Five full months have already passed in the year 2015, and yet the “silo effect” is still a problem talked about in business. Furthermore, even marketing efforts still suffer from this impact. It is understandable that, if you are in a large business, you need departments just to make organization and leadership possible. However, for your marketing department and especially your internet marketing department, attempting to silo everything into different parts that do not communicate and interact is a recipe for failure.
Of course, you already know this. You have had the meetings, talked it over with your most trusted advisors, and you understand that trying to put your internet marketing efforts into silos will only result in failure. This is what leads to the next question: where do you start? How do you break down silos that have already been built up or, better yet, prevent the silos from being constructed in the first place? The following tips will allow you to create an integrated internet marketing plan that, in time, you will be able to turn into a fully integrated advertising strategy.
Change Begins at the Top
The first thing to remember that remember is that silos tend to be created as a way to make a steadily growing firm easier to manage. Preventing their creation, or breaking them down, requires commitment from managers. This means encouraging communication and pushing employees to step beyond their defined roles and show initiative. Team structure should be built around this group dynamic instead of splitting off teams into hyper-specialized roles. This degree of specialization may yield objectively better results, but said results will likely end up being subjectively worthless for your business objectives.
Furthermore, the design of silos is such that, even if those occupying them recognize a problem, they are powerless to tear them down on their initiative. As a consequence, if they have already been established it is up to management to bring them down.
Have a Unifying Plan
A business still needs to have all parties moving in the same direction. This is true regardless of how big your company is. Without that unifying vision, everybody is left pulling in a variety of different directions, and nobody is entirely sure where they are supposed to be going. In internet marketing, this is even more important, as you want to create a unifying tone across multiple platforms. Most people have multiple social media accounts, browse blogs, and consume wide varieties of content in numerous ways. If they get crossed messages across these various platforms, it could easily confuse your consumer.
Having a transparent strategy will allow everybody from the top to the bottom to know what they are supposed to be doing at any given moment. This also creates a clear sense of what other individuals outside of a particular specialty will be doing as well. Without this communication, your blog writer will end up writing content that doesn’t mesh with your social media audience. You can get far more reach when both your content creators and your social media managers (to name one example though this dynamic exists across multiple specialties) are both working to the same ends.
Incentivize Teamwork and Initiative
Remember that the various specialties in your internet marketing department all work with and complement one another. The whole point of this article is to break down silos, yet it is easy for employees to feel confined to those silos and focus on just doing their one job regardless. As such, provide incentives to those employees who break out from their traditional role and take on more responsibility than their job title would otherwise demand. You should also reward initiative, those employees who do things that need to be done without having to be prompted.
An example of rewarding teamwork and effort in the marketing space, for example, would be if somebody in your internet marketing department comes up with an idea for a campaign that asks users to solve a puzzle that requires them to go offline as well. If that employee then goes to the other specialists in your marketing team and arranges for the offline components to be put into play and assembles the pitch on his own to management to release the funds for the project, then a reward is in order.
Furthermore, to prevent individuals from hogging the glory, your best bet would be to provide these rewards to the entire team. Pay particular recognition to those who stand out, but the last thing you want is for employees to start undercutting those who have brilliant ideas in a way to benefit themselves at the expense of others – this would act as a disincentive to taking initiative.
Reorganize Your Teams
Any attempt at breaking down silos will require a reorganization of your teams. If you still have a team solely consisting of social media experts, a group solely of SEO experts, and another team solely of content marketers then the silo effect will be inevitable. As such, it is essential to mix up your teams.
Resist the urge to lump people together by job description. Instead, have teams consisting of a marketing manager and a specialist for each channel within that team, and encourage these groups to work with one another. Your internet marketing efforts are not a series of tubes; it is a combined effort of many parts moving towards a common end.
Quantify the Results
Attempting to break own silos built up over time in your internet marketing department requires justification of the time invested. Make sure you quantify results after implementing this re-organization. This is also essential for attempting to reward teams that work well together; you have to be able to quantify their results and justify any rewards given.
Successfully quantifying the results of each group does require knowledge of what your marketing objectives are and what goal each team should be trying to fulfill. It also helps to have clear, realistic standards for each team to meet.
In the end, trying to break down silos in your internet marketing efforts is no easy feat. It requires dedication and patience, and no small investment of time. If you are starting small and do not have silos built up, you are in a better position than those who have already created them. In either event, this guide should help you to break down silos in your internet marketing efforts, or at the very least provide organizational tips to prevent those silos from being built in the first place. You can also find further resources on this matter through sites such as Marketing Land and Forbes.
