Perfect parts don’t make a perfect whole. By breaking down marketing silos and creating cross-channel synergy, companies can build a stronger brand identity, create a more cohesive and consistent brand experience for customers, avoid duplication of effort and, as a result, achieve a higher return on investment for their marketing efforts.
Of course, this is easier said than done.
Often, marketing teams are built around functional expertise – there is an SEO team, a performance marketing team, a social team, an email team, a campaign team, and so on. The entire model revolves around the channels that marketing uses to reach customers. Each team may have its own goals, strategies, and metrics for success, which can lead to a lack of alignment with the company’s overall goals.
Marketing channel silos are not uncommon in the real world. Here are a few examples:
- SEO & SEM cannibalization: Paid search and SEO can work very well together. However, there are instances where the landing pages created by your paid search team are geared toward the similar intent of your SEO pages. From a holistic standpoint, spending additional marketing dollars to convert a customer who would have otherwise converted organically results in wasted spend.
- Disorganized cross-channel communication: When a marketing campaign launches, your marketing team may do its best to activate all channels to get attention. We get it. But bombarding your audience with the same messages at the same time can lead to marketing fatigue. In addition, similar to the SEO & SEM problem mentioned earlier, you could have saved some advertising dollars by curating the communication sequence, for example, sending email messages first and then targeting those users who did not engage with the emails with ads.
We could go on and on about this recurring theme, from the lack of collaboration between online and offline marketing to the lack of synchronization of information and messaging between sales and marketing. The loss of synergy that results from each aspect focusing on single-point optimization is a real barrier to marketing efficiency.
How to Break Down Marketing Channel Silos
Connecting the dots between different channel initiatives to drive more results is what most organizations dream of, especially when resources are thin. If you’re on the hunt, here are some actions you can take:
- Align with overall goals and plans: Involve all departments and functions in the marketing strategy and a common goal to ensure a cohesive approach. Encourage regular communication and collaboration among each marketing team to ensure that strategies and priorities are aligned.
- Establish a consistent brand message: Define a clear brand message that expresses your company’s values, goals, and personality. This message should be consistent across all channels.
- Develop a cross-channel user journey and message orchestration: Identify the target audience and their preferences/behaviors across touchpoints to map the user journey. Develop a cross-channel orchestration strategy, not just integration. This would involve planning messages and sequences across all marketing channels, such as social media, email, and advertising, to complement and reinforce each other.
- Coordinate promotions: Ensure that promotions offered through online and offline channels complement each other. Avoid offering conflicting promotions that may confuse customers, and try to incentivize your offline sales to promote your online offerings.
- Expand partnerships: Create cross-promotions and leverage partnerships with complementary businesses to reach new audiences and increase brand awareness
Closing
Overall, achieving cross-channel marketing synergy requires an integrated strategy that combines goal alignment, audience understanding, channel synchronization, data integration, and consistency of brand message and promotion. By focusing on these key factors, companies can effectively coordinate their marketing efforts across multiple channels, resulting in a more cohesive and successful marketing strategy.
Do you know that Ematic can help businesses optimize their marketing efforts and achieve cross-channel marketing synergy? We work in such a way that our marketing consultants not only have in-depth knowledge of a particular domain, but also understand how different channels intersect. When we work with you, we ensure that we deliver a strategy that not only improves your channel performance, but also supports your overall marketing plan.
Through Ematic’s comprehensive digital services, we also connect businesses with the right marketing technology so they can easily track and analyze customer data across all channels, identify the most effective marketing strategies, and automate their marketing efforts to save time and resources.
Our vision is to help companies develop integrated, highly effective marketing strategies, not just spin the wheels.
Learn more about our services from SEO, performance marketing, social media marketing, CRM to e-commerce and how we can help businesses effectively coordinate their marketing efforts across multiple channels to create a cohesive and consistent brand experience for their customers and drive growth.
