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Snapchat is one of the most popular social networks in the world.
It boasts 293 million daily active users on average.
That’s a ton of people sharing and engaging with content on a daily basis.
On top of a huge user base, the engagement levels are off the charts. People open the app 30 times a day on average, over 75 percent of 13 to 34-year-olds in the U.S. use the app, and over 5 billion Snaps are created every day.
It’s no question Snapchat has potential in numbers and engagement, so why don’t you see results with the platform?
Below, you’ll find some of my top Snapchat ad strategies, tips, and resources to help you run successful campaigns.
However, before we dive in, we need to establish if Snapchat ads are actually worth your time and money.
If your brand appeals to Gen Z and millennials, you should look at Snapchat as a way to increase user acquisition, brand awareness, and sales.
Why?
Snapchat has over $1 trillion in direct spending power between these two generations. With one-third of users more likely to make purchases on their phones, it’s a platform that’s worth a second look.
On Snapchat’s Inspiration page, you can see tons of businesses have found massive success with Snap Ads.
Spinnaker Nordic tried Snapchat ads for three days and had incredible results. With $759.04 ad spend, the company achieved:
What if you don’t have $700 to blow on ads? No problem. You can advertise on Snapchat for as little as $5. With such a low daily minimum spend, you can test, learn, and optimize your ads on any budget.
Not enough to convince you?
Snapchat also has a partnership with Amazon. If a user sees a product they like, all they need to do is point their cameras at the barcode or product and long press on the camera screen.
Snapchat will then show a card with a link to the item on Amazon. The app has created one of the fastest ways to shop online and is one of the frontrunners for augmented reality e-commerce.
If there is anything we can learn about finding success on Snapchat, we can learn it from experience.
Multiple brands using Snapchat find massive conversion rates and increases in sales on-site and for their mobile apps.
Here are some of the best Snapchat ad strategies and resources to help you mimic their success and grow your business.
Why should you care about poll ads?
Well, it can increase your engagement and views.
On Instagram, polling stickers in Story Ads increased the number of three-second video views in 9 out of 10 campaigns.
The insights you gain from your audience can also strengthen your ads, help you stand out from the competition, and potentially increase your sales.
The only downside? Snapchat doesn’t have a built-in polling feature like Instagram.
However, by using an app called Polly, you can mimic Instagram’s polling success on Snapchat. Polly lets you create polls and share them to Snapchat, where your audience can answer anonymously.
How to Use Polls in Your Snapchat Ads Strategy
Polling Ad Resources:
Once you have your audience’s attention, you need to direct them to the next step, i.e., your landing page. You don’t want users to watch your ad and move on. You want to instigate an action that will get users into your sales funnel and create conversions.
What is a landing page?
It’s a stand-alone webpage created for an advertising or marketing campaign.
The page usually has a goal like:
For example, if you’re an app developer, you would redirect people to your Google Play or App Store download page. If you’re an e-commerce brand, your landing page could link to sign up for a newsletter and get a 15-percent discount code.
On Snap Ads, there are three different types of ad links you can use:
The one you choose depends on your landing page goals and the types of products you’re selling on the app.
If you need help creating a high conversion landing page, use these resources below:
Landing Page Resources:
For your Snapchat ads to find success, you need:
With the short attention spans of Gen Z and millennials, Snapchat recommends writing copy that’s easy to understand, is localized for your audience, and has an offer message within the first two seconds of the ad.
Subway used this approach to announce its new cheesy garlic bread. The ad is only five seconds long and uses two short sentences to get its message across.
Ad Copy Resources
Spit testing or A/B testing is crucial to improving your conversion rates. It helps you hone in on what’s working and get rid of what isn’t. Most importantly, it helps save you money.
Gone are days of blowing your entire ad budget on a campaign with lackluster results. With split testing, you can combine your more effective elements to boost ROI, lower the risk of failure, and create a winning ad strategy.
How does spit testing work with Snapchat ads?
