By role · 4 tools
The web stack for a VP of Marketing
A VP of Marketing is choosing what a team will live in, not what to use this afternoon. The right pick is the one a marketer can operate without a developer, that a new hire learns in a week, and that does not have to be replaced the next time the brand changes.
What is a VP of Marketing actually accountable for?
You approve tools rather than open them. Your team works inside whatever you choose for the next couple of years, and the cost of a wrong pick is not the licence fee. It is a year of marketers waiting on a developer for changes they should be making themselves.
What should a VP of Marketing standardise the team on?
Four picks, each with the trade it makes. None of them is the right answer for every company, and a shortlist where everything is excellent is an advert.
Your team edits and publishes the site without a developer in the loop. That queue disappearing is the thing you are actually buying.
Watch outIt takes real training, and the honest number is not the one in the demo. Editing existing content is an afternoon. Building pages is weeks, and being fast is months.
Content is stored apart from the design, so the redesign you approve in two years is a new front end rather than retyping the site.
Watch outHeadless means somebody has to connect it to the site. That is an engineering dependency at setup, bought to avoid a larger one later.
Experimentation you can defend in a budget review, with the permissions, audit trail and support an enterprise agreement asks for.
Watch outIt pays back only when someone owns it full time. Bought as a capability rather than as a person's job, it becomes an unused line item.
Worth standardising on so the AI work your team does is reviewable and repeatable, rather than living in private chat windows nobody else can see.
Watch outIt expects a terminal, which is a genuine barrier for a marketing team. Prove it with one person before rolling it anywhere.
What can a VP of Marketing hand to an assistant?
Each of these is one file you paste once, and then the job runs the same way every time.
Page briefTurn a rough page idea into a brief you can hand to a builder, or to Claude: who it is for, what sections it needs, and what each one has to say.QA passPut a page through the same checks every time: how it holds up at seven screen widths, what the markup says, whether anyone on a keyboard can get through it, and whether the words are right.Learnings checkBefore you build a test, find out whether your team already ran it. It searches the finished tests, weighs each one by how recent and how proven it is, and tells you to proceed, change it, or think again.Which tools should a VP of Marketing connect to their assistant?
Connecting these means asking a question about the real site instead of copying screenshots into a chat window.
Questions people in this role ask
Taken from what people actually ask about this, not written to fill the page.
How long will it take my team to learn Webflow?
A few hours for someone who only edits existing content, several weeks to be comfortable building pages, and a few months before anybody is genuinely fast. Budget for the second number rather than the first. The common failure is buying it for a whole team, training nobody properly, and ending up with two people everyone queues behind.
Webflow or a headless CMS?
Webflow when this is your marketing site and the goal is a team that ships without engineering. Headless, meaning Storyblok or Sanity, when the content also feeds a product, an app or several markets. If the words only ever appear on one website and you have no developer, headless adds the dependency you were removing.
What happens to our content when we redesign?
Text, images and structured content move with moderate effort. Custom interactions, animations and anything unusual in the layout get rebuilt. That gap is the actual argument for keeping content separate from design. It does not make a redesign free, it makes it a front-end project instead of a retyping project.
How do I know whether we are running too many tools?
Ask what each one costs once the labour around it is priced in, not what the invoice says. A tool nobody has time to operate is a line item, and the stitching between disconnected systems usually costs more than any single subscription. Cut on how much a tool is actually used rather than on its price.
Can marketers use AI coding tools without engineers?
For internal work, yes. Reports, drafts, one-off scripts and page briefs need no engineer in the loop. For anything a customer sees, tell an engineer before it ships. The barrier is not capability, it is the terminal, so prove it with one person on your team before rolling it out to everyone.
Not your job?
Every tool named here has a full entry in the stack, with the verdict and what it costs you.