Marketing alignment, often known as integrated marketing, isn’t guaranteed just because you have that monthly department meeting or All Hands.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot more work than that – from the overall team, and leadership.
Here are 9 warning signs your marketing team isn’t working effectively (and how to solve it):
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Good content is quickly forgotten about
In marketing, content makes the world go round. Without content, you have no brand messaging, no brand personality, and no way to persuade your target audience to fall in love with your brand.
All too often, this content is created… then forgotten about. And we’ve got three words for you:
Repurpose. Your. Content.
This means taking a piece of content – any type – and using it in a different way. This could look like a blog being turned into a newsletter, a social media carousel being turned into a one-pager, a customer video testimonial into a quote on the homepage. You get the gist.
Doing this not only helps you save on time and resources, but helps you scale your content in a way that keeps it consistent, at the same time as reaching new audiences.
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No one knows what any other team are *actually* up to
Here’s the thing: if you can’t tell yourself (or anyone for that matter) what the other teams in your department are working on – whether that’s keywords they’re targeting, personas they’re working on, events they’re present at, or campaigns they’re running – chances are, your marketing is a little bit, or a lottle bit disjointed.
Having oversight of what each team are working on will align your team, and make sure your content and messaging is as consistent as possible. This transparency and unity within your team is essential for strengthening your marketing organization to get the results you’re dreaming of.
And hey, marketing leaders – we’re looking at you too, no matter how busy your diaries may be. 👀
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A strong sense of ‘just stay in your lane’
While we’ve all been hired to do certain jobs, that doesn’t mean you have to work in strict silos.
By breaking down a silo mentality, you can help build strong and far more collaborative relationships within your marketing department, and within the company too.
Here are 5 ways to break down marketing team silos (and beyond):
- Promote more communication between managers and teams
- Encourage collaboration with established frameworks and knowledge hubs
- Keep things transparent as possible, from leadership downwards
- Spark productivity and brainstorming with regular team trainings
- Use effective collaboration tools – too many will only disrupt and distract
After all, there’s no ‘you’ in ‘marketing team’. There’s no need to go it alone when you’ve got other marketing enthusiasts just a desk, a Slack message, or a Zoom call away.
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The dreaded Franken-stack technology monster
Yes, that’s right – we know Frankenstein isn’t the monster.
But anyway, a Franken-stack is all those pieces of software or tech that don’t integrate well together at all. Because of that, your marketing success is being seriously slowed down because – as we’ve already mentioned – too many tools can be distracting.
Some technology gets used, some doesn’t, many of your team will use certain software differently to others. This is wasting time, money, and not to mention, patience.
The solution? Being more efficient with your choice of tools. This could be researching more streamlined, all-in-one platforms that have everything you need in one place like Optimizely (hi, not-so-humble brag) or HubSpot, or asking the right questions to understand which tools work best with your current solutions.
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Marketing goals aren’t compatible with your business goals
If your marketing investments aren’t all aligned or don’t make sense together, there’s a strong chance that there are some (or more than some) that aren’t aligned to the overall business goals.
And if you’re not driving business goals, what are you doing?
With the help of those ‘transparency’ and ‘open communication’ things we keep talking about – sorry, not sorry – you can avoid marketing investments being here, there and everywhere, and keep them in sync with your business goals.
With an integrated marketing strategy and plan, your marketing investments will be streamlined in a much more cost-efficient and resource-efficient way, and power each other up in doing so.
Check out this marketing strategy template to align teams of any size.
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No central hub to store or easily access content
So, this one is kinda linked to ever-forgotten content point, kinda linked to marketers wanting to be more productive, but a lot linked to common sense.
If you as a team are producing regular content and digital assets, make sure there’s somewhere they can be easily found… otherwise, all the hard work is quickly wasted.
Your best option is having a central content hub that got the relevant tags and a handy old search bar.
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Little-to-no consistency on publishing and execution
Delays, lack of content calendar, no structured execution processes or timelines – we've all been there.
But those three examples are slowing you down, and not letting you scale at the rate you probably want to be scaling at. Instead, you’ll be seeing a lot of:
- Missed deadlines: When there’s no clear schedule or accountability, deadlines quickly slip through the cracks which is super disrupting to your workflow, and certainly not good for time-sensitive campaigns.
- Inconsistent brand voice and messaging: With no unified approach, the content produced by your team can feel disjointed and inconsistent – this can confuse your audience and dilute your brand messaging, making that brand trust and authority more difficult to achieve.
- Wasted resources: A lack of structure in content execution often leads to missed opportunities (boo) or even teams working on the same tasks unknowingly (again, boo).
- Poor performance tracking: Without consistent publishing and content execution, it can be challenging to measure the success of your campaigns or your marketing team accurately – it’s hard to understand what’s working, and what’s not.
- Employee burnout: Last-minute changes and panics, as well as no clear direction of a content plan can bring up a lot of frustrations and stress in your team, meaning less productivity, more errors, and possibly a high turnover rate.
Doesn’t sound efficient, does it? Get that content consistency and content calendar in check.
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Your marketing lifecycle looks like… what, exactly?
Anyone in your company should have visibility to what the marketing lifecycle looks like, if they ask for it. This means not only content execution, but the whole shebang:
Ideation → Creation → Execution → Reporting → Tracking
Without a clear (and did we say ‘visible’?) marketing lifecycle, it’s all too easy for all your hard work to be undone.
For this kind of visibility, collaborative tools are the answer.
By using project management and collaboration tools, anyone with access can track progress, assign tasks, and make sure everyone is on the same page. These tools provide a centralized place for information and knowledge, so you can quickly check in on the status of any campaign.
Not to mention, they help leaders make informed and timely decisions with real-time visibility.
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Messy marketing causing a messy customer journey
Inefficient marketing doesn’t just affect your team internally. As we’ve touched upon briefly, it can really disrupt the customer journey too having a negative impact on marketing revenue and your business overall.
The chaos of messy marketing radiates through all the campaigns, blogs, social media posts, and emails in a way that confuses the customer and often drives them away.
When your brand voice, messaging, and focuses are giving off different vibes across different channels, it can be quite jarring and off-putting. It can make them ask themselves questions like: “Is this legit?” or “Is this the right company for me?”.
You want to build as much trust and authority as possible, showing yourself as a go-to solution for your target audience. A fragmented marketing strategy leading to a fragmented customer journey is not going to get you there – but you knew that already.
Check out our handy guide on how to build a bigger, badder, more integrated marketing team (and say goodbye to those pesky fragments).
An integrated team for a truly integrated marketing strategy
When your marketing team and marketing efforts are aligned and synchronized, you can let the results speak for themselves.
... then you’ll kick yourself and say, “Why didn’t we think of this before?”.
This collaborative, unified approach goes beyond individuals just working together – it helps your team have a clear vision, play to their strengths, produce more high-quality content, and build more trust and loyalty with your customers.
Optimizely Content Marketing Platform provides marketing teams everywhere with the visibility needed to create an efficient, streamlined workflow that coordinates, creates, and enhances the customer experience with clarity and consistency.
