With host Darrell Alfonso
Marketing culture is divided. In most marketing departments—and especially in large, enterprise ones—almost all of the marketing team sees marketing campaigns and data in slivers. Each marketing professional spends most of their time focused on their one specialty.
The content writing team stays focused on keeping the blog up to date and tracking how well it performs. The PPC team keeps their attention on their search ad campaigns and how well they’re driving traffic for the cost.
Even the CMO, who must stay on top of all the different campaigns and departments at once, mostly sees the marketing analytics from each in distinct spreadsheets or dashboards. Marketing departments throughout the country are run as though each marketing team is a country in itself, rather than an important part of a larger whole.
Silos within an organization keep marketers from understanding how the company’s campaigns are performing across different channels. To be effective, they have to work together, which is why no one part of the larger marketing department can provide the full solution. Here’s why.
If your different teams aren’t talking to each other, then you won’t know how to deliver your customer the most relevant marketing. Maybe you end up sending them redundant offers, pummeling them with too much advertising in one day, or providing them with information they’ve already seen. That can have serious consequences.
According to research, 34% of consumers have admitted to giving up on a brand because of irrelevant or disruptive marketing messages. You don’t just risk putting time, effort, and money into marketing campaigns they don’t pay attention to. You risk losing them all together.
All of your teams have information that can be useful to other teams:
And everyone has some idea, based on trial and error, of what doesn’t work.
If all of that information is stuck in silos, then too few of your employees are benefiting from it, and you’re wasting money on marketing that won’t work.
You can all build better marketing campaigns based on what others in your larger marketing department know. But only if that information gets shared.
If you’re looking at the results from each department in disconnected spreadsheets, you’ll never see the big picture. You don’t just need to know the individual results of each team; you need to know how they all relate. If the work being done by your different departments isn’t supporting each other, then you have a problem that needs to be addressed.
You need one comprehensive, easy-to-read CMO dashboard to start making the important connections. Do your PPC ads bring in leads that then start paying attention to your blog? Do prospects that find your brand’s content via Google often become leads that attend webinars or request demos?
No one branch of your marketing department can do the whole job on its own, and you’re the one with the biggest view of data to help you see which parts of the puzzle need to be strengthened—or you should be.
Ditch the spreadsheets. Load all that data into one marketing performance management tool, and then drag all those old spreadsheets into the trash bin so you never have to deal with them again. If you want to open a bottle of champagne to mark the momentous occasion (after the workday is done), no one will blame you.
Once you have your entire marketing plan—including each of the subsidiary marketing plans of every department—loaded into one central platform, you can start to make sure they all relate and work together. With all your marketing campaigns and analytics collected into the same place, you can track how they’re all performing in real time and quickly see if one particular piece of the whole isn’t pulling its weight and needs to be improved upon.
With one CMO dashboard that shows you everything—what’s to come, what’s happening now, and the results of marketing campaigns that have already been completed—you’ll finally see the big picture. You and your team will have all the information you need to confidently make the best decisions moving forward.