The “Next-Quarter” ROI of Fixing Your Website

By Adam Picker, Senior Director, Business Development at Material

When executives say, “We need to fix the website,” they don’t mean make it prettier. They mean it’s not performing. Traffic isn’t turning into leads. Teams can’t move fast enough. Content is stale or scattered. Personalization’s stuck. Reporting doesn’t add up.

In other words, the site isn’t doing its job. And your category is too competitive for these missteps.

The fix isn’t a redesign. It’s not a platform switch. It’s not even about more content.

The fix is making the site easier to update, easier to measure and easier to improve. The good news is that you can do all that without a massive overhaul, by fixing what’s under the surface: the structure, the content model, the way updates and testing get done.

That’s where next-quarter ROI comes from.

Fixing Structure Fixes Speed

Most marketing and digital teams know what needs to change — or at least the outcomes they need from changes. The problem is getting it done.

If the content model is too rigid, teams lack autonomy and can’t deliver the right message to key audiences at the most opportune moments.

If templates are too limiting, teams operate in workarounds that just don’t land the way they should.

If updates require too many approvals or too much dev time, teams can’t move at the speed your market requires.

Fixing the site means rethinking structure. It means reusable components, clear governance and authoring tools that let people act on insight because they can’t afford to wait weeks to publish a tweak.

Experimentation = Results Now, Better Decisions Later

An improved website gives you room to experiment and a way to measure those experiments. Measurement, after all, is understanding. The ability to test a call to action, swap a hero image or tailor content for a specific audience segment quickly and safely can deliver immediate returns, and it also changes how teams make decisions. Experiments replace opinion with evidence.

That evidence becomes fuel for bigger decisions:

• Which messages convert intent into action.

• Which segments don’t respond to broad messaging, and where to invest deeper personalization efforts.

• Which parts of the journey are leaking attention, and which moments are doing more heavy lifting than you thought.

• Where your content model or navigation structure is getting in the way of the tasks users need to complete.

Over time, the learnings compound. You start knowing what works. That makes your next campaign smarter, your next content brief sharper, your next design refresh more matter-of-fact — and your next roadmap can now be grounded in reality.

Content to Move the Needle

Most enterprise teams don’t have a content problem. They have a content system problem.

Assets exist, but they’re hard to find, harder to reuse and often out of sync with what users actually need. Teams create from scratch when they should be building from shared blocks. Pages take too long to publish. Updates get bottlenecked.

Fixing your website means fixing the content supply chain: how content gets created, approved and delivered.

Many of those fixes are a mix of procedural and structural, and can be tackled fast, without a replatform or major tech overhaul:

• A gradual move to reusable components and away from rigid or bespoke templates.

• A lightweight content review loop using analytics to flag the 20 most-visited pages and assess whether users are completing key actions.

• A habit of testing small changes such as CTA copy or block layout order on high-traffic pages to learn what drives better outcomes.

• A tagging and taxonomy system that reflects how people actually search and decide.

• Clear roles for who creates, who updates and who approves content.

• A model that supports global standards but recognizes the need for local, line of business or departmental teams to have autonomy and flexibility.

Personalization Doesn’t Require a Moonshot

Too many marketers believe personalization requires perfect data, complex tooling and a fully unified stack.

Yet you can make your site more relevant just by using signals you already have:  location, device type, repeat visits, page behavior, traffic origin, weather.

If your team has basic analytics and a modern CMS, you can:

• Swap in region-specific case studies on a returning visitor’s homepage.

• Change CTAs based on time of day or journey stage.

• Tailor page modules to industry, location or past behavior.

• Highlight the next logical piece of content based on what someone just viewed.

These are simple, audience-aware changes you can test, measure and scale. You don’t even need a customer data platform to start. All you need is the capability to do some dynamic content swapping and a few creative versions to change in and out.

This approach takes personalization from a capital-P Project to a series of practical experiments that enable you to build confidence, capability and buy-in over time.

Small Fixes for Ongoing Results

If your site is slow to update, hard to measure or disconnected from what your audience needs, it’s a fixable problem. There’s no need for a total rebuild or overhaul to realize ROI.

With structural and procedural changes, new habits and a few smart experiments that show what’s working and what’s next, you can show progress and build momentum. Of course, knowing exactly how to rethink your site’s structure and content supply chain isn’t always intuitive. Material can help, because we’ve empowered global enterprises to reap website ROI in both the short and the long term. Get in touch today to learn what we can do for you.