There’s famously no I in TEAM, but that doesn’t mean different teams will always play nice. How do you protect your strategy when it’s every team for itself?
In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote, “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” This idea became known as the law of the instrument or Maslow’s Hammer.
Marketing is full of Maslow’s Hammers. Approach different specialist agencies with a marketing problem and each will argue that the best way to achieve your goal relies on their specific area of expertise.
“To achieve that sales target, you need to drive more traffic to your website with search engine optimisation,” claims the SEO expert.
“SEO is sooo old school,” says the social marketer. “A social media campaign will reach and build relationships with far more people, nurturing more potential customers over time.”
“Ha,” laughs the direct marketer. “Email can get your sales message to those people already familiar with your brand and most likely to buy right now.”
The brand marketer recommends refreshing the logo. The web developer insists on adding more landing pages to improve the site’s UX and boost conversions. The designer pitches a series of product comparison infographics.
So far, so not very surprising. Marketers will always compete with other marketers to market themselves to even more marketers. It’s a noisy feedback loop of hype and expectations.
Of course, it’s in each provider’s business interests to represent their core speciality. But it does require you as the client to take a more holistic approach when trying to build a joined-up strategy that, more often than not, will draw on most if not all of these disciplines.
Instead of treating any one silo as a silver bullet, you’re more likely to invest a portion of your budget to each – either as ongoing tactics or as part of a series of separate campaigns.
Trouble is, each of these competing silos will likely justify their effectiveness and value with an entirely different set of self-serving KPIs. Trying to identify where the real value is being generated becomes a futile exercise in comparing apples with oranges.
The SEO team points to an increase in web traffic and/or rankings and claims any lack of conversions are down to the landing pages. The web team claims the landing pages are fine, but the quality of web traffic is poorly targeted. The content team blames the social team for poor distribution. The social team dazzles with rising engagement numbers but can’t say with any certainty what all that engagement actually achieves. And so on.
To put it cynically, with everyone continually vying for a greater share of the client’s marketing budget, it’s in each provider or agency’s best interest to overstate their own effectiveness while undermining that of their competitors.
Working together in harmony
This isn’t a rant against specialists. I’m a specialist. Content marketing is my domain. And while I’m extremely confident in my area, I also know the limits of my expertise.
Marketing needs specialists with that deep-down, nuts and bolts expertise to transform the key aspects of a strategy into deliverable tactics with a decent likelihood of success.
But someone still needs to be the referee or coach, capable of aligning these silos into a single, more effective, more cohesive team, collaborating towards your ultimate goals, not their individual vested interests.
I recently wrote about how an SEO strategy isn’t synonymous with a content strategy and vice versa. However, while both are distinct disciplines, the success of one will often depend, in part at least, on the other. And a key element in defining that success is to have joint KPIs that relate to your ultimate business goal.
Who cares about an increase in search rankings if your website conversions don’t also go up? Who cares about your new white paper if no one discovers it?
The same is true for your other silos too. While the goal of social marketing may well be more followers and increased engagement, this isn’t a business goal unless you can connect it to your bottom line.
Sure, the customer may have converted after clicking an ad in Google. But that last click shouldn’t get all the credit for weeks or months of careful nurturing across many other channels. All those other engagements with the brand in social, on the blog and elsewhere may well be why the customer clicked your link and not one of your competitors’ listings when they finally entered the buying phase and searched for a product.
As such, these individual tactical KPIs all need to align with the primary strategic goal. All silos need to demonstrate how they contribute to the bigger picture.
Links in the chain
Simply put, most marketing campaigns are about persuading or encouraging potential customers to move from point A to point B one way or another: from awareness to purchase, from print ad to in store, from social media to landing page.
Allocating different aspects of that A-to-B strategy to different (often external) teams can distort everyone’s view of that journey as a whole.
Seeing only part of a picture is no replacement for seeing the whole thing. If you’re only allowed to see, let alone contribute to, one section, then as far as you’re concerned that is the whole picture.
This is why it’s not necessarily a good idea to keep your various external providers and their teams at arms’ length from each other. You need them to collaborate, not compete. Each team or silo needs to be aware of what the others are doing – and why.
There will almost always be a need to work with external agencies and providers. Very few businesses have all of the internal resources and skill sets to achieve everything in-house. And even in-house teams can quickly become silos.
That’s why some of the best marketing managers are generalists, understanding enough about each discipline to deploy and exploit them as needed without ever losing sight of the bigger picture.
And the fewer teams or external providers involved in that process, the easier it becomes to maintain alignment throughout.
When hiring a marketing agency or building your toolkit of providers, it pays to look for teams that can handle multiple disciplines or that have a proven history of working closely together. When the copywriter producing the words for your new website sits two desks away from the developer tasked with building the site, collaboration and alignment become so much easier.
And stay vigilant for any Maslow’s Hammers threatening to distort your strategy or undermine that whole-picture alignment. If you work on developing your entire tool kit, you’ll always have the right tool for the job.
