What are Marketing Silos?
When people speak about silos in a marketing organization, they are referring to heavily departmentalized teams. You have a group that cares exclusively about paid search, another that does organic search and still another that does social media. Each of your teams work on their own, focusing on goals within their own area, often even competing against other teams within the marketing department.
End Marketing Silos At Your Company
What are silos used for?
The Internet has definitevely moved from being an nice extra in the marketing world to being the focal point. An estimated 67 percent of the buyer journey now takes place digitally and about 94 percent of B2B customers will conduct research online before making a purchase. Customers now are online, and marketing needs to reflect that.
What is most significant about these developments, however is that a growing number of customers are channel agnostic. They do not have just one means of communicating with brands. They might do searches on Google, read articles their friends posted on social media or click on a few paid ads as they try to determine the brand and products that best fit their needs.
These online customers, however, expect to see the same messaging and branding from a company no matter where they interact with them. If you have a strong organic SEO presence but do not have anything to offer them on social media, they might just move on to a competitor who is better at meeting them where they are.
Marketing silos prevent the different parts of your marketing team from working together. They hinder progress and joint goal setting, which leads to disjointed user experiences. For marketing teams to be successful moving forward, they need to learn to form coherent groups with common goals and understand how to use all their methodologies to accomplish their objectives.
How do I do silo management?
- Encourage your different teams to develop documents defining common language. When everyone can communicate with the same words, it will be easier to understand each other’s perspective.
- Develop projects for the teams to work on together. This will help the different teams get to know each other and their respective objectives and methodologies.
- Offer workshops for members of different teams to get to know the basics of other types of marketing.
- Have the teams set common goals for new marketing campaigns and articulate how their specific group will work towards those goals.
Marketing silos are quickly becoming a hinderance in a successful marketing operation. Brands need to focus on bringing their different teams together so that they can work towards common goals and present a unified brand image no matter where customers might encounter them.