Inside your advertiser’s dashboard, you can test different variables such as:
For example, let’s say you want to test an audience. Maybe you’re not too sure if you should target 18 to 25 or 30 to 35-year-olds for your next campaign. Your creative, placement, and delivery will be the same with the split-testing feature, but each ad set will target the different audiences you’ve created.
The winning test is the one that achieves the lowest cost per goal. A goal can be:
When you’re done, create a campaign with the winning variable, and start getting better results from your ad spend.
Split Testing Resources:
In a study with Deloitte, 94 percent of people expect to use AR for shopping, making Snapchat’s AR Lenses one of its most valuable features.
What is AR for shopping exactly?
The filter lets users interact with a brand or product. For example, MAC has four Snapchat lenses to try on 20 different lip and eye products.
The feature is immersive. It brings the in-person shopping experience into your home, evolving the e-commerce experience.
However, it’s not only for brands selling products.
You could create a filter with iconic makeup looks from Ru Paul’s Drag Race and use it to promote the new season.
For games, you could create a filter of one of your characters or create a branded filter for specific times of the year.
For example, Burger King could do something for International Burger Day or the Fourth of July.
Here’s an example of how Starling Bank used the AR lens in a campaign to increase brand awareness:
The result? A 61 percent lower cost per install versus other platforms.
You can choose from three shoppable AR categories:
What are the benefits of creating a Snapchat ad strategy around AR lenses?
Snapchat Shoppable AR Resources:
Snapchat’s Audience Insights is a powerful tool for marketers. It provides a wealth of information about your audience and can help you tweak your campaigns to improve your conversion rate.
Inside the dashboard, you can compare and create new audience segments. The data, a mixture of demographics, Snap Lifestyle Categories and external third-party partners, tells you more about your current audience and helps you discover new segments for your brand.
By using the Audience Insights dashboard, you might discover that 70 percent of your audience is also interested in rock climbing. You can use this interest to optimize and create more relevant ads that appeal to your audience.
Pretty nifty, right?
Well, Snapchat’s wealth of data doesn’t end there.
One of the best features on the dashboard is purchase intent. You can see at a glance what is the likelihood of your audience purchasing your service or product.
You can also compare the purchase intent across different audiences and use the information to adjust your Snapchat Ad bids.
Analyzing Your Audience Resources:
If you’re not incorporating UGC into your Snapchat ads strategy, you’re missing opportunities to convert your audience into paying customers.
There’s plenty of data that shows it’s an effective marketing strategy.
According to Snapchat, not only is it more likely to get viewed in full, but your ad will feel more authentic and less over-produced.
If you don’t have any UGC yet, create ads with a similar look and feel. Use Snapchat’s features, have someone speak directly to the camera, and keep your ads five to six seconds long. It will appear more organic and come across as an extension of other Snaps rather than an intrusive ad.
User-Generated Content Resources:
If you’re using the wrong ad format, you’re not going to see results with your Snapchat ad strategy.
Each format is designed to help you achieve specific business goals, such as:
Here’s a brief guide to what each format can help you achieve:
Ad Formats Resources:
I know.
This advice might seem odd, especially when there are statistics like 69 percent of people watch videos without sound.
Shouldn’t your Snapchat ad strategy follow suit and design for no sound?
Nope.
According to Snapchat, 64 percent of ads are watched with sound on.
This isn’t surprising.
As I mentioned earlier, the best Snapchat ads are the ones that fit natively within a user’s feed and don’t disrupt the experience. Most Snapchatters are watching their friends’ Snaps with sound, so your ads should do the same.
Video Ad Resources:
The final Snapchat ad strategy you need to implement is goal-based bidding.
What is goal-based bidding?
It’s a feature that allows you to optimize your ad spend toward a specific action you want a Snapchatter to take e.g., downloading your app or making a purchase.
By setting this cost-per-action, Snapchat will deliver your ads in the most efficient way possible to achieve the desired outcome.
The result?
Your ads will go out to people most likely to complete the action, and you’ll see higher conversions.
