Breaking down silos: a framework for coordinating content across marketing teams

Have you ever heard a swing band play? The robust energy of a trumpet, the deep metronome of a bass, the moody cheek of a saxophone. Clarinet, piano, trombone, guitar… Each with its own character, purpose, and story. They don’t have a conductor to reign them in. What they do have is a drummer. With a steady, reliable beat that grounds and guides all the separate parts. And all of a sudden, where there could have been a cacophony of sounds, there is one wholesome tune that makes your feet go tap-tap-tap.   

Unfortunately, finding a ‘drummer’ to align multiple marketing teams can be a much bigger challenge. Before you know it, Social has created their own off-brand templates, Product went live with a major release before PR lifted the embargo, Content implemented a separate tool to track their publishing schedule, and Brand was left there to pick up the pieces.  

Welcome to the world of marketing silos. 

The good news is, if the above sounds familiar, you’re not the only CMO struggling with disjointed marketing. The even better news—we’ve got a handy framework for you to use to tackle this challenge. One step at a time.  

Let’s dig in. 

Understanding marketing silos

As they say, the first step to addressing a problem is recognising it.  

The tricky thing about marketing silos is that, even if you have a drastic case as described above, they can be easily overlooked as the culprit of your marketing troubles. It can be tempting to blame it on a misfired campaign, a lack of budget, or even a shift in the industry.  

But ask yourself the following questions:   

• Is your messaging aligned across all channels and platforms?

• Is everyone across your marketing teams aware of and actively following Brand Guidelines?

• Are all launched marketing initiatives complimenting each other, with each team consistently boosting their impact?

• Are all the produced content pieces/campaigns/posts timely and have a chance to “shine”, without being overshadowed?

• Is every team member aware of their roles and responsibilities and how they align with the overarching marketing structure and strategy?

• Are you always clear on the workload and budget allocation, without duplicated efforts or multiple briefed agencies? 

   

If you’ve replied “No” to any of these questions… You guessed it. Silos.  

If not addressed, marketing silos can (and will) cause process disruptions, prevent collaboration, undermine the effectiveness of your initiatives, and—worst of all—damage your customer experience, which, in turn, will negatively impact both your brand and your bottom line.  

Let’s have a closer look at the key factors that need to be tackled to break down the silos.  

Key elements to breaking down the silos 

Eliminating silos might seem like a Herculean endeavour, but in the end, it comes down to five key tasks:  

• aligning themes and goals 

• ensuring consistent messaging across all channels and platforms 

• introducing collaborative planning processes 

• implementing key integrated tools, and 

• defining clear roles and responsibilities  

Unified themes and objectives

Do you remember that bizarre CatDog cartoon from the noughties? An animal with two heads (a cat and, yes, a dog), facing in opposite directions. Each with their distinct personality and idea of a desired destination…which rarely matched.  

CatDog is pretty much what you get when your marketing teams are not aligned on the overarching themes and objectives.  

Say, you’re launching a new wearable. Product wants to showcase its unique health-tracking features and position it as a tool for professional athletes. Meanwhile, Social focuses on its sleek design and being a perfect fashion accessory. As a result, this dissonance only confuses the audience (in fact, two distinctly different ones in this case) and devalues the brand. 

By ensuring your teams are aligned on the main themes, as well as business objectives—driving brand awareness, for example, is quite different from pure lead gen—you can increase the impact of your initiatives and strengthen the brand.  

Consistent messaging

In marketing (and brand), it’s all about the story. And the story only works if the narrative is consistent across all chapters.  

The same applies to your brand messaging.  

If Nike’s social channels all of a sudden shifted the focus from the driven, empowering ‘Just Do It’ to ‘Nike and Chill’, it would raise more than a couple of eyebrows among their audience. Instead, the company consistently delivers a dynamic, athletes-focused message across its content, website, social, paid media, and the product itself. The result? A cohesive narrative that reinforces the brand, boosts recognition, and drives loyalty.  

Some of the core strategies to ensure consistent messaging include company-wide implementation of Brand Guidelines, dedicated training—that starts from the onboarding—and regular content audits and finetuning.  

Collaborative planning

Content and marketing alignment is not something that can be done from the top-down only. The best way to ensure that every team is on the same page is to include them in the content planning process, right from the start.    

Let’s look outside of the marketing world.  

