If there was a common theme that resonated with marketing leaders in our annual survey and State of the Website report, it was opportunity. With AI setting a lightning pace of innovation, marketing leaders agree that the opportunity for growth is huge, while acknowledging that there’s a need for flexibility and adaptability as they set strategies for the future. 

So we invited three marketing leaders—Ashley Kemper of Pandadoc, Emily Singer of Drift, and Neda Stoll of HubSpot—to share their personal takes on the future of the web. How should leaders be thinking about new sanctions and laws around privacy? How can they improve existing processes and test out new ideas? And of course, we talked about AI. 

Read on for advice that your web team can use today, to prepare for whatever opportunities come our way tomorrow. To watch the discussion in full, check out our free webinar.

Forging new experiences with AI

In the coming years, we may see a shift in traffic away from organic sources and channels like search engines. “So the idea of a very static site, where everyone sees the same information when they come in, might not be the best experience for your customers,” Stoll said.  

Today, ABM (account-based marketing) is largely accepted as the gold standard of personalization. But it’s going to be more important in the future to be able to cater to individual accounts. “That gets a lot more complex, and that’s where AI can help drive efficiencies,” Singer explained. (Shameless plug: We recently acquired Intellimize, which helps marketing teams personalize their websites for different audiences at a one-to-one level.)

With marketing owning so much of the buyer experience and the web team, they have a chance to steer their company’s AI strategy and internal adoption. Scrappy marketing teams, in particular, can seize the moment. “Small companies have the opportunity to be AI-first and lean into some of these trends from a cultural standpoint, in a way that bigger companies will continue to face a challenge to do,” Singer said.

One more thing: As companies implement AI, there’s an opportunity for web teams to lean into what’s uniquely human, like creativity, humor, and relationships. “Incredible storytelling, high quality content that adds value to your customers and prospects—that continues to be core,” Stoll said.

Losing cookies without losing engagement

The future will be about finding new ways to balance being compliant with new privacy requirements, while still delivering the most relevant, engaging content to customers. Panelists stressed the importance of not giving up on personalization, and finding creative ways to deliver a great brand experience without cookies. 

Singer framed the shift this way: “It’s less about caring who they are—as in personal identifying information—and more about what they want, to be able to meet your buyer in the right place at the right time with the right message. If you're able to do that successfully and drive a positive brand experience, then you can build that trust where they'll voluntarily share who they are, and you can go from there.”

On a very practical level, it’s important for marketing leaders to start working with their legal teams early and often. “We’re learning a lot about different cookie access permission levels, and tools that our team has to make strong decisions,” Kemper said. “If you have a great legal department, pull them in for those conversations.”

Balancing ownership with collaboration

In our survey, marketing leaders named website ownership as a persistent challenge—one that resonated with our panelists. “If marketing doesn’t have ownership over your website, you end up spending a lot more time and budget on those ecosystems in the future,” Kemper said. (Our report found that marketing teams on average spend $1.6 million on their web team and software.)

But at most companies of sufficient size, it’s a balance, where ownership needs to be shared with engineers and satellite teams and regions to empower better processes.  

HubSpot has navigated this by investing in governance. “We try to provide marketers across the company with what they need to make sure they’re compliant, on brand, and set up for success, even from a measurement and tracking perspective,” Stoll said. 

“I’m excited to see the continued trend of engineers becoming less ‘technical-only,’” Kemper added. “I’m pushing for web engineers to own OKRs around SEO and performance and around website conversion rates, so that they can see the impact and the direct-line contribution to our customer experience.”

Testing and retesting to refine hypotheses

In our 2024 State of the Website report, marketing leaders listed “experimenting with new marketing strategies and tactics” as one of their top three priorities for the year. At first, this might seem surprising, because today’s leaders also report having smaller budgets and smaller teams. But marketing leaders understand that experimentation is a great way to accomplish more with less. 

“We have a culture of test and learn,” Stoll shared. “Just because a program or a test or an initiative didn't work in the past, doesn't mean it's not going to work in the future.”

Kemper agreed. “Anytime you’re not testing on your website, it’s a lost opportunity. Every visitor is a potential data point to teach you something new. Being in the mindset of always-on testing, you are incrementally driving learnings over time.”

Wondering where to get started with testing? “Understand your goals,” Stoll said. “We usually start with a brief any time we want to test something. What are we trying to accomplish? Who’s our audience? Why do we think that testing is the way to achieve what we want?”

As marketing leaders look toward the future, one thing remains certain: the website will never be “done.” “It’s always evolving,” Stoll said. “It’s truly a journey, not a destination.”