Separating Your Marketing Team From the Others Is Limiting Your Success

Virtually every business is made up of different teams that serve the organization as a whole. These teams could be sales, customer service or project management, but each one has its own method of measuring efficacy.

Let’s say you’ve specifically built systems to track impressions, likes, clicks and other critical metrics, and the data looks positive – sales should be skyrocketing. Your brand should be thriving. But, you’ve hit a wall. Why?

Have you forgotten about your digital marketing team? Though they are an essential part of any business, marketing teams are often separated from the others. They cover many important functions, from content creation to SEO optimization, which are vital to a company’s success. So, if you’ve found yourself in a stagnant position, perhaps it’s time to pull this team in closer. 

Good fences don’t always make good neighbors

Separating team members based on their skill set is an age-old method of business organization. It just makes sense, after all, to keep those in the same wheelhouse together as a group. Every team in your business has its own Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that determine success — but how do these different KPIs work together to support your overall mission? 

Things are simpler when teams are separate, right? The marketing team can be evaluated based on unique determining factors that are entirely separate from sales, customer service or project management. Everyone is accountable for their specific team’s results.

But this method is also limiting your success by isolating data.

What if the sales team isn’t the reason for decreased profit? What if it’s the separation between teams in itself? What if your silos have become impenetrable fortresses, and amongst the sea of department-based KPIs, everyone has forgotten that we all have the same goal?

Related: Why Attribution Is All That Should Matter in Digital Marketing

Aligning the goal

No matter the team’s skill set or wheelhouse, there is always a shared goal. For many companies, separating teams from one another leads to tunnel vision.

If we separate the people, the goal and the measurement, we are destined for failure. Keeping your company focused on the overarching goal is the best route to success. It’s as simple as that.

While it’s possible — and sometimes necessary — to divide teams up based on skills and activities, it is vital to ensure that we understand how each team is contributing to the end goal. It is also important for each of those teams to deeply understand how their KPI ties in with other teams within the organization.

Let’s say, for instance, the social media team is killing it — at least as far as the numbers are concerned. They’re getting all the likes, impressions and click-throughs. If that’s your measurement of success, then it would be easy to believe your social media team is top-notch. 

In reality, all the engagement in the world is worth very little, if those engaging are not also buying. 

Related: Why I Quit My Safe, Well-Paying Job To Start a Tech Business Out of My Basement

Holistic measurement is key

One of the key issues with separating your marketing team from the rest is that you are also separating your measurement of those teams. 

When you measure a social media campaign, you need to be holistically measuring it up against all your other sales channels. Focusing only on those upper areas of the sales funnel will not give you a clear picture of what your business is achieving in the market.

When we understand what each team is supposed to be delivering, we can also tie that up with how our customers buy. We know, for instance, that people don’t necessarily go onto Facebook to make a purchase. That doesn’t mean that their engagement on those platforms can’t lead to a conversion, and that is really what we should be measuring. 

To properly tie in all the pieces of the puzzle, it is necessary to measure each team in isolation, but then also as a whole. This way, you will start to truly understand the value each component has with the end goal of sales conversion always in sight. 

Having separate teams is just fine, but ensuring a united goal and holistic measurement of the contribution to that goal is key.

Related: 3 Steps to Set Up Sales KPIs That Actually Work