Snapchat Ad Bidding Resources:
There are six different ad types on Snapchat: Single image of video ads, filters, lenses, story ads, product catalog ads, and commercials.
It depends on your campaign objectives. For example, filters help you create a branded conversion, lenses create interactive moments, the product catalog showcases a series of products, and commercials are great for driving brand awareness.
Snapchat Ads have a minimum daily spend of $5.
If your audience is Gen Z and millennials, Snapchat is one of the best social media networks to engage with them and drive sales. The app reaches 75 percent of Gen Z and millennials in the U.S., has 293 million daily users, and on average, people spend 30 minutes on the app each day.
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With almost 300 million people using the platform, Snapchat is not a dead social media network. It still carries weight, especially with the younger generation.
If your brand appeals to its user base, it’s worth investing in Snapchat ads. With such an affordable minimum daily spend, almost everyone can afford to roll out successful Snapchat ad strategies.
Get creative with AR technology to create unique campaigns and build hype around your products. Use split testing to figure out what works for your business and what needs to go, and you will see your acquisition cost go down with more conversions.
The above tips and resources will make sure you create ads that resonate, engage, and drive action with your audience.
How do you get the most out of your Snapchat Ad investment?
Christian Pulisic’s first goal under manager Thomas Tuchel was as good as it got for Chelsea.
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Because the oldest Gen Zers are reaching an age where they can make their own purchasing decisions, you have a whole new audience you can target with your paid ads.
Search interest in Gen Z has climbed so high that as of March 2021, searches for Generation Z surpassed searches for baby boomers and millennials.
In order for your ads to be successful, you need to understand the demographics and characteristics of Gen Z so you can tailor your campaign accordingly.
The ages of those considered to be in Generation Z vary by source.
To add to the confusion, there’s also different terminology used to describe them. While the name “Gen Z” appears to have stuck, this generation of young consumers is sometimes also known as the Zoomers, in contrast to baby boomers.
For this article, I’m using the definition from Pew Research Center, which categorizes anyone born from 1997 to 2012 as part of Gen Z.
Just as baby boomers were defined by the postwar world, Gen Zers have their own unique characteristics tied to the age they were born.
For starters, they’re the first generation to grow up with access to technology throughout their lives. In 1995, two years before the first Zoomers were born, just 44.4 million people worldwide used the internet. By 2000, that number had climbed to 413 million, before roughly doubling every five years up until 2015.
The oldest Gen Zers turned 10 in 2007, the year Apple launched its first iPhone. They’ve pretty much always had access to social media, with the first social platforms starting to gain traction in the mid-noughties.
Generation Z isn’t just unique because they’re digital natives.
They’re the most diverse generation in history. Just 52 percent of US Gen Zers are white, and almost one-quarter have at least one immigrant parent (compared to one in seven Millennials).
What’s more, despite the growing cost of college tuition, Gen Z are better educated than earlier generations. Of 18 to 21-year-olds who weren’t in high school in 2018, 57 percent were in college, compared to 52 percent of Millennials in 2003, and 43 percent of Gen Xers in 1987.
Perhaps as a result of their educational exploits, they’re also less likely to work in their teens and early 20s:
They might be young, but Generation Z is already impacting our economy. In the US alone, they spend an estimated $44 billion a year. Taking their influence on all household spending into account, their annual economic impact climbs to a staggering $600 billion.
So, you should be targeting them through ads, right?
Not necessarily. Generation Z isn’t the best target audience for every brand.
For instance, they don’t seem to like alcohol as much as older generations. Just 15 percent of drinking-age Gen Zers say they drink at least once a week, compared to 28 percent of Millennials and 36 percent of Baby Boomers.
They also watch less TV. They watch over 30 minutes less broadcast TV per day, and they don’t watch any more online TV than the average internet user.
While they might not be a fantastic audience for brands in the alcohol or broadcast TV spaces, there are definitely some things Generation Zers do enjoy.
For instance, they love gaming. Indeed, two-thirds of Gen Z males describe gaming as a core part of their personal identity.
