Written by
Chris Chan
In our era of hyper-consumption, the most successful businesses need seamless and consistent brand messaging.
Effective brand messaging is about so much more than individual marketing channels like paid search or Facebook ads. It’s about creating a unified omnichannel strategy with flawless personalization while staying true to a specific brand image.
Siloed communication within brands is a significant roadblock to consistent brand messaging. Using silos in your brand could restrict internal coordination on projects and negatively impact long-term profitability.
Breaking silos that hinder brand messaging is not just an option — it’s non-negotiable for a brand’s success in 2021 and beyond.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss what siloed communication is and how you can get started crushing silos for long-term profitability.
Let’s get started.
Siloed communication is defined as the lack of information exchange between marketing channels or divisions within a business. More prominent brands often fall into the silo trap due to departmental silos and stand-alone teams.
These siloed communications create friction in marketing channels and decrease messaging consistency, which reduces clicks, conversions, and customer retention.
In addition, slower internal communications can make it harder for brands to pivot internally in response to a volatile marketplace.
For brands to maintain long-term relationships with customers, they must be willing to invest time and money towards unifying their internal communication while streamlining operations across all marketing channels.
Unifying targeting, ad creative, and KPIs across all marketing messaging is key to building long-term brand loyalty and profitability.
Related: Scaling the Customer Experience During Rapid Growth
Starting to break down siloed communications in brands is not always straightforward, especially if your brand already has separate teams in place for creating, measuring, and optimizing marketing campaigns.
But that doesn’t mean that breaking down silos is impossible. In fact, with a few adjustments, it’s one of the best ways you can set your business up for long-term profitability.
Here are 5 concrete ways that you can start to break down silos and unify your marketing communication to maximize brand messaging consistency.
Crushing silos starts with shifts from leadership.
Strong leaders can increase their teams’ efficiency and streamline task management; they can also shift their tone when communicating to promote a culture of transparency.
As a leader in your brand, it’s essential to set a good example for your team members by providing clear insights on channel changes/data to your team so they can pivot to optimization quickly.
Practically speaking, this means your brand leadership team must empower all employees to communicate with radical transparency and incentivize contribution from all team members.
The way that teams communicate internally will directly impact the coordination of marketing messaging.
To improve messaging consistency, you should take stock of the tools that your teams use to communicate.
Addressing problems within your brand, such as social media complaints or mistakes in paid advertising strategies, should be done swiftly through Slack. At the same time, tools like Asana can help keep projects organized.
Collaborative software for projects involving multiple teams can also increase workplace efficiency and break down silos between departments.
In larger brands, separate marketing teams often make differing creative decisions within their given channels.
While experimenting with channel-specific strategies can give your brand an edge, it is crucial to maintain a level of consistency in visuals, tone-of-voice, and overall marketing messaging.
For increased clarity in your marketing efforts, try creating and applying brand guidelines universally.
A brand guideline should include tips on proper logo usage, tone of voice, and usage permissions of branded assets.
Internal teams can use brand guidelines and templates for various assets like pitch decks, blog posts, social media posts, and product descriptions.
Creating branded standard operating procedures (SOPs) that facilitate brand guidelines usage in different teams/departments is another great strategy for unified messaging.
In organizations with siloed communication styles, it can often be challenging to nail down the individual responsibilities of each employee.
To combat this in your brand, meet with team leaders to delegate specific roles and responsibilities connected to key team goals and workflows.
Short weekly kick-off and check-in meetings within a team can give everyone a clear overview of each employee’s responsibilities and help clear roadblocks quickly.
KPIs are the centerpiece of all marketing efforts. Without them, it’s impossible to measure the effectiveness of a brand’s marketing. Choosing KPIs that can improve marketing coordination internally is a bonus.
For example, working based on a KPI like return on ad spend (ROAS) may be impactful for the paid media department but irrelevant to the organic marketing team.
On the other hand, a KPI like customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost (LTV/CAC) is relevant to all channels and will necessitate inter-departmental communication.
If you need a way to crush siloed marketing messaging and increase your communication consistency, calling on a qualified partner for help could be the solution.
Talk to Us to find out how you can leverage performance brand strategies to increase internal communication efficiency while boosting your brand’s long-term profitability.
Featured image by Will Francis on Unsplash.
Chris Chan is a content writer at WITHIN who loves martial arts, gospel music, and all things brand marketing. His favorite pastime is watching online course videos and his favorite food is sushi.
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