Developers and marketers have longstanding business relationships that span as long as websites and applications have been needed to conduct business. In other words, it’s tough for many of us to remember the days when this partnership didn’t exist. While new technologies are brought to market regularly, with little to no signs of slowing down, this relationship grows more complex—despite how technology often aims to simplify it.
So what’s being done to help these teams drive better collaboration, align on business goals, and build stronger partnerships? And is there a need for this at all? That’s what we sought to find out.
In a recent study commissioned by Netlify, we surveyed 150 marketing leaders and 150 development leaders to better understand the state of marketing and web development workflows for building and publishing content on the web. (We’ll detail the breakdown of respondents later, but leaders are understood to be director-level and higher.)
How are these teams collaborating? How well-aligned are most teams? Where are they misaligning most often? The list goes on and we unpack it in this report.
What we found suggests:
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There’s frequent misalignment in the priorities of each other’s teams
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The most widely adopted tools available aren’t designed to facilitate collaboration
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There’s still a prominent yearning for autonomy from marketers
According to Gartner, “nearly half (46%) of B2B CMOs say their company views the marketing organization as a cost center rather than a profit center.” With money on the line, streamlined collaboration and efficient processes are paramount.
Before we dive into the findings, we think it’s prudent to break down how the study was conducted and prove its relevance to you in your role.
Proving relevance: Survey sample and methodology breakdown
In a recent study, Netlify commissioned a third-party research firm to run a mirror study between marketing and web development leaders. By our definition, a mirror study offers the same questions to both sample groups to extract sentiment around similar concepts. The survey consisted of 30 total questions after demographic fit was confirmed.
300 marketing and web development leaders were surveyed, with a 50/50 split.
Here’s the seniority breakdown of those who took part:
Here’s how the sample broke down by company size:
Finally, here are the self-described industries the sample works within:
With a strong emphasis on leadership roles, we hoped to uncover macro trends that business leaders examine in their respective teams.
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50.33% of marketing leaders are from companies with 1,001-5,000 employees.
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53.60% of web development leaders represent companies with 1,000-10,000 employees.
As such, the results of this survey can be weighted toward mid- to enterprise-level conversation.
It’s also important to note that a majority of participants cited their industries as computer hardware, computer software, and business services—solidifying technology leaders as a strong voice in this survey. The following industries also have strong representation: financial services, manufacturing, and retail.
Let’s get started.
1. Marketing and web development teams suffer from priority misalignment and understanding
Marketers and developers have different roles to play in the success of a project. That’s the hard truth. While marketers are often concerned with reaching the right people, driving conversions, and getting fresh contacts into the sales funnel, developers are thinking about usability, accessibility, and core web vitals—for example.
There isn’t a clear line in the sand that signifies where one role and responsibility starts and ends, but clear ownership often makes for better alignment and understanding.
So where’s the breakdown? According to our research:
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57.61% of developers say they lack the understanding of what marketers need.
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63.91% of marketing and development leaders agree there’s a gap in translating marketing objectives into technical requirements.
When teams are misaligned, dreaded rework is often the result. If this happens too frequently, trust is damaged, and creativity is hampered.
Reflecting on the reasons why rework happens most often, marketing and development teams have differing opinions. Let’s take a look at the top three causes of rework for each group, and compare.
Please note: The top three causes of rework for each group are different, but we provided the breakdown for both below.
What’s most interesting to point out here is that on average, marketing leaders fault communication as the primary barrier to a streamlined process. In contrast, developers fault the market conditions and changes in project scope or strategy.
These ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. Let’s ponder an example.
On a day-to-day basis, marketers evaluate their audiences and trends in the market. On the other hand, developers focus on producing the best digital experiences they can—focusing less on the unique business and customer needs of a marketing campaign.
This leads to a knowledge gap. Marketers know what the customers want. Developers know how to build what the customers need. However, when developers aren’t abreast of the ever-evolving marketing strategy, miscommunication about changes in strategy and consumer behavior is likely to occur—resulting in rework that may have been avoided.