More generally, they have very different ideas of “consumption” than previous generations. To them, the act of buying simply means having access to a product or service, not necessarily owning it.
Or, as consulting firm McKinsey puts it:
As access becomes the new form of consumption, unlimited access to goods and services (such as car-riding services, video streaming, and subscriptions) creates value. Products become services, and services connect consumers.
At this point, I’m going to assume your brand is relevant to Gen Z, and you’re eager to reach them.
With that in mind, here’s a word of warning: advertising to Generation Z is a double-edged sword.
They received their first smartphone at the age of 10.3 and spend an average of three hours a day on their mobile devices. As a result, many Gen Z experience ad exhaustion. They’re 12 percent more likely than average to use ad blockers, with 49 percent saying it’s because there are too many ads on the internet.
However, their buying habits suggest they’re actually extremely receptive to seeing the right sort of ads.
For starters, 44 percent describe social media as a popular source for product inspiration, while 69 percent want to buy directly via social media. What’s more, they’re more inclined than Millennials to make impulse purchases.
It boils down to this: if you target Generation Z with the right products, they might be more likely to purchase it in-store or through social commerce (if you offer it). With that in mind, in this section, I’ll discuss how to target them effectively.
First, a quick disclaimer—you should only target the oldest members of Generation Z. Just as a millennial born in the early 1980s may not share much common ground with one born in the mid-90s, there’s likely to be a lot of disparity between young and (comparatively) old Gen Zers.
These strategies are relevant to reaching young adults right now, but trends will change by the time the youngest Zoomers come of age.
I’ve already noted that Gen Z is the most diverse US generation of all time. Zoomers recognize and champion this, with 71 percent eager to see more diversity in advertising.
While they respond positively to authentic, genuine expressions of diversity, they immediately see through ads that latch onto it as a way to sell a product. As one respondent to a Facebook survey put it: “It has to be authentic diversity, not just brand image.”
Say you’re in fashion e-commerce. You should absolutely use diverse models and messaging, but don’t latch onto Black History Month or International Women’s Day to promote your latest flash sale.
Generation Z hates being patronized.
This should be obvious—we’ve all been teenagers, after all. Yet so many articles about marketing to Gen Z talk about how they have the attention span of a goldfish.
Not only is that untrue, it’s also extremely patronizing. It suggests Gen Z are so obsessed with their phones or playing Fortnite, that they’re simply unable to focus on your brilliant ads.
In reality, Zoomers have better recollection of ads than Millennials or Gen Xers, particularly for skippable ads lasting less than two seconds.
Also, they’re the most educated generation in history and more comfortable with technology than their parents. If you don’t give them the credit they deserve, don’t expect them to buy from you.
Zoomers were raised on a diet of social media. Facebook is older than a lot of Gen Zers, so it’s hardly surprising they’re bored of it.
That’s not to say they don’t use Facebook at all; one-third check it on a daily basis. But they check lots of other channels, too. One in nine use TikTok every day, while one in ten are daily Discord users.
The lesson here is simple: to target Gen Z effectively, you need to focus on a diverse range of platforms, while keeping one eye on the “next big thing” in social media.
You might think your online presence should be geared toward selling your product and building brand awareness.
Zoomers disagree.
Two-thirds say it’s no longer acceptable for companies to stay silent on social justice issues, while three-quarters believe brands have more responsibility than ever to promote social justice.
What’s more, they’re open to brands joining in the conversation via the groups and communities they’re part of.
That means you should incorporate key issues like climate change and the Black Lives Matter movement into your messaging. But, don’t simply use it as a platform for selling—it has to be genuine.
Gen Z is just entering the workforce, so they typically don’t have a ton of money. What’s more, they were hit particularly hard by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in terms of job retention.
As a result, the older end of the Gen Z spectrum is much more financially aware. Because of this, you could get a lot of traction from targeted ads that demonstrate the affordability and value of your products.
Advertising to Generation Z can be a real minefield. Some advertisers get it exactly right, but unsurprisingly, lots of others don’t. Here are two examples of ads that get it spot on, and two that missed the mark.
