Integrating your marketing team is no longer just a noble goal. It is crucial to staying in step with the sophisticated expectations of today’s customers, who expect not only that you know who they are, but what they want, and when they want it.
This year, 80 per cent of marketers said that silos within marketing prevent them from understanding campaign performance across different channels. This disconnect can result in fragmented campaigns and the squandering of an important opportunity to understand customers as they interact with the ever-growing number of marketing systems and technologies.
Marketing is a segmented discipline, often involving external agencies and parties, each with different objectives and perspectives. All marketing teams need to work together so that people and projects share the same vision and goals. Marketing functions where individuals and teams have a broader view of customer behaviour across channels are more likely to deliver seamless experiences that connect across each channel for each customer.
To make this challenge of unification more challenging, digital marketing is evolving daily. Marketers have to understand the developments and make the right choices about the technologies they invest in. Once new technologies are added, their teams - and their data - need to be unified into the larger marketing effort.
Identifying the silos that exist within your marketing department is the first step toward unifying teams, technologies and data. The following four areas are where many organisations have unintentionally formed silos:
1. Cultural Silos
One of the most significant barriers to implementing technology that streamlines operations and enables integration is anxiety from employees. Fearing that their skill set or job could be in jeopardy, people within the organisation can block the path to progression, intentionally or even unintentionally. Enterprises need clear communication and proper retraining programmes to break down this cultural resistance. Communication is key.
2. Process Silos
Marketers are often focused on product or channel centric KPIs designed to boost their own function or department. This narrow view doesn’t always benefit the organisation as a whole. A customer-centric approach can help eliminate those barriers by connecting the dots between processes and departments.
The key is ensuring that each marketing function understands what contribution they, and others make, to different points along the customer journey. By looking at, and mapping, the bigger picture, individuals should have an appreciation for all elements of the marketing function. It’s important that each marketing area is recognised for the part it plays in the final outcome.
3. Data Silos
One of the more daunting challenges in eliminating silos is bringing together the many disparate sources of marketing and customer data within an organisation.
The Teradata survey shows that 43 per cent of marketers have achieved fully integrated data across teams, compared with just 18 per cent in 2013. But technology challenges persist as new technologies are being added to marketing’s portfolio. The only way for organisations to become truly insight-driven and customer-focused is through making wise technology investment decisions.
Choosing what appears to be an all-in-one marketing cloud solution, for example, can actually make unification of data and your marketing teams difficult. Some of the products included in the solution may be better than others, and there may be external competitor products your organisation would prefer to include to meet your strategic goals.
The closed nature of these all-in-one systems – and their walled-off data – may make a “best technology choice for my needs” selection process impossible to execute. And with new social media platforms and marketing technologies appearing daily, being able to configure the unique set that will give your organisation a competitive edge is crucial. Finally, you can’t wait for a vendor to graft a new technology on to a closed system if your competitor may be equipped with it months sooner.
Open marketing enables rapid innovation and marketing agility by borrowing its approach from open source technology. Tearing down the walls between systems through open technologies and shared data means that teams can more easily collaborate and unify. This open approach allows for innovation and for custom sets of marketing technologies to be assembled rapidly. This approach is the only way to successfully meet the unique needs of your organisation in today’s hypercompetitive digital marketplace.
Reporting Silos
Each marketing function is collecting its own pool of data, data that provides valuable insight. Imagine the enhanced value of the individual data from each marketing system if it could all be pooled together. Unifying this data enables the analysis of trends across channels and functions, providing more important insights and informing more intelligent decisions. Creating and distributing 20 reports from 20 different analytics tools, for instance, is counterproductive. It’s information overload without insight.
A unified dashboard, which looks across all tools to extract critical insights and present them in digestible format, equips marketers to improve their interactions with customers.
Adopting an open marketing approach to enable the elimination of silos, share data and unite teams is the critical path to knowing and understanding each individual customer and creating a valuable ongoing relationship with them. That approach is what customers expect today, and delivering on that expectation can only be accomplished by breaking down your marketing silos.
By David Mennie, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Acquia.
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