Silos Are for Farmers, Not Marketers

Do you think you have a silo marketing problem? The term “silo marketing” refers to disconnected or otherwise isolated systems in online marketing (imagine an isolated farm silo separated from the rest of the farm), where communication between two channels simply isn’t occurring. It’s a more common problem in marketing than you might think. While it’s easy to collect information from clients, storing all of that information in one place can be harder, and if you don’t have different parts of your marketing business communicating, you miss out on potential customers!

What are the problems with silo marketing?

Siloing data isn’t just a problem that impacts your efficiency; it impacts all levels of your organization. Let’s take a step back and look at how silo marketing affects your business.

Siloing data creates unhappy customers. The miscommunications that come along with silo marketing directly impact your relationship with your customers. Nothing alienates a client faster than losing their mail due to a misfiled address or offering to sell them a product they already own. You give the impression you don’t respect or value customers when you ignore information they’ve already shared, which can drive even long-standing clients away.

Silo marketing is pricey. You might not think that silo marketing is as expensive as it is, but small costs begin to stack up quickly. Every time postage returns to your organization, you have to spend time and money correcting the initial error. Even then, prices can climb even higher when marketing is focused on a single silo, leading to your organization spending more resources on the same tasks. For example, SEO optimization made by one team might be unavailable to a second team, meaning that all of that hard work fails to translate.

Siloed data loses sales. In addition to being more expensive, data that’s inaccessible to other channels means that marketing departments can’t make the most of the tools they have at their disposal. Information customers provided that shows that they fall within a target demographic might be hidden between marketing teams, leading to a sale that never happens.

How can you get rid of silos?

All is not lost, though! With the right steps, it’s possible to consolidate your data and move away from silo marketing. Here are five steps you can take to free your business of silos.

1. 1. Connect your inbound mail to your outbound mail. By connecting your inbound and outbound mail, you keep lines of communication in your business running smoothly and prevent cascading miscommunications. It can be as easy as using a barcode system to track postage by tying it to singular clients. By tying outbound mail and responses together, all of the data is housed in one location, which keeps lost information to a bare minimum.
   2. Collect your data capture methods in one central place. Inaccessible information is information that’s not helpful to your business. Organize a central location for your mail to aggregate, and use that central location to organize and store all of your data. Mail coming in from anywhere could be useful, so capture mail from all departments ranging from marketing to customer service to sales.
   3. Extract and organize the data that’s relevant to your business. With all of your data in one central hub, sort through it for any information that might be relevant to your marketing. Some of the insights you can extract might include names, addresses, transaction histories, customer surveys, and channel preferences. When you’ve pulled everything you can, input the extracted data into a central database that’s accessible to your entire organization.
   4. Analyze the data for insights. Your data might contain valuable insights into how your business manages its marketing. To make the most of it, consider hiring or assigning a data analyst or a marketing expert to scrub through your extracted data for trends, and see what useful information they can learn about customer behavior, trend preferences, and more.
   5. Apply your findings to your marketing strategies. After all of this, you’ll have transformed your siloed data into a marketing force to be reckoned with. Analyze what you’ve learned from your data and apply it directly to your marketing efforts!

Need help consolidating your marketing?

If you’re looking for help consolidating your data and moving away from silo marketing, consider what we at PMI can do for you. For over twenty years, PMI has helped businesses with creative marketing services, and our team of design-focused professionals has the skills needed to streamline your marketing. Contact us today, and let us know what we can do to help!