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Dec 02, 2024 • 2 Minute Read • Elizabeth Spranzani, Directrice de la technologie
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The Modern CMO’s Guide to AI, Brand Strategy & Performance Marketing
Apr 28, 2025 • 10 Minute Read • Elizabeth Spranzani, Directrice de la technologie
CMOs: Are you feeling the squeeze? From rising revenue targets to the rapid adoption of AI, the modern marketer faces many complexities and competing priorities. But there are practical solutions to help you stay ahead.
At the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Alliance's Summit in New York, I took to the stage with Webflow's Chief Evangelist, Guy Yalif, to cover some of the most pressing challenges marketing leaders face today. We began with the growing pressure on marketers to do more with less and guided the audience through the evolving content management system (CMS) landscape, the role of AI, and practical strategies for selecting the right platform for their organizations. In this article, I'll share the key insights from our session.
The Pressure is On: Doing More with Less
Today's CMOs are under more pressure than ever, facing higher revenue targets while grappling with flat or shrinking budgets and rising paid media costs. Last year, only 24% of CMOs reported they had enough budget to execute their 2024 strategy. This "CMO squeeze" demands a more strategic approach to every dollar spent.
At the same time, AI is reshaping search engine optimization (SEO) and the buyer’s journey, and outbound tactics are losing effectiveness. While generative AI (GenAI) is impressive, there’s still a wide gap between the hype and the reality of operationalizing it. Demos might wow, but turning AI into a scalable, reliable business solution takes serious effort.
All signs point to one thing: it’s getting harder to attract and convert customers, whether through paid or earned channels. That’s why the most important thing you can do this year is find the right balance between performance, brand, and AI to drive both engagement and long-term growth.
So, where do you focus?
Making Your Website A Priority
Your website is your business and brand’s front door and credibility builder. As a revenue driver, according to Webflow's State of the Website Report, 91% of marketing leaders say the website generates more revenue than any other marketing channel. With 94% of B2B buyers researching online, they're turning to it for proof points, case studies, and insights that de-risk their decision-making.
As CMOs, you must build the brand with storytelling and drive performance with logic and numbers. Ideally, brand and performance complement one another, but when things get tough, it's numbers you rely on. For many B2B marketers, 2023 and 2024 were all about survival, with marketing budgets slashed and performance spending under pressure.
In a tough market climate, with rising performance pressure and evolving AI capabilities, marketing leaders need to rethink their operations. Three key enablers for success are executive alignment, empowered marketing, and a strong brand foundation.
- When a brand sets clear guardrails, performance can move faster.
- When technology empowers marketing with the right tools and autonomy, teams waste less time on low-value tasks.
- And when CMOs speak the language of CFOs and boards—tying the brand to business metrics like customer acquisition costs (CAC) and long-term value—they can unlock the investment they need.
It all comes down to leveraging the right technology and better collaboration across teams to go to market faster, smarter, and with more impact.
The Future CMS: Empowering Marketers Fully with Technology
How can CMOs go to market in a way that has brand-enabling performance and technology-enabled marketing?
Take advantage of the technology that exists today, especially in the systems that drive your content and website. Technology has been evolving dramatically, especially with AI.
The Chief Technology Officer's (CTO) team’s purpose should be to empower and fulfill the needs of the CMO and marketing. In fact, Webflow’s report shares that 96% of marketing leaders surveyed think they could better collaborate with technology leaders across all the functions.
The team under the CTO really needs to uphold the highest standards of quality, security, and best practices and balance that with the adoption of cutting-edge technology, all while keeping in mind their purpose and your needs as a CMO.
CMS – The Core Platform
Your CMS is the core platform that delivers your brand’s front-door experience. So, how will it empower you, and what should it look like?
It starts with how it’s built. The shift toward Software as a Service (SaaS) and headless architecture is more than a technology trend. It’s a strategic move. SaaS is cloud-first and headless. Many may ask why moving to SaaS is better. The answer? It eliminates historically time-intensive activities for technology teams.
SaaS eliminates the need for manual upgrades, reduces technical debt, simplifies deployments, and auto-scales infrastructure. The headless architecture breaks the dependency between platform code and front-end experience code, leading to more agile development and releases.