Food delivery services saw big sales growth during the coronavirus pandemic. But with competition from the likes of Uber and Deliveroo, UK-based delivery service Just Eat needed to stand out.
Its answer? A collaboration with the rapper Snoop Dogg!
As a quick glance at the Billboard Hot 100 will tell you, Gen Z love a collaboration, and this ad certainly resonated, clocking up almost 13.5 million views on YouTube.
Take a look at the comments and you can see it’s gained the sort of response you’d typically expect from a “real” music video:
No one likes to be stereotyped, and Gen Z is no exception. Given that they make up more than one-third of the world’s population, it’s understandable they want to be seen as individuals, not all grouped in together.
Despite this, the British Army launched a recruitment campaign aimed at young adults, branding them “Phone Zombies” and “Selfie Addicts”.
That’s a tough sell. If a brand insulted me, I wouldn’t buy a pair of socks from them, let alone potentially lay down my life for them!
As an aside, 61 percent of Gen Zers describe themselves as “global citizens,” which suggests a career in the armed forces might not be a natural fit for them anyway, regardless of the advertising.
Fashion retailer ASOS launched a whole range targeted at Gen Z in which all the clothes are animal-free, sustainable, and gender-fluid.
As part of this, the brand ran a poll through Instagram Stories to ask whether clothes should be gendered, with two-thirds of respondents insisting they shouldn’t be.
This was effectively a double win. Not only did the campaign raise awareness of the Collusion line, but it also proved ASOS cares about the same issues as its audience, and understands the importance of expressing your identity.
Here’s an ad found on the subreddit /r/FellowKid, which is dedicated to naming and shaming terrible examples of Gen Z-focused marketing.
To be fair, Thortful does a lot of good advertising. It has a huge inventory of greetings cards, many of which are actually funny, but this ad is objectively pretty bad.
It smacks of an advertiser desperately trying to link their product to something that’s popular with a young audience.
Also, while the Fortnite bubble hasn’t burst yet, interest in the online shooter game was at its peak in October 2019. Thortful missed the boat on this one.
The word “authenticity” is horrendously overused in marketing, but it’s absolutely crucial to targeting Generation Z effectively.
Remember, Gen Zers expect you to weigh in on social justice issues, and they want you to promote diversity. But if you do it inauthentically, they’ll run.
If issues like these aren’t central to your branding, it’ll be obvious you don’t practice what you preach—and that will drive away these young, savvy, conscious consumers. For help creating your Gen Z marketing strategy, reach out to our top-rated agency.
What are you doing to reach Generation Z through your advertising?
Have you heard of data visualization? Even if you don’t know the term, you’ve probably seen some examples. Data visualization refers to graphical images that represent and explain data trends or other numerical information, such as charts, maps, scatter plots, or graphs. You can use data visualization in articles or on web pages to make …
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If you are looking to scale up your marketing, you will need talented people that can take charge of and execute your strategy. But should you build your own in-house marketing team or hire an agency partner? There are compelling reasons for both, and it mostly depends on your situation. Read on to find out … Continue reading Working With a Digital Marketing Agency Vs. Hiring In House
According to Investopedia, a silo mentality is “a reluctance to share information with employees of different divisions in the same company… reducing the organization’s efficiency.”
In other words, if different people or teams in your company aren’t on the same page about everything that’s going on, they might end up doing a worse job.
Silos can make your company seem less innovative and damage your employee engagement, resulting in lowered productivity.
They could also make your marketing less effective.
When it comes to marketing, “working in silos” usually means that everyone in the marketing department keeps to themselves.
The SEO people only think about SEO, designers about design, developers about development…you get the picture. Like actual silos, they’re separated and don’t interact. Why does this matter? Because it’s bad for business.
There are many reasons why marketing silos can cause a ripple effect in your business that goes beyond ineffective communication.
When your marketing is siloed, your team can end up accidentally wasting a lot of time by not coordinating with each other.
