The Problem with Marketing in Silos

When work happens in siloes, it can be largely unproductive and can have a negative impact on customer experience.

Take a look at these stats -

Teams working in siloes are not something new and the impact is quite self-evident.

Source: AMA & EConsultanc

A study by Smart Insights and TFM&A reveals that teams structured in siloes is one of the top 2 factors that limit integration of digital marketing channels.

The trouble with silos?

You will have

• Blurry business vision

• Unnecessary work

• Misaligned goals

• No collaboration

• Duplication of effort

• Increase in costs

• Lack of synergy

• Increased frustration

• Faulty decision-making

• Stunted growth

• Restricted flow of information

In today’s world, customers use more devices and engage with a brand on more touchpoints than ever before. And so brands adopt an omnichannel marketing strategy— using different martech tools, Cloud storage solutions, agencies, and publishing tools. What ends up happening because of this is that everything is in silos.

Marketers are not able to quickly find and re-use content in various channels and so more time, money and energy is spent in executing their strategies.

Your business creates channel-specific content

You use several applications to create content for specific channels – it could be for email marketing or for your push notifications on mobile devices. What ends up happening is that there is content specific to one channel – which can’t easily be adapted for others. So your audience gets different experiences on different channels and not one seamless experience across the board.

All your content is scattered

When you engage with your customers on various channels, you need to produce content in large volumes, even if takes a lot of time and money. Each channel probably uses a tool or agency the people are comfortable with which scatters all the content in various places and tools. Only that department knows of the existence of this content. This content is hardly re-used because it is not stored properly for everyone to be aware of its existence or access it when needed. So instead of getting more out of each piece of content, the team spends more creating more.

You use disparate and disconnected Systems and Applications

Each channel and every function uses different systems, and very often these systems don’t talk to each other. Without one single system that can bring all the various other tools and systems together, marketers can’t use the data on one tool to support another one. This use of various dis-jointed systems can cause a lot of problems for the marketer. They either spend time and energy creating new content or looking for the old that they can’t find easily or trying to distribute the content across channels. The content that was created for one channel, is then adapted for another by a whole new different department – which can produce variations in the messaging and cause inconsistency.

For omni channel marketing to be effective, it is important to have content that can be re-used, content that is not specific to only one channel and content that can be accessed by anyone in the system.

You need one tool that can do all this – or can speak to all the various disparate systems and integrate them. You should be able to find and access content from anywhere, tag all the content automatically for better tracking and use.

As part of our consulting practice, we work with some brands on end-to-end campaign management including creative generation and landing page development. We put a lot of effort into making sure they are as persuasive as possible. We have stringent quality checking mechanisms in place to ensure that tracking codes are deployed.

On the other hand, we work with brands on campaign management where the creative and landing page development are handled by the client's creative agency. Sometimes these landing pages don’t get the attention they deserve! It could be that the development of hardworking campaign creatives and landing pages with basic hygiene is not very important in the creative agency's scheme of things.

How do you handle the integration of all your marketing efforts? Write and tell us at [email protected]. We would love to hear what you think.