Your CMS should also be composable—able to integrate easily with best-in-class platforms—and offer low-code features to speed up execution.
Maybe you’ve heard the buzz around low code and code generation. It’s not just hype—it’s happening now. And while it may feel like a threat to some developers, the truth is,their roles aren’t disappearing...they’re evolving. With less time spent on routine tasks, they can focus on more strategic, high-impact work like integrations, data, and AI-driven agentic implementations.
AI’s Role: Transforming CMS and Marketing Operations
AI enhancements are growing within CMS platforms and adding tremendous features far beyond just generating content and images. AI can now generate brand-aware content briefs and assign tasks for you, orchestrate workflows, recommend tasks, perform compliance reviews, suggest a/b test variations and generate variants, provide insight into customer data and recommend actions, automatically translate content, brainstorm ideas and execute deep research, and summarize across multi-media, including documents, images, and video.
Autonomous and semi-autonomous experiences can be added to your customer-facing experiences, from search and product selection assistance to booking agents and more. It even acts autonomously through your website. The near future will include a sitemap and AI recommendations, component building, brand-guided design variations, and more.
Ultimately, AI allows marketing teams to become far more autonomous when rolling out the changes needed to align with your campaigns, without needing a developer every single time.
If you can reach this ideal technical architecture and integrate AI into your operations, it’ll allow you to shift where you’re spending your time and money toward something a lot more valuable.
Examples of Better Value-Spending:
1. Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Content Management Platforms (CMP)
CMPs help manage content before it hits your CMS, and they often include DAMs to organize assets for omnichannel use, where your website is just one destination. It has built-in guardrails that support brand consistency and streamline marketing ops. The result is time saved and a more cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints.
2. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
CDPs unify first-party data across platforms to create a 360-degree customer view. This enables cross-channel personalization, A/B testing, and experimentation, which were previously out of reach for many organizations. By reducing technical debt, you’re no longer stuck maintaining the basics and can focus on strategic efforts.
The CMS Ecosystem: What’s Best for Your Organization
Navigating the CMS ecosystem isn’t simple or easy, as it changes frequently. Now that many platforms are SaaS, providers are rolling out features quickly, and it’s hard to keep up with how they're differentiated.
To help grasp the ecosystem a little more, here’s a brief overview of the CMS platform types:
1. Open-Source Platforms
These are "free" and don’t need a license. But as we all know, cheap can be expensive. Many organizations choose a license-free platform, but they end up licensing plug-ins and paying for third-party services for infrastructure and service level agreements (SLAs). Additionally, without a license and contractor, there's no accountability or legal recourse. So, what if those in charge of that platform decide they don't like something and make unilateral decisions that impact the availability of features? We’ve seen that happen recently with WordPress.
Additionally, in a time when everything is moving so quickly and SaaS is allowing for features to be rolled out daily, open-source platforms are innovating at a slower pace and falling behind. AI and low code are essentially leveling the playing field in terms of cost.
2. Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)
DXPs are the big players, and they’re tried and true because their products perform well. But they also offer many products in a suite. Your CMS is one piece of that, and it can be expensive. Licensing annually can cost half a million dollars or more to have these products. There can be price breaks when you stay in-suite, and there may be better interoperability, but you start to sacrifice a best-of-the-breed approach. Your CMS might be a leader but maybe their marketing automation or DAM isn’t, and now you’re pressured to stay in-suite. Strong players DXP players include Optimizely, Sitecore, and Adobe, although all are still on a journey to be less monolithic and are not yet recognized by the MACH Alliance.
3. Headless Platforms
In a true headless CMS, the platform’s code is separate from your website’s code. While other types of CMS include headless options, I’ve called it out independently because some platforms are built specifically to be API-first and front-end agnostic. They don’t fall into categories like open source, DXP, or low code—they stand on their own.
That said, while these platforms offer flexibility, they're not always easy or affordable. You're still responsible for managing infrastructure and deploying your site. And from a marketer’s perspective, they are often limiting. There is usually no front-end page builder, so developers are still needed for page presentation updates. Some of these platforms are adding front-end tooling, but many are still behind the curve. Contentstack has made great strides to address the marketer's needs as it transitions from a pure headless CMS to DXP.
4. Low-Code Platforms
This category has changed a lot over the years. There was a time when low-code platforms were simple, templated, had limited customizations, and were definitely not enterprise-grade. Now, some low-code platforms allow for bespoke design experiences and dynamic content. Plus, some have personalization and A/B testing built in. These advancements are why Verndale has become involved with Webflow after primarily being in the DXP world. The low-code technology has come so far. Additionally, Webflow has evolved to be enterprise-grade, adding workflow, fine-grained security roles, guaranteed up times, and switching to the CDN Cloudflare.
Understanding these CMS categories can help you decide what matters most to you and what will empower you to reach your goals.
Where AI Should Help Across the CMO Role
As AI becomes an essential tool across the CMO’s entire scope of responsibilities, where does it really make an impact? And how should marketing leaders think about applying it across brand, performance, and strategy?
1. Building Brands
AI delivers effectiveness. It integrates into CMS and CMP in a way that allows it be brand-context aware. In recent releases, companies can upload brand documentation, brand guidelines, and style guides to enable the AI system to use it as context for generation. It also guides compliance for your marketers within the platforms.
The bottom line is that it ensures that your brand voice and visual brand representation in the content, website, or whatever it generates match your brand.
2. Delivering Performance
AI is transforming performance by accelerating content creation and campaign execution. It helps generate copy, videos, and images and plays a key role in experimentation, shaping ideas, launching tests, and analyzing results at scale. In a world flooded with content, personalization becomes even more important. Predictive AI helps ensure the right message reaches the right person at the right time.
Many marketing and ecommerce leaders are already using AI for things like product and content recommendations, optimizing campaigns across email and paid media, and improving chatbot experiences. It works behind the scenes to drive efficiency and stronger results across your entire performance strategy.
3. Driving Strategy
AI helps you make smarter decisions. From early research to execution, it contributes to your business and marketing strategy. It helps shape the prospect journey and embeds intelligence into every touchpoint—from context-aware search to chat support to autonomous tasks.
It uncovers how users are moving through their digital experiences, where they are dropping off, and what is driving success. It can analyze testing results, traffic patterns, and performance trends to uncover what is working and why. It can also scan competitor content and marketing moves, pulling insights from multiple sources in minutes. With autonomous agents, this kind of analysis can be ongoing and automatic.
At the end of the day, your CMS and AI should work together to help you build your brand, drive performance, and create consistency across every experience.
8 Tips for Setting AI Up for Success
Here are some real-world areas to consider with your CTO as you bring AI into your organization. These insights come directly from C-suite leaders sharing how AI drives business growth, so this isn't just generic ChatGPT advice.
1. Lower the Barrier for Entry: Make it easy to experiment with AI. If licenses are required, ensure marketing teams have access to try it for themselves. This also allows your organization to steer employees toward vetted products.
2. Change Management: Address concerns and help people feel comfortable with the new tools. It's important they don’t see AI as a threat but rather as an opportunity to improve what they’re already doing.
3. Build the AI Muscle: AI is constantly evolving, so don’t wait for it to be perfect. If you do, you risk falling behind while others move forward.
4. Be Intentional: Make sure everyone understands the purpose behind AI. Set clear objectives and communicate the desired outcomes.
5. Measure and Show ROI: AI isn’t free. Track the value it brings to ensure it’s more than worth the investment.
6. Focus on Mission-Critical Items: Identify your top two or three priorities and focus your AI efforts there.
7. Rebuild Use Cases: Revisit your use cases from the ground up to ensure they align with your AI strategy and goals.
8. Leverage AI Agents: Think of AI agents as long-term team members for major projects, helping scale efforts over time.
Embracing Change for 2025 and Beyond
The modern CMO's playbook is evolving fast. Navigating the squeeze, embracing AI, balancing brand and performance, and aligning marketing with technology aren’t just challenges—they’re opportunities. The key to success is a strategic, data-driven approach that maximizes impact while remaining adaptable.
As 2025 approaches, how are you adapting to stay ahead? Let us know your biggest challenges. We can help turn them into opportunities.