Picture this…
You own a company that makes dog food, and your content marketing strategist is trying to generate a few content ideas about pet care for your blog. They go to my keyword research tool, Ubersuggest, to get some inspiration:
But what they don’t realize is that the SEO team already did a bunch of research about this topic last week, and could easily have shared it with them. No one on the SEO team thought to tell the marketing team about their research, and no one on the marketing team thought to ask.
Because of marketing siloing, your content marketer has now spent their entire day doing something that’s already been done.
Here’s another example:
You have a freelance copywriter writing for your new website and a UX specialist working on the design. They’re working separately.
When they present you with the final deliverables, none of the copy fits into the wireframes. At all.
Your copywriter now has to redo all their work, annoying them and costing you more money.
The whole thing could have been avoided if you had just asked the copywriter and UX specialist to work together.
In addition to wasting time and money, marketing siloing prevents you from getting killer results.
Your customers expect your marketing to be consistent across channels—it’s how they know they’re on a legitimate site for your company. That’s why it’s so important to have an integrated marketing strategy. If your marketing department is siloed, your campaigns—and even basic things like font choices and colors—will look inconsistent. Silos can also create confusing situations and missed opportunities.
For example, let’s say you’re launching a new content marketing campaign. Your content team pours a bunch of money into hiring freelance writers, graphic designers, and videographers to create lots of awesome content for your website.
And then…
No one knows what happened. The content is really high-quality and perfectly optimized for SEO. You’re getting tons of additional traffic, but no conversions. What gives?
Turns out, the tone of the content is all wrong. It’s written in a way none of your ideal clients can understand or relate to.
Know who could have told you that? The sales and customer service teams. After all, they know your clients pretty well.
Once again, siloing leads to a marketing fail.
(By the way, if you’re trying to get more conversions for your website, there’s more to it than just creating content. In the video below, I share seven cool hacks that can help improve your conversion rate.)
Another terrible thing about marketing siloing is that it demotivates your employees.
Here’s how:
It’s easy to get excited about something when you see the bigger picture. But the larger your business gets, the more removed every individual becomes from your company’s overall mission—because they may not even know who is making decisions, let alone why.
Think about the way freelancers and consultants see their business. They’re responsible for doing everything themselves, so it seems like a real win when they get results.
The same goes for small teams—when something goes well, everybody celebrates. People feel like their job is making a difference.
When you’re running a larger company, it’s harder to keep this dynamic going.
Suppose your SEO person sits around all day copying and pasting keywords into a spreadsheet without seeing how this impacts the company’s marketing strategy. They’re likely to start thinking their job is pointless. After a while, they’ll probably start to look for another one.Losing talent is expensive. You don’t want your best people to leave because of an easily-solved problem like marketing siloing.
For employees at mid-size or larger companies, getting together with co-workers to bounce around ideas can be motivating, especially when those co-workers aren’t the same ones they see every day.
It makes everyone feel like they’re working towards the same goals.
By now, you should be pretty convinced that marketing siloing is not a good thing: it’s something that can hurt your business.
But how can you know if you have a silo problem?
When you’re “in the trenches” day in and day out, it can be hard to take a step back and think about what’s going on at the macro level in your company. And if you’re making the higher-level decisions, you may not know what your employees are experiencing.
If you’re worried about marketing siloing, take a look to see if you notice any of these things:
Have you noticed that your employees only talk to a few of their co-workers?
Maybe they don’t leave their desks and just chat with the people next to them. Or perhaps they have one or two friends in their department and don’t talk to anyone else.
If this is something you’ve seen at your company, marketing siloing might be an issue for you.
Another way to see if your marketing department is siloed is to ask your marketers what their co-workers are doing.
Ask your designers what the dev team is up to in relation to their projects. See if your SEO team knows anything about paid ads. Check if your content marketers are working with your social media people on writing consistent content across verticals.
If the answer people keep on giving you is “I have no idea,” they’re working in silos.
Even if your marketers are pretty good at working with other marketing team members, that doesn’t mean they’re good at working with other teams.
