The siloed treatment of marketing is one of the most scandalous mistakes that businesses are making today. Even experts like Neil Patel talk openly about the determinants of marketing siloing. Worse, not only do marketing teams often operate independently from, say, sales and research teams, but it’s also increasingly common for inter-marketing department processes like social media and content to now sit at odds with one another, or at least rarely cross paths.

This is a significant problem, especially as consumers who interact with cross-platform marketing now expect brand consistency more than ever. The question is, what exactly happens to your marketing efforts when they sit in a silo? And perhaps more important, what can you do to change that before it’s too late to undo the damage caused?

What Happens When Your Marketing Sits In A Silo?

 

1. You limit your ability to track results.

It’s only by correlating things like marketing launches, alongside resultant sales department figures, etc., that you can truly understand whether a marketing campaign has proven lucrative. When you put barriers in the way of this, you create significant blind spots that can only ever end up damaging efficiency.

Often, combining even cross-departmental data is the most important way around this challenge. This can be achieved through data integrations that use reverse ETL or similar processes to provide an applicable, one-source insight center for everyone.

It’s also well worth initiating things like complete marketing department meetings, or even meetings between the heads of marketing and different departments. These kinds of meeting can offer more direct and immediate feedback that keep marketing campaigns focused and on the right track at all times.

2. Your employees end up feeling unmotivated.

When marketing teams don’t talk to each other or anyone else, it’s way more likely that team members will end up having to redo or adjust work that was created without background information in the first place. Employees may therefore end up feeling unmotivated and uninspired.

This can increase the risk of both lackluster marketing efforts in the first place, and high turnover among your team. Consistent collaborative meetings and email conversations, etc. that include all connected parties are the best option in this instance. Make sure that any relevant information is provided along with a project brief, instead of after the work is already completed.

3. Your marketing loses its cross-platform pulling power.

Marketing teams now need to be present across multiple platforms. Content uploads like infographics, blog posts, etc. should ideally be shareable across each of those platforms to strengthen and extend client relationships. Unfortunately, if your social marketing team never talks to your content writers, graphic designer, etc., then this is going to be far harder to achieve, resulting in marketing that always has a limited reach.

By comparison, departments and individual teams who work together are far better able to tailor content for this cross-platform focus, making each marketing campaign far more lucrative, and potentially even saving everyone work in the long run.

Marketing might feel like a standalone process, but you need to remove those silos if you want to avoid these mistakes.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya