Death To Marketing Silos: Why Your Teams Must Merge (or Die)
There’s just no getting away from the fact that content production is expensive; high-quality content even more so. Hence why you must balance strategy with efficiency. However, one classic way to undermine both strategy and efficiency is to have multiple marketing functions (content, SEO, digital PR, social media, etc.) creating their own content independently of each other for the same or similar target audiences.
For example, the SEO team commissions or creates content intended to boost search rankings. Briefs to writers are all about keywords, heading structure and which internal links to include. Meanwhile, the social media team wants content likely to spark the right conversations. Forget keywords; they care more about highly sharable nuggets of information and whether the primary image has been cropped to the ideal dimensions to display correctly in social feeds on every device.
Each team has a very different idea of what effective content looks like, focusing on different factors as they work towards completely different goals and KPIs.
Content marketing can’t function effectively in such a disjointed way. Instead, these various teams need to work collaboratively towards a common goal, forming three pillars that must all be present for your content to be truly effective.
Rather than multiple tactics and campaigns devised and executed independently of each other, all content serves a single strategic vision. Rather than inadvertently cannibalising or competing with each other’s efforts, the various disciplines and teams instead collaborate towards shared goals, benefiting from and building upon their combined expertise.
Content silos beyond marketing
Process or team-based silos of the kind we’ve talked about so far are pretty common, but they’re not restricted to marketing. They can and do happen in departments outside of marketing: sales, customer service, product support, and so on. This form of content silo can be even more insidious because you might not even be aware that another team is indulging in a bit of “guerilla content”.
Picture this: the sales team at a SaaS company digs into its data to try and understand why prospects don’t convert. They conclude that a lot of prospects are reluctant to commit because of concerns about getting started with the platform. Technical concerns. Setup concerns. Integration concerns.
Seeing an opportunity, a member of the team cobbles together a set-by-step onboarding guide to demonstrate how easy the platform is to set up and use. They start emailing the guide to hesitant prospects in the hope they might close more deals, also sharing the file with the rest of the sales team.
You might think this doesn’t sound like a problem at all. Someone used their initiative to address an issue, and rather than get the official content team involved, they went ahead and got it done. Does it really matter if it hasn’t passed through all those tedious processes that would have taken weeks of back-and-forth?
Yes, it does. Those workflows and approvals aren’t there simply to justify the content team’s existence with a lot of time-wasting drudgery. They’re essential to ensuring all content is consistent, on brand, on message, factually accurate, and strategically aligned. (Oh, and well produced. While almost everyone can write, not everyone is a writer.) But then I’m a content marketer, so of course I’d say that.
It’s for exactly this reason that marketers obsess over things like brand guidelines, tone of voice and messaging plans. But when different silos produce their own content, policing these guidelines is next to impossible.
Process and quality assurance issues aren’t the only problems with siloed content. The rest of the business has no idea this content exists. Or if they do, they don’t have access to the file. The full potential, reach and value of the content is wasted.
The support team can’t refer to the guide when answering customer questions, creating the risk of providing conflicting or inconsistent information. The marketing team can’t reuse or promote the guide in other channels. The SEO team are unaware that Sales has a bunch of answers to commonly asked questions that could reveal valuable new search terms to target.
Plus, when the person who originally created the guide leaves the business, their online storage account is locked off and archived—or worse, deleted—along with the original file. Even those people who did have access to the guide no longer do.
Company mergers and acquisitions can exacerbate the problem even further. Now you don’t only have the different teams within one organisation to contend with, but also the marketing, sales and other teams in each subsidiary, with their own bedded-in content workflows.
However, it’s also possible to have silos within a team, simply because someone thinks they know better. You might have one or two people who keep going off to do their own thing, based on little more than gut feel. Forget the strategy. They’re certain their idea for a podcast or blog post is much better than whatever’s in the approved content calendar. And if they’re senior enough within the organisation, you might not find it so easy to reject their vanity project.
Ultimately, all of these content silos risk undermining your content marketing strategy, disrupting your priorities and eating into your budget.
Creating a brand newsroom
The solution to inefficient content silos isn’t anything new. It just requires us to look outside our enterprise marketing bubble to an industry that manages to publish or broadcast torrents of world-class content every day: the media newsroom.
A brand newsroom is a centralised content operation within an organisation, replicating the same methodologies, roles and workflows that newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, broadcasters and publishers have relied on for decades. Dedicated content specialists—including copywriters, journalists, videographers, designers, and proofreaders—collaborate on a rolling schedule of high-quality content.
Crucially, like in any media newsroom, a Chief Editor oversees all content functions, including SEO, PR, social media, blog posts, videos, podcasts, even interactive content.
The focus of your brand newsroom should be on delivering what your ideal audience is actively looking for; not what your brand wants to say to that audience. This is all about them, not you.
So, the first step is to agree on a unified editorial mission statement, which defines the kinds of stories you will tell to connect with customers; the topics and themes.
Then, just like any media organisation, every piece of content follows a rigorous editorial process:
- content planning based on data-led insights and audience research
- production by content specialists
- editing, proofreading, and quality control
- publishing, supported by integrated distribution and amplification tactics.
At first, this might sound like an even more expensive and long-winded way to produce content. But a brand newsroom is far more efficient in the long run, avoiding those silo traps of inefficient production workflows, duplicated assets and guerilla content operating outside of any strategic oversight or governance.
Instead, you get to maximise your budget on fewer, well-produced assets that are far more likely to deliver long term business value and a measurable content ROI.
Navigating the cultural shift
A word of caution: A brand newsroom isn’t a silver bullet to slay all the content silos within your organisation. You can’t just implement a new centralised team and a set of processes and demand everyone falls in line.
A brand newsroom strategy is also a major cultural shift, requiring plenty of consultation, collaboration and communication to get everyone’s cooperation while addressing the reasons these silos formed in the first place.
Why do they distrust the official content processes? Which of the many competing workflows are actually the best? How can you foster greater collaboration with these teams and departments so that everyone still has some input and a sense of ownership over their area of expertise?
A brand newsroom should address all these issues, while simultaneously providing the expertise, rigour and strategic oversight essential to success.
An operational and cultural initiative like this will only survive the distance with buy-in from the top. Before you start anything, you need to gather your arguments and build your business case to persuade the decision makers. Document the issues. Estimate the wastage. Demonstrate the opportunities. Then reveal a better way.
Take back control of your content strategy
While breaking down silos is never easy, the alternative is potentially far more damaging and costly. A brand newsroom is a proven method for bringing order to the chaos.
And the payoff is definitely worth it; strategically aligned content growing in value over time, efficient teams working towards shared goals, and a unified brand voice building genuine authority in the marketplace. All of this means a brand newsroom is one of the smartest investments you can make.
Need help designing a silo-busting content marketing strategy? Get in touch