Marketers need to know what other teams are doing—even when their jobs seem unrelated.
If your marketing team doesn’t understand your business from a big-picture perspective, they could be making major mistakes that cause your marketing campaigns to fail.
Let’s say you’ve decided that your business has an issue with marketing siloing. What are you supposed to do about it?
You have to take action to deal with the siloing.
When creating a plan to tackle marketing siloing, the first thing you’ll want to do is talk to your managers.
Siloing often starts at the higher levels of a business. If your marketing department is divided into several teams, meet with your team leads separately to see what their goals are.
If the team leads aren’t working together and their goals seem unrelated to one another, that’s a problem. You should call a meeting with them to come up with a way to do things better.
Here are some of the things you can include in your de-siloing plan:
Having one central marketing plan that everyone has to follow is essential for your company. If you don’t already have one, that’s the first place to start.
If you’ve been running your marketing in a “throw things at the wall and see what sticks” type of way, it’s time to nip that in the bud and get serious about your strategy.
What does this mean? Well, first, you should have one or more buyer personas that show who your customers are and what they care about.
Next, you need to know what your competition is doing. Do some competitor analysis and try to understand what they’re doing that works and how you can use that information to get ahead of them.
Don’t copy their strategies, though. You’re not the same as your competitors; instead, you’ll want to show you’re better. More on that in my video below:
Once you’ve covered these things, you can create a multichannel marketing plan to help you get the results you need.
You’ll want to define your main goals and KPIs and make sure you’re hitting them. Make it clear that everyone needs to be involved in that process.
If you already have a marketing plan in place, but you still feel like you’re dealing with marketing silos, how can you get everyone in your company to get on board as a cohesive team?
If folks in your company don’t see the big picture, maybe it’s because they’re not talking to each other enough.
Make sure to plan regular meetings for your marketing department where your marketers can present what they’re working on and tell others about their wins and roadblocks. Even a 15 or 30-minute weekly meeting does wonders for team connection and communication.
Another thing to look at is the collaboration software you’re using.
If people are divided into different groups in your internal chat software or project management tools, make sure some company-wide channels are open, too. These will let everyone talk with each other.
Ensure that all your marketers have access to training, even in fields that are different from theirs. Maybe your SEOs want to learn more about web development, or perhaps your developers want to know more about copywriting. Let them learn!
Training your employees not only helps them get better at their job, but it also shows you care about helping them advance in their career—in turn, making them more engaged at work.
If you still can’t figure out why your marketers aren’t working together, maybe your company has a culture problem.
Maybe one of your managers has trouble controlling their temper and has a history of blowing up at people. Everyone tries to avoid them, so communication breaks down.
Or maybe you’re paying your lead SEO twice as much as your head of content marketing, and the content marketer isn’t happy about it. Since the content marketer resents the SEO, they’ve stopped talking to them and just do things on their own.
Once you root out these problems, you can deal with them.
If you’ve already tried fixing culture problems and giving your marketers more opportunities to communicate, but you’re still having problems, it’s time to consider taking more significant steps to deal with your marketing siloing.
Maybe what you need is a full overhaul of your org chart.
If you have several small, siloed teams, consider merging them into one larger unit with a few different “sub-units.”
Put these bigger teams together in the office to talk to each other about their current projects.
Or you could keep the hierarchy you have now, but move people around in a way that makes them feel less isolated.
No matter what you choose to do to deal with marketing siloing, the most important thing is that you follow through with it.
Don’t just go on an “anti-silo crusade” for a few months and then forget about it, letting things go back to the way they were before. Make sure your commitment is permanent.
Marketing siloing is one of the main things that can sabotage your marketing campaigns. Luckily, once you realize your company has a silo problem, you can often deal with it pretty quickly—as long as you have an organized plan.
Your employees will feel relieved that you’re taking the initiative. They will benefit from better communication between departments and individual employees.
Did I miss any ways to deal with marketing siloing? Let me know in the comments.
The post How Marketing Siloing May Be Ruining Your Business appeared first on Neil Patel.