top-notch web design and access to the best features. Webflow offers incredible features to support your marketing strategy, like search engine optimization (SEO) enhancements, app integrations, and redirect management. Plan, create, and publish content that ensures you reach the top of SERPs.

Explore Webflow University’s informative docs, courses, and interactive lessons for better content marketing tactics that ensure your business’s success.