It’s thought experiment time! Pretend you’re about to revamp your business’ website. You know it’s time – you’ve had the same site for five years and it’s just not generating business for you the way you know it should be. So you’re sitting down to discuss what the new website will look like and how it will work. Who’s at that meeting with you?

If you didn’t immediately answer with the names of your marketing team – either internal or the agency you work with – start over. Marketing leads web design the way a bride-to-be plans a wedding: it is their vision of the ideal customer experience that needs to be communicated through every messaging avenue you have, including your website.

[Tweet “Marketing and technology are married.”]

There is an unfortunate tendency to segregate marketing and website development from each other, as if the fact that a website exists online completely eliminates the fact that its very reason for existing is to promote your business. We don’t do this with any other kind of advertising and promotion.

I started Technology Therapy Group in 1997. In all that time, never once has a client come to us with a marketing department and a print department, or a marketing department and a radio department, or a marketing department and a signage department – you get the picture. We totally get the fact that marketing and print belong together; the same for radio, signage and more.

Marketing and technology belong together the same way. Your website, social media presence, text messaging campaigns and other digital strategies are all marketing tools. It’s not enough to have a pretty website; you need a website that’s designed to fully achieve your marketing objectives. From attracting customer attention, converting that attention into interest and eventual action, your website is a sales tool. If your marketing team isn’t involved in its creation and day to day operation, particularly in the form of making sure the website’s reflects current overall marketing campaigns, you might as well not have a website at all – and in today’s world, no website means no business.

Marketing and technology are married; a firmly committed pair that work well together to help you achieve your business goals. Don’t make them live separately. This doesn’t make them happy, and it won’t make you happy either.