You have a powerful CRM. A configured analytics system. Maybe even a marketing automation platform that promised to revolutionize your campaigns.

And yet, every time you need to launch a landing page for a new program, the answer is still the same: "Open a ticket."

In the last two editions, we explored how open source can trap you in obsolete versions and how "free" hides massive costs. But there's a third problem that's rarely named, and it's possibly the most costly of all:

The time your marketing team loses waiting.

The invisible bottleneck

A Gartner study revealed that 56% of marketing leaders experience delays in their campaigns directly linked to dependencies on other teams, especially web development. Wrike adds that bottlenecks in asset production can delay campaigns by up to 40%.

Read those numbers again. We're not talking about technical failures or insufficient budgets. We're talking about campaigns that simply don't go out on time because the process prevents it.

In universities, this translates into very concrete situations:

And meanwhile, leads keep arriving at outdated pages. Or worse: they don't arrive.

The paradox of the "powerful" CMS

Here's the irony. Most universities I know have marketing teams with access to their CMS. Technically, they "can" edit content.

But "can" and "do" are very different things.

In typical WordPress or Drupal, "editing content" means navigating a backend that looks nothing like the final website. It means wondering if that change will break something. It means not being able to preview how it will look on mobile. It means, in many cases, not daring to touch anything important.

The result is predictable: the marketing team ends up depending on IT for any change that goes beyond correcting text.

A web marketing agency recently documented that some marketing teams spend almost 20 hours a month—the equivalent of half a work week—simply trying to get basic updates to production on a legacy CMS. That's not inefficiency. It's paralysis.

The cost that doesn't appear in any budget

When we talk about platform costs, we usually think about licenses, hosting, maintenance. But there's a cost that's almost never quantified: opportunity cost.

Every day a campaign is stalled is a day without capturing leads. If a competitor can launch a new program page in a day and it takes you a month, they're capturing market share that should be yours.

In higher education, where student decision cycles are long but action moments are very specific (fairs, enrollment periods, scholarship deadlines), speed isn't a luxury. It's the difference between filling a program or not.

The EducationDynamics trends report for 2025 says it clearly: "Agility and responsiveness define the leaders" in higher education marketing. Institutions that can't adapt their campaigns quickly are at a competitive disadvantage.

Why technology isn't the problem (but isn't the magic solution either)

It would be easy to say the problem is WordPress or Drupal. But it's not that simple.

The real problem is an operating model where the marketing team has the responsibility to generate results, but not the authority to execute. Where every change to the website requires the intervention of a team with completely different priorities.

IT isn't sabotaging marketing. They're doing their job: maintaining stable systems, prioritizing strategic projects, managing security. The problem is that those priorities rarely coincide with the timing of a recruitment campaign.

A Sitecore article sums it up well: only 8% of B2B marketing teams can claim that the vast majority of their projects move forward efficiently. The remaining 92% live somewhere on the spectrum between "complicated" and "impossible."

Three symptoms that your website is holding back marketing

1. Your team is afraid of the website. If content and marketing teams hesitate before requesting changes because the process is too painful or they fear breaking something, you have an agility problem. A website that's scary is a website that doesn't get updated.

2. IT is the gatekeeper, not the enabler. If your development team spends more time on "web maintenance" and minor fixes than on high-value projects, the system is draining them. Their time is being consumed by inefficient infrastructure.

3. You can't answer "What's the ROI of our website?" If your site is too difficult to update and test, you can't effectively measure which messages or layouts work. Lack of agility leads to lack of clear performance data.

The Comillas Pontifical University case

For five years, Comillas tried to solve its web ecosystem with Joomla. Multiple agencies. Multiple attempts. The result: a system nobody knew how to use well and total dependence on external providers for any change.

The transformation came when they changed the approach. They didn't look for "a more powerful CMS." They looked for a platform where the marketing team could work autonomously.

Today, more than 100 editors at Comillas publish content independently. The communications team can create microsites for events without opening tickets. Marketing can launch program landing pages in hours, not weeks.

The change wasn't just technological. It was operational. For the first time, the people responsible for results had the tools to achieve them.

The difference between technical autonomy and freedom to execute

There's an important distinction that's rarely made.

Technical autonomy is being able to modify source code, install plugins, configure servers. It's what open source promises and, to a large extent, delivers.

Freedom to execute is being able to launch a campaign when needed, without intermediaries, without tickets, without waiting. It's what the marketing team really needs.

The problem is that many universities have optimized for the former thinking they would get the latter. They've chosen platforms that give maximum technical control to IT, assuming that would translate into maximum agility for marketing.

It doesn't work that way.

IT's technical freedom doesn't create operational freedom for marketing. In fact, it usually creates the opposite: systems so flexible they require experts for any change, so customizable that no one else can touch them.

What a university marketing team really needs

After years working with marketing teams in higher education, the patterns are clear. What they need isn't more features or more technical control. It's:

Immediacy. Being able to make changes and see them reflected instantly. Not in staging. Not in preview. On the real website, with one click.

Confidence. Knowing they won't break anything. That the components they use are designed to work well together. That the brand stays consistent automatically.

Independence. Not depending on IT to update a price, change a date, create a landing page. Being able to respond to the market at the speed the market demands.

Visibility. Seeing what works and what doesn't. Being able to iterate. Being able to test. Being able to learn from data and act on it.

This isn't a wishlist. It's the minimum standard to compete in recruitment today.

Time as competitive advantage

IE University had a common problem: each new school or program required approximately two years to develop its complete web presence. The process involved multiple departments, multiple approvals, multiple development cycles.

When they changed their operating model, they managed to launch 30 new sites in a single year. Not because they worked more hours or hired more people. Because the system stopped being the bottleneck.

That's a 75% reduction in time-to-market. In recruitment terms, it means IE can respond to market opportunities four times faster than before.

While other universities are still in the "requirements specification" phase, IE is already capturing leads.

The question you should be asking

The next time you evaluate your web platform, don't just ask about features, security, or license cost. Ask:

"How many days pass between marketing deciding to launch a landing page and that landing page capturing leads?"

If the answer is "weeks" or "it depends on IT," you have a competitiveness problem, not a technical problem.

In a market where students expect immediate and personalized responses, where decision windows are narrow and competition is global, speed of execution isn't a nice-to-have.

It's the competitive advantage.

In summary

In the next edition: How leading universities are structuring their web teams to maximize speed without sacrificing control. Governance that accelerates instead of slowing down.