3 Easy-ish Ways to Fix Your Siloed Communication Strategy
Communication strategy, or, how your collective marketing channels work together to achieve your goals, can be messy and often difficult to orchestrate. The ability to synchronize across an entire channel set tends to leave marketers with crossed-wires and siloed channel processes and can result in inconsistent messaging. Oftentimes, this leaves consumers with an unclear, disjointed and/or awkward brand encounter.
Dedicating the time to sorting this out will lead to a more consistent and connected brand experience for all your audiences. Here are 3 easy-ish ways to fix what may feel like a bit of a hopeless cluster-f.
Gather the functional facts. Evaluate the reality of where you’re at and stop biting off more than you can chew. Oftentimes, organizations can have dozens of channels (depending on the size) to not only build out/up, but also sync and expand. Because each channel comes with its own strategy, personalities, process, and expectations – you have to be realistic about what you can actually solve and where to start.
Here are a few questions to outline the challenge you may be up against:
How are the channels currently working together?
What are the biggest problems to solve within your best and worst performing channels?
Which channels have gone rogue and what are the characteristics of that team?
Start smart and create a pilot program that you can scale. After you’ve evaluated the dynamics of your channels individually and collectively, you’ll need to assemble the right set of people across the organization to create a better omnichannel process that can eventually scale. Hot takes on how:
Pick passionate people in high-performing channels. By focusing on motivation, you will beat apathy. By focusing on high-performing channels, you will have the attention of leadership. All of which will allow your pilot process for communication strategy to be set up for success. Choose at least 3 channels so that you have the data you need to demonstrate this approach works across a variety of teams and is worth scaling. If you have no idea where to start, we suggest first syncing the process and approach within your paid media, website and in-store (or whatever your in-person channel is).
Build a better process together. Collaborate, discuss, run internal surveys, get to the bottom of what is broken and how these channels can come together to create a way that gets the company closer to collective success across the entire channel mix, not just each individually. Perhaps there is not a consistent set of KPIs across channels, or perhaps some channels/teams follow the advertising campaign and others do not – perhaps some teams don’t understand the brand guidelines and go totally rogue on the entire Vis ID. There are dozens of problems that arise when communication is in the hands of dozens of operators. Once you feel good about the problems you’re solving, build a linear problem-solving process that you want to test over the next 6 months.
Examples (because they help):
“We want to switch to yearly planning to sync everyone up.”
“We need to get a new brand idea and run two campaigns a year off of that brand idea that focus on selling our top 5 products. We want everyone to ladder up to those campaigns.”
“We need our entire communication approach to be based on using channels for where they are across our consumer journey. We need a more thoughtful brand experience from awareness to purchase.”
Whatever it might sound like, you’ll be rebuilding a mini-process to help solve it.
Build and run a 6-month metric-based test on how you hope to sell it to the larger organization. Develop a comprehensive set of KPIs as to how you will measure test results. Halfway through the test, measure and optimize on both the process and the performance. Build the test to report on not only the quantitative, but the qualitative, as to be sure that there is both art and science behind how you’re selling the new and improved process.
Test Example: You have decided that your “better process” is to run the next 6 months of communication goals off a redesigned consumer journey. You redesign your consumer journey to 6 major touchpoints that now have 6 aligned KPIs, with each channel reporting on the KPI that is within their part of the consumer journey – therefore you have one channel represented across each of the 6 touchpoints for the duration of the test to see how it performs.
Sell the simplified and success-driven structure to the entire company. After the test has run, develop a results-driven presentation for leadership demonstrating how this new approach is crucial for the success of the business and the brand. Be sure to include a plan on how it scales and what would be the next domino to fall – assuming you can’t solve it all at once. Perhaps it’s a total Mar-Comm org restructure or perhaps it’s creating more flexible and actionable Brand Guidelines. Whatever the solution, be sure you give it the appropriate detail it needs to move into the tactical implementation phase.
Implementation looks different for everyone, but here a few ways to envision the potential:
Creation or evolution of consistent tools that everyone is using to action the brand across communications.
Workshops or training based on the organization's barriers and bottlenecks when it comes to communicating the brand across its goals cohesively.
A shorter-distance process from brand, to insight, to collective communication – based on mitigating room for error and finding efficiencies where you can.
Currently trying to wrangle your communications? Wanting to start but lacking some of the space/time to do so? We’d love to discuss. We offer a variety of services that help identify and solve these types of challenges. We know it can be daunting, but you clearly care as you got to the end of the article – which means you’re doing great already (yay you!) and if you want to take the next step, we’re here to support you.