Maybe you’ve heard of siloed marketing before, when a corporate bro at your previous job used to talk about “breaking down silos.” (Ugh. Another example of business jargon we hate to hear.)
He might’ve been a bro, but he got at least one thing right. Silos, when it comes to marketing your small business, can do more harm than good. Let’s talk about the solution to the siloed marketing problem.
What is siloed marketing?
Siloed marketing might also be called silo marketing, marketing silos, and the most awkward and our least favorite, marketing siloing. It’s when marketing efforts are fragmented because of miscommunication and corporate bloat. It also happens in small businesses when the owner neglects to share important information to employees or contractors helping with their marketing.
The term has non-business origins; a “silo” is a tower or pit used to store grain on a farm. (Which makes it funnier when corporate city dwellers who’ve never left New York use it.)
If you can picture a giant tower sealed off from any outside dirt or air, you can picture how one might “work in a silo.” Your graphic designer only focuses on design, your SEO specialist on SEO, your YouTube person on YouTube…and so on.
Similarly, and just as frustrating, siloed marketing can mean having one person who specializes in just one thing, rather than having a few people who can flex their skills and talents across multiple roles.
Why siloed marketing doesn’t work
So, your many, many team members are doing their own thing, working in isolation, rather than working with each other. If that sounds messy and inefficient, it’s because it is. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this happen IRL.
Some of our clients have admitted they have seven different calls with seven different members of their marketing team lined up for one dang project. It doesn’t make your job as a small biz owner easier. And the more “siloed” everyone is, the harder it is to get shit done.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with hiring experts at all. Not everyone on your team can rock multiple hats, nor should they! You can absolutely have one person dedicated to a specific role if it makes your life easier and your business better.
What we’re saying is, you need someone who “breaks down the silos” and is a single source of information and truth for everyone else on your team. Someone who brings all those disconnected pieces of your team together so it can run harmoniously.
The solution that can streamline your marketing
How can you bring all the pieces of your marketing puzzle together? That single source of information and truth can be a person, a company document, or both. (We like the idea of both the best.)
A company document, for example, could outline brand standards and guidelines so that everyone on your team knows what their ultimate goal is at any given time. The mission or vision for your brand.
What about short-term and mid-term goals? Goals for each project or month or quarter or year? For these more immediate goals, having one person like a content or marketing director oversee and review all of your marketing tasks can ensure that everyone is doing their job. And that your marketing content is doing its job.
A content director might have responsibilities like:
- Planning weekly, monthly, or quarterly content
- Assigning tasks to everyone on the marketing team (writers, designers, ad specialists, SEO specialists, social media managers, podcast teams, YouTube teams, etc.)
- Creating content themselves
- Editing and reviewing content so that it falls in line with goals and brand guidelines
We know, we know. We just talked about how having one person per marketing role can add up to a bunch of different people on a team. But a content director is outside all of that. They make sure that the team is running as it should so that you, founder/CEO/big boss, can rest easy knowing your marketing is taken care of.
Marketing should be a well-oiled, efficient machine
Consistent, on-brand content is kind of our thing. (It’s one of the first things you see on the Uncanny Content home page, for crying out loud.) Whether you’re creating that marketing content yourself or hiring someone else to do it, you need every team member of yours to be on the same page.
That’s the problem with working in silos. Each person keeps to themselves, which means time is wasted, precious info isn’t communicated, and your marketing efforts fail. You don’t get the results you’re hoping for. Whomp whomp.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Encourage collaboration and transparency. Make sure your brand’s ultimate goals and guidelines are crystal clear. And if you can, restructure your marketing team and put a content director in charge of it all. You’ll feel relieved at how organized and streamlined everything is afterward.
And hey, if you need someone to take over content duties for you…we know a guy who offers amazing content services. (It’s us. We’re the guy.)
