Onkar Kailas Shankarpelli · Founder, Growth Sequences
Marketing should shape a website before it's designed, because marketing holds the information a website is supposed to be built around: who the buyer is, what they search for, what they ask AI systems, what they need to see before they trust a business, and what they do when they're ready. When that knowledge arrives after the site ships, the site was built on guesses, and the marketing budget goes on working around them. Putting marketing in the room first costs a few weeks. Leaving it out costs the site.
Why is marketing usually brought in last?
Because the website feels like a technology project and marketing feels like a later stage. The sequence seems logical: build the thing, then promote it. Most businesses follow it without ever deciding to.
There's also an ownership gap. Web agencies and developers are briefed on pages and features. Marketing agencies are briefed on channels and campaigns. Neither is briefed on the other's work, and nobody is asked to make the whole system produce enquiries. So the website company builds what was asked for, the marketing agency promotes what was built, and the space between them, where the buyer actually lives, is nobody's job.
The result is familiar to anyone who's run a marketing function. You inherit a site with a slogan where the value proposition should be, service pages that describe rather than answer, a contact form that feeds an inbox, no analytics events worth the name, and a structure that mirrors the org chart. Your first recommendation, politely phrased, is a rebuild.
What does marketing know that the website needs?
Seven things, and each one changes a design decision.
| What marketing knows | What it decides on the website |
|---|---|
| Who the buyer is, specifically | Which pages exist and who each one speaks to |
| The words buyers use when searching and asking AI | Headings, page titles, the language of the copy |
| The questions buyers need answered, in order | The content architecture and the sequence within each page |
| What proof buyers need before they'll trust you | Where case studies, credentials and reviews sit, and what they say |
| What competitors claim, and where the gaps are | The positioning the homepage leads with |
| What action fits each stage of the buying process | The calls to action, per page, and how much each form asks for |
| What happens after someone enquires | The CRM connection, the notifications, the first-response flow |
None of this is visual. All of it should exist before a wireframe does. When it doesn't, the designer fills the gaps with convention, which is why so many B2B sites look alike and convert alike.
What's changed in 2026?
One thing that makes the sequencing question more urgent.
Half of B2B software buyers now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year earlier, and seven in ten say AI guidance led them to choose a vendor they hadn't planned to (G2, 2026 Buyer Behavior Report). AI systems build those answers partly from what they can read on a business's website: whether it states plainly what the company is and who it's for, whether pages answer questions directly, whether claims come with sources, whether the structure is parseable.
Those are content and structure decisions. They're marketing's decisions. And they're almost impossible to retrofit onto a site designed around a slogan and an org chart, which is why marketing needs to be making them before the first wireframe rather than diagnosing their absence afterwards.
What does "in the room" actually mean?
It doesn't mean marketing designs the site. It means marketing does its research first, and the research becomes the brief.
In practice:
Before design starts, marketing (in-house or agency) produces the buyer research: personas with real buying questions, search and AI-prompt behaviour in the category, competitor positioning, the trust signals buyers look for, and the conversion goals per buyer type.
During content architecture, marketing and whoever is designing the site decide together which pages exist, what question each answers, and what action each prompts. The sitemap comes out of this, not before it.
During design, marketing reviews for whether each page does its job, not whether it looks nice.
Before build, marketing specifies the measurement: which events to track, how leads flow to the CRM, what source attribution looks like.
At launch, marketing isn't starting from scratch. It's activating channels on a site built to receive them. This is roughly how the first three stages of our method work, and it's the reason the method exists.
Doesn't this slow things down?
It adds four to six weeks before design begins. It usually shortens the total, because the build implements decisions instead of inventing them, there are fewer rounds of revision, and the site doesn't need rebuilding when marketing arrives.
It also changes the marketing budget. Campaigns landing on pages built to convert cost less per enquiry than campaigns landing on a homepage. SEO built into the content architecture costs less than SEO bolted onto a finished structure. The first six months of a marketing engagement stop being diagnosis and start being growth.
What should you do?
If you're about to build or rebuild a website:
- Hire or involve marketing before the web company, not after. Even a few weeks of research changes the brief.
- Make buyer research a deliverable. Personas, buying questions, search and AI-prompt language, competitor positioning, trust signals. Written down, handed to design.
- Have marketing sign off the content architecture. Every page should have a question it answers and an action it prompts. If a page has neither, ask why it exists.
- Specify measurement before build. Events, CRM connection, source attribution. If the first analytics conversation happens after launch, it's too late.
- Brief the web company on outcomes. "Generate qualified enquiries from operations directors at mid-size manufacturers" is a brief. "Eight pages, modern look" is a shopping list.
If you're a marketer inheriting a site built without you, document what's missing against the table above before you recommend anything. It turns "we want a redesign" into "here's what the site can't do and why," which is a conversation leadership can act on.
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