To overcome this challenge, marketers and developers agree on one solution: involving web developers earlier in the planning process will significantly improve marketing project outcomes. In fact, 80.46% of marketers and developers agree with this notion.
So let’s say marketers and developers collaborate earlier and more often. Truly sharing the knowledge of the audience, the problem at hand, and the solution to overcome it—thus, solving for misalignment and understanding.
What’s next?
2. The tools available aren’t designed to facilitate collaboration
Miscommunication and shifting priorities can be difficult to overcome. Not to mention, when the tools available suit the needs of one group over another, it becomes a challenge to collaborate effectively.
According to our survey:
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56.29% of respondents say collaborative tools and platforms need improvement between marketing and web development teams
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42.72% of respondents say outdated software and hardware is a top technology reason why web developers and marketers don’t work efficiently
When teams don’t have the tools in place that fosters collaboration, inordinate amounts of context switching may occur, or worse, silos may start to form.
“Cognitive fatigue has a powerful negative influence on decision making and therefore on productivity, quality, and innovation. One cause of cognitive fatigue is context switching, which happens when developers are interrupted or switch to a different task because their current task is blocked.” -Kieth Mann, Sr. Analyst, Software Engineering Strategy & Practices, Gartner
From a frontend development standpoint, orchestrating the process is overwhelming. It looks something like this:
Throughout this process, teams of developers are required to hand off elements of the project, leading to interruptions, delays, dissatisfaction, and breakdowns in communication. All the while they need to be in lockstep with the needs of marketing teams. But that should be easy, right?
Well, here’s what it looks like from a marketing standpoint taking a concept from idea to production:
There’s no wonder the relationship between web development and marketing isn’t without faults. Both teams are wading through cumbersome processes to get seemingly simple tasks completed.
With better collaboration tools and processes in place, marketers and web developers can more efficiently work together. With Netlify Core, a frontend cloud solution, developers can greatly reduce the amount of handoffs, maintenance, and oversight required to manage frontend development:
This grants web developers the freedom to focus on the things that really matter to the business—like partnering with business teams to deliver programs and campaigns that impact business metrics. Not merely keep the lights on.
This solves the developers’ gripe, but what about marketers who want to be able to do more with less hand-holding?
3. There’s a yearning for autonomy from marketers
Effective collaboration doesn’t always mean working with the same tools at the same time. Sometimes it means setting up teams or individuals for success by providing the necessary templates, guardrails, and autonomy to get their job done.
According to our survey, there’s a yearning for autonomy—or at least the ability to be more self-sufficient:
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87.42% of marketers wish for more direct control over web content without always needing developer support
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68.21% of developers think that their marketing colleagues don’t fully utilize the capabilities of the web development tools they have
So what’s the deal? Marketers want more control, but developers believe the option may be there—it’s just not utilized.
If you’re not using Netlify, both can be true. However, the first step toward a more efficient marketer and developer relationship is to move from a rigid system (like AEM, Wordpress, or Drupal) to a headless CMS (like Sanity or Contentful).
A headless CMS will:
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Decouple the frontend from the code
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Make content accessible via API
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Afford you multi-channel publishing
But more is needed to optimize user flows and collaboration for nontechnical users.
That’s where Netlify’s Visual Editor enters the picture. Through this feature, marketers can make changes to the website without developer hand-holding. And developers can feel confident that there won’t be any impact on the backend code and all changes will be written back to the original CMS.
With the Visual Editor, you can:
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Build truly bespoke templates
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Eliminate marketer-developer dependency
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Create custom workflows, roles, and permissions
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Bring your own components, content models, layouts, and styling options
Imagine a partnership that looks more like this:
The bottom line for marketing and web development workflows
Rarely is anyone’s best work the output of frustration, miscommunication, and misalignment. Making matters worse, 56.29% of developers agree that faster web development cycles significantly improve campaign results. And it goes back to what we said earlier.
The faster and more efficiently campaigns can be rolled out, the more likely they will strike the right cord in the market and shrink the potential for rework and false starts.
With a single platform that breaks down the silos between marketing and web development teams, a new world of collaboration, efficiency, and better results is born.
You may as well give it a go.