Content Marketing

Paula Ximena Mejia, Wix Studio: 3 actionable strategies to free up marketing bottlenecks

Paula Ximena Mejia, Wix Studio: 3 actionable strategies to free up marketing bottlenecks

Duncan is an award-winning technology industry analyst, specialising in cloud computing, blockchain, martech and edge computing.


Marketing teams are under constant pressure to go to market faster, yet many face recurring bottlenecks that slow their progress. Resource inefficiencies, team constraints and misaligned goals are some of the most common culprits. While these challenges can feel overwhelming, solving them is critical for driving growth and ensuring long-term success.

Paula Ximena Mejia, VP of enterprise marketing of Wix Studio, is a marketing leader with years of experience solving these exact challenges across customer success, e-commerce and inbound marketing.

Simply speaking, a marketing bottleneck is when a team’s not able to produce campaigns or assets as quickly as they should, Mejia explains. 

“I think sometimes managers will feel it, but not as much as the people on the ground will feel it,” she says. 

“So it looks a lot like five rounds of reviews where briefs have to be reconstructed. It looks like team frustration. It looks like missed deadlines and generally the sense of things going too slow.”

It’s a scenario that most marketers will likely recognise, according to Mejia. “It’s an extremely frustrating position to be in from a team point of view, but also from a marketing goal point of view. It’s quite toxic, because marketers are in a very fast paced environment where you are competing for attention, and the way you are able to compete is by putting your content in front of your audience at the right time. 

“If it takes you too long to do that, then you’re not able to get the feedback loops you need in order to create the most efficient processes, and you won’t be able to get the most out of your resources, whether that’s budget or people.”

The bottlenecks are most likely to occur when marketing teams don’t keep the ‘why’ front of mind.

Marketers focus on goals. They understand the goal of any particular campaign they’re working on. But why is it the goal? It’s a key step in the process that Mejia believes is often skipped. 

“In marketing, you can also get caught up in vanity metrics, and how many likes something gets,” she says. “I’m not saying that those metrics are not relevant. They very much can be. It just depends on why it’s important. And it’s not because a post went viral that you are necessarily succeeding. 

“You need to understand how it’s connected to your larger goal. So it’s both the goal and it’s the why. And this really trickles down from the team plan for the quarter or the year, down to the specific campaign.”

As far as Mejia is concerned, marketing briefs are sacred, but so is quarterly planning because those documents, although she admits they can feel a tad bureaucratic, are crucial in keeping marketing managers aligned with company leadership, and keeping themselves aligned with their teams when it comes to deciding what types of campaigns they’re working on, why they’re working on them and, ultimately, what success looks like.

“Those are really important pillars to make sure that things don’t get messy and fall apart,” says Mejia.

But there are three key actionable strategies to free up these bottlenecks and help marketing teams become more agile and efficient:

• Structuring teams to maximise efficiency,

• Defining key roles that every team must have, and

• Selecting the right tech stack to streamline operations and collaboration.

Team structure

“There was a trend for a while to go for very specialised marketing roles, and there are situations where you’ll need a professional content writer to write really great content,” says Mejia.

“But I think that when your team requires more agility, having generalists that you can plug and play in different situations can be a very strong advantage when it comes to creating more agile work and testing more often. 

“I’ve definitely fallen into the trap of thinking I really need a specialist that works only on this area, and then goals changed and specific targets we had shifted. All of a sudden that specialty was completely irrelevant to the thing that I had to deliver. And then you have to think about restructuring.”

Teams can take a long time to put together, and you’re never really done building them, notes Mejia.

“It’s not like, ‘oh, I finally hired everyone and we’ll just work and it’ll be amazing for all time’. Because things are always changing. So when you work in a really dynamic environment, which marketing tends to be, I find that when you build a team with many generalists, you are more easily able to adapt to those changes.

“That’s very specific to my experience at Wix today. I know that there are some situations where you will need some specialists, but I think that it’s a good way to prepare for the potential of change, which in my job is 100% guaranteed.”

Key roles

As far as key roles are concerned, Mejia says you definitely need an operations manager when you’re thinking about processes and making sure everything is optimised. 

She explains: “Depending on how much headcount you have available to you, you may have a hybrid, someone that’s really project management-oriented and process-oriented, doing that and something else. But I do think that there is the need to have this as a responsibility for someone in the team that could also be the manager, depending, again, on the size and the skill set. 

“I find that when you have someone who’s being measured on how smooth the processes are, how well everything is working, how clear the goals are for everyone in the team, it just tends to unlock a lot. And I love writers and designers and product marketing managers. They’re all very talented people, but I think if you just let them be, the processes can get a little bit murky and and all of a sudden, deadlines don’t get set, right? Because you’re doing your thing and working on your piece, whatever it might be, and then you need someone there to have those very clear deadlines and be able to work backwards from those. Tell people, ‘okay, if this is happening in four weeks, content needs to be done by then, and design needs to be done by then. And should we need to move that in one way or another, there needs to be a very good reason.”

The right tech

As well as assembling the right people on a team, having the right technological tools for them to use is also vital.

“I was talking to a lot of marketers in the summer,” Mejia explains. “And someone was telling me about their tech stack for their marketing team. It included three CRMs and all sorts of things where there was so much redundancy. It’s expensive and it’s complicated, and it actually makes the work harder. 

“I think everyone who’s managing a marketing team needs to make sure that they’re doing a tech stack audit. Whether you own the responsibility of your software or not, at the end of the day you will be the user. 

“An audit is there to help you understand what you have, because, for instance, you can have licenses you didn’t even know you had, and they’re just wasting resources in the background.”

It’s also important to understand how the different software licenses you have available connect with each other. If there is an overlap, is there a reason for that? 

Mejia says: “Maybe there is a capability that A has that B doesn’t have, and that’s why you need both. But probably not, right? There is probably a solution that can encompass all of them. 

“Making sure that the team you have and the software you have aligns is really important. So you can be in a situation where some software is extremely technical, but not everyone in your team is extremely technical. So is that a bottleneck? Some CMSs require developers or a very technical person. 

“If you’re creating digital assets, that becomes a bottleneck. But it might not be. You may not need that level of technical skill for the types of resources you’re creating, so just make sure that you are up to date with what you’re using, how it’s working, and then take a look at what’s on the market. 

“Because if you bought your software five years ago, especially with all the stuff that’s been happening with AI in the past two years, there may be much better, more advanced solutions available to you. And then, of course, if you are sharing this information with your finance team or your IT team, tell them, ‘we looked at all this stuff and it turns out I don’t need 50 seats for this license, and I would actually rather reduce those two and get this one instead’. 

“They’ll be pretty happy. I think that they’ll get on board, and you’ll have a much stronger partnership with those teams.”

And Mejia says all this while still acknowledging that there’s a lot of pressure on marketers and marketing leaders. “It’s all about ROI, and grow this and grow that,” she says. “So maybe the idea of also owning responsibility for your tech stack sounds daunting. But, for me, it’s as important as saying you need to be responsible for the people that work under you.”

Focusing on the structure of your marketing team, defining those key roles and really nailing your tech stack can go a long way towards eliminating the marketing bottlenecks and, ultimately, help achieve whatever targets you’ve set.

Summing up, Mejia says: “Take a look at what you’re planning to do and be very honest with themself about what you think is actually worth doing – and cut out the rest.”

Interested in hearing leading global brands discuss subjects like this in person? Find out more about Digital Marketing World Forum (#DMWF) Europe, London, North America, and Singapore.

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