Five Strategies to Break Down Digital Marketing Silos and Integrate Your Digital Marketing

It’s no secret that as digital marketing becomes increasingly sophisticated, it’s more important than ever for brands to have a cohesive, integrated marketing plan. Ensuring a consistent customer experience depends on aligning your overall strategy with channel-specific strategies. Equally important is breaking down digital marketing silos and integrating your teams, people and processes.

There are significant opportunities for brands and marketing professionals that can integrate effectively. Here are five strategies to break down digital marketing silos and integrate your digital marketing.

1. Use Brand Strategy to Drive Your Marketing, Not Channel Specific Tactics

Your brand strategy, and more specifically the goals that drive this strategy, should be the foundation of all of your channel specific tactics. It sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s very easy to lose sight of this when you get caught up in day-to-day tasks of your specific channel tactics.

Start by having a clear understanding of your target audience and then craft key messaging that can be repurposed across multiple channels. Set goals aligned with this strategy and make sure that you have the right metrics in place to measure these goals. For instance, say part of a campaign included a Facebook post that generated a high number of likes and shares. Great news right? Not if the goal of this particular campaign was not awareness, but instead lead generation and this post had a low conversion rate.

2. Focus on the Consumer: Keep the User in Mind at Every Touchpoint

Think of how the consumer interacts with your brand. In most instances, they will have multiple touchpoints before making a purchasing decision. Create clear, compelling and consistent messaging for each stage of the decision making process, as well what part of the optimization sequence consumers are in. For instance, if might be easy to user numbers in the messaging of your PPC ads because you know that numbers typically increase your click through rate. But if your PPC messaging doesn’t match your landing page, it results in a bad user experience where they are likely to leave the page immediately and keep looking.

3. Cross-train Employees to Understand How All of the Roles Work Together

Marketers can no longer succeed when they remain confined to a single, specialized digital marketing role. The content marketer needs to be able to interpret analytics that tell them whether or not they’re engaging the intended audience. The paid advertising specialist must not only know how to create content that will encourage people to not only click on his or her ads, but also understand Landing Page Optimization to also convert that click into a lead.

It’s also important to take this a step further and to not only come out of your digital marketing silos, but also your marketing silo. When you cross-train your employees, they gain an understanding why a web developer can’t implement a page design as the marketer had envisioned because of template restrictions. You’re a team and you’re all working towards the same goal, but sometimes it’s easy to forget.

4. Ensure that Your Agencies Work in Sync

As an agency, this is something we run into frequently. It is not uncommon for a client to use several different agencies for different aspects of the same campaign (print, display, PPC, SEO, etc.). We all want to help you meet your campaign goals, so it’s important for us to know all of the aspects, how they integrate together and what we can do to ensure a consistent look and feel across all channels.

5. Analyze, Adjust and Repeat

Once a campaign is complete, it’s time to figure out what worked and what didn’t. Did the brand messaging remain consistent through the funnels and optimization sequences? Are we using the right metrics to measure our goals? Analyzing this information saves time in the future so that you can repurpose the successful components into another campaign.

How Marketers Can Succeed Once Silos are Broken Down

Marketing silos that once separated channels, campaigns and even the skills of marketers themselves have come crashing down, and failing to provide customers with a strong, consistent brand image across all platforms will make your intended message much weaker, and ultimately impact your goals.

We must start breaking down silos within our organizations that are limiting our ability to successfully tell the world what we do, why we’re great, and why they should spend time investing in us as we invest in them.