As per Investopedia, a silo mentality is “a hesitation to share information with employees of various departments in the same company decreasing the business efficiency.”
In other words, if several employees or teams in your business aren’t on the same page about everything, they might end up creating a disaster. Silo mentality can make your business seem less innovative and break your employee engagement, ending in lowered productivity.
What is Marketing Siloing?
When it reaches to marketing, “working in silos” normally means that everyone in the marketing department holds to themselves.
Let us go through a brief, the SEO employees only think about SEO, designers about design, and developers about development. Like real silos, they’re isolated and don’t interact with each other. Why do we have to concern about this? Because it’s dangerous for business.
Why Are Marketing Silos Harmful to Your Business?
There are many causes why marketing silos can be dangerous to your business while going beyond weak communication.
Silos Waste Time
If your marketing is siloed, your marketing team can end up unintentionally wasting a lot of time by not coordinating with other departments
For example:
You are a business owner that makes dog food, and your content marketing strategist is trying to research a few keywords for content marketing.
But what they don’t understand is that the SEO department has already done a bunch of research about the same topic last week, and could have easily shared it with them.
Because of siloed marketing, your content marketer has now wasted their entire day doing some research that’s already been done.
Silos Block Your Path From Receiving the Best Marketing Results
Siloed Marketing prevents you from getting the best marketing results apart from wasting time and money.
Your consumers expect your marketing to be compatible across channels — it’s how they comprehend that they’re on a genuine site for your business. That’s why it’s so essential to have an integrated marketing strategy. If you have a siloed marketing department, your campaigns — and even basic things like font style, size, and colors — will look inconsistent. Siloed marketing can also create complex situations and missed opportunities.
Siloed Marketing Demotivates Your People
Another disturbing thing about siloed marketing is that it demotivates your employees.
It’s easy to get enthusiastic about something when you see the larger picture. But the bigger your business gets, the more distant every employee becomes from your business main mission — because they may not understand who is the decision-maker, let alone why.
Just assume that your SEO employee sits around all day just copying and pasting keywords into an excel sheet without learning how these keywords impact the business marketing strategy. They will start thinking that their job is pointless and after a few days, they’ll start looking for another one. Losing talent is expensive. You wouldn’t want your best people to retire because of an easily-solved puzzle, like siloed marketing.
How to Tell If Your Company has Siloed Marketing
By now, you should be convinced that siloed marketing is not a good practice: it’s something that can damage your business.
But how can you check if you have a silo problem?
When you’re “in the channels” day in and day out, it can be difficult to get a step back and consider what’s going on at the macro level in your business. And if you’re performing the higher-level decisions, you may not know what your employees are undergoing.
If you’re concerned about marketing siloing, take a look if you recognize any of these things:
Your Marketing Department Employees Don’t Communicate with Each Other
Have you noticed that your marketing employees only talk to a few of their colleagues?
Furthermore, they might not leave their desks and just chat with the employee next to them. Or possibly they have one or two friends in their marketing department and don’t talk to others besides them.
If this is something you’ve noticed at your company, marketing siloing might be a problem for you.
Your Marketing Department Employees Has No Idea What Their Colleagues Are Doing
One of the most interesting things to see if your marketing department is siloed is to ask your fellow marketers what their co-workers are doing.
Ask your designers and developers what their respective team is up to about their projects. See if your SEO people know anything about the paid campaigns. Check if your content strategists are working with your social media team on writing consistent content across multiple verticals.
If the answer is “I have no idea,” they’re indeed working in silos.
Your Marketing Department Team Doesn’t Work with Other Fellow Teams
Even if your marketing team is pretty good at working with other marketing department team members, that doesn’t imply that they’re great at working with other departments.
The marketing team needs to know what other departments are doing — even when their projects seem irrelevant.
If your marketing department doesn’t recognize your business from a big-picture view, they could be making significant mistakes that can cause your marketing campaigns to decline.
Conclusion
Siloed Marketing is one of the foremost things that can destroy your marketing campaigns. Luckily, once you understand your business has a silo problem, you can usually deal with it pretty swiftly — as long as you have an assembled plan.
Your employees will feel satisfied that you’re taking the lead. They will benefit from more conventional communication between various departments and individual employees.
