Five tips to make digital progress when you have limited resources

We’ve always observed that the idea of “progression” and “improvement” tends to be engrained in the mindset of digital marketing functions and website teams. The need to drive more lead generation and improve sales. The need to increase the number of visitors or improve an SEO ranking. A desire to make the user experience better. Even just the need to evolve ideas and practices.

On the flipside, progress is often also an expectation of stakeholders who want to see things moving forward, and so teams can feel the heat in terms of needing to improve. As technology gets more sophisticated and a CMS can deliver more things, there is also perhaps a feeling that a website should inevitably progress in some way.

So, what happens when the mindset and expectation of making progress is met with the reality of restricted budgets and small teams who may not be able to achieve what they really want to achieve without the necessary resources?

The feeling of standing still and treading water can be frustrating, but that is what some digital teams are currently facing with constrained spending and under investment. However, we believe it is still possible to make some digital progress even with little budget.

In this post we look at five ways to make digital progress without the need for actual spending. However, there is caveat. Our suggestions are dependent on teams having some spare capacity or time to get things done, even if they don’t necessarily need to spend any additional budget.

1. Activate CMS features and leverage other internal tools you haven’t used yet

The Content Management System (CMS) and Digital Experience Platform (DXP) market has been highly competitive in recent years meaning that many products have become over-stuffed with features, many of which end up simply not getting used. When you’ve got no budget, it might be the perfect time to investigate the CMS feature that you have yet to implement such as introducing simple personalisation. It can be surprising just what you can achieve, leveraging the full set of features that you are already paying for.

A related idea is to use digital tools that your organisation subscribes to, but you are not using yet. Digital marketing and customer experience can span more then one function or division, and there may be an opportunity to leverage tools that are already licensed by your organisation. Additionally, there also a number of freemium tools – Google Analytics being an obvious example – that can add value.

2. Optimise your MarTech stack experience

Most digital marketing and website teams use a variety of different solutions to help deliver and improve their digital footprint. Beyond a core CMS or DXP at the centre of the experience, you might use an analytics package, a social media management platform, a digital asset management system, a brand portal and so on. There might even be an additional CMS.

Each of these applications may be used by other teams and groups, including content publishers. Some of these solutions have options to configure the experience to different roles so it is possible to optimise it for their use. For example, publishers on your CMS probably should not see all the distracting bells and whistles that the core web team need to see and probably don’t even have permissions to use.

If you have issues around the use or adoption of some of your MarTech stack, optimising the back-end admin, editing and reporting experience for different roles and groups across different solutions can be a highly worthwhile exercise. It can help encourage use and provide a better experience.

Configuration should not involve additional spending and can even encourage greater use of different tools. In doing so, you may also find out things your CMS does that you didn’t even know existed!

3. Upskill the digital team

Upskilling is often at the heart of improvement, unlocking new opportunities, perspectives and practical insights. Improving the digital experience of your users might just need to start with improving the skills of your digital team. However, training and upskilling are often surprisingly neglected areas by busy marketing and digital teams who don’t always have the time to focus on increasing their knowledge.

In terms of budget, the good news is that there are lots of training resources that are free or low cost. Of course, there is always some good material on YouTube, but some CMS vendors also provide some digital training resources that are free of charge. Platforms like LinkedIn Learning which your organisation may subscribe to will also have some good material, and there may be other options offered via your organisation’s LMS. You may even have training budget that needs to get used up.

4. Review your website governance and plug the critical gaps

Governance isn’t a particularly inspiring word, but defining the roles, rules, processes, standards and guidelines absolutely helps ensure a great digital experience and often provides the foundations to keep content up to date.

Most digital teams will have some governance applied but at times it may be ad hoc, incomplete or out of date. Inevitably, there will be gaps. For example, do you have a policy on archiving news on the website? What about rebranding those old PDFs? Do you have some guidelines articulated to help publishers and content owners which could help reduce the amount of handholding you have to do? Are there some areas where responsibilities are a bit vague and muddy? Do you have a view on using AI?

Consider reviewing your governance, identifying the gaps, and then clarifying and documenting anything that is missing. This can help set you up for continual improvement and make progress with the digital experience with the solid foundations that ensure things get done and everyone knows what they are doing.

5. Experiment with AI

It is likely that you already are experimenting with AI, but a surprising number of digital teams are actually quite slow to the party and are using AI in a very limited way.

AI has lots of use cases relating to digital marketing and website management from helping with SEO keywords to actually generating the base content. We’re pretty confident that is has the potential to contribute in some way to improve team processes and productivity.

While you may have some AI built into your MarTech stack, you’re also likely to have access to AI through an enterprise-wide product like Microsoft Copilot. If you haven’t already done so,

consider experimenting with the AI that you already have access to (and paid for) and see how it can improve the way you and your team works. Perhaps it won’t make so much difference, perhaps it will prove to be a real game-changer.

Making progress

We understand the move to want to progress a website. We also know how frustrating it can be when there is no resource to be able to make that progress and you’re just standing still.

In this post we’ve explored some of the options to explore when you have very few resources. The bottom line is there is always something that you can do to improve your website, its content and how you manage both. If you’d like to discuss how you can improve your website, then get in touch!