Procter & Gamble (P&G) have always prided themselves on driving innovation “from within”. But with the company’s growth, relying solely on internal R&D teams was no longer sustainable.  

In 2000, they had a rude wake-up call: their stock slid from $118 to $52 a share. That’s when the new CEO introduced the “connect and develop” innovation model that integrated external entrepreneurial minds, with their fresh ideas, into the existing network. It met some resistance and required a good bit of change management, but the model worked.  

Today, more than 35% of P&G’s new products have elements that originated from outside of the company, and their R&D productivity has increased by 60%.  

It’s the good old “our differences make us stronger” approach. And it’s certainly true for marketing. By bringing key members of all the relevant teams together during the planning stage, you can ensure not only content consistency and an influx of fresh ideas, but also increase cross-team and management buy-in. 

Integrated tools and platforms 

Technology is here to make our (marketing) lives easier. We all know that.  

The problems start when each team—and often even team member—implements their own tech to manage their corner of marketing. And where there should have been increased collaboration and productivity, there’s now disruption, the need for awkward integrations (and often the lack thereof), and extra admin.  

By implementing cross-team tech like project management apps, CMS, or communication tools, you can ensure high-level visibility, which helps avoid inconsistent messaging, duplicated efforts, and conflicting campaigns. It will make onboarding way less stressful, too. 

Clear roles and responsibilities 

No matter how thought through your content strategy, it won’t matter unless everybody understands their role and is ready to assume responsibility. At the end of the day, it’s about ownership and accountability.  

Something simple like a detailed, documented role description for each team member with precise areas of responsibility and defined KPIs can be a good starting point.  

The important part is to ensure that everybody understands exactly what’s expected of them, how their role relates to others on the team, and how it contributes to the overall strategy.  

The framework for breaking marketing silos 

So. You’ve got the theory. Now comes the difficult part—making it happen. 

Below, you will find six key steps to tackling the silos problem. While the order in which you implement the framework might differ depending on your organisation, we recommend starting with the first two steps, as they will set up the structure for everything that comes after.  

Step 1: Establish a central content strategy team 

When everyone is responsible, no one is.  

Before you even start tackling the silos problem, you need to establish a cross-functional team that will be responsible for overseeing the consistent implementation of content strategy across all channels and departments. Call it a Marketing Board, a Content Leadership Group, a Strategy Team, or anything else that strikes your collective fancy.  

For the sake of this article (and my appreciation of DC), I’ll go with Content League.  

The first person you need in your League is a Content Strategist. After all, they will be responsible for the actual development of the strategy and everything that comes with it, from personas to content pillars. They are the ones spearheading the meetings and ensuring the outputs align with the overall company strategy and business goals. Depending on your organisation, it’s usually a dedicated role, a leadership position like CMO, or an agency bringing an impartial perspective. 

Then, include one representative from each marketing team. It’s important that they have the authority to make decisions on behalf of their department.  

And finally, add a Project Manager—someone who will make sure everything stays on track and is delivered within the agreed time and budget.   

If your company lacks dedicated resources, the League can be substituted by an external agency. They can ensure the lack of bias and represent the Voice of the Customer (VoC).  

Step 2: Develop a one-page communications hierarchy 

For something to take effect, it first needs to be documented. 

A one-pager that outlines key themes, core messages, customer personas, and content pillars will serve as a central reference guide and will make it much easier to ensure cross-team content alignment. Establishing and documenting a communications hierarchy and content governance standards will help define clear SOPs required for streamlining content production. 

Once created, make sure that this document can be easily accessed by all team members—storing it in a company-shared folder, or better yet Digital Asset Management system (DAM), can be a good solution. 

Remember that this is a “live” document that needs to be regularly reviewed and updated to ensure its relevancy.  

Step 3: Conduct regular collaborative planning sessions 

Your League isn’t worth much if all it has is fancy titles. And a strategic document can’t become actionable if it’s there to simply tick a box and be forever forgotten in some folder.   

Collaborative planning sessions are where you put your theory into practice.  

Think of them as regular sprints aimed at aligning teams on upcoming campaigns, general themes, and content needs.  

But they are more than an organisational tool. 

These sessions can and need to be an open forum, a supportive place to bring ideas, brainstorm, and identify and preemptively address potential challenges. The fact that you’ve established a cross-functional team means that these meetings will be fueled by a variety of ideas and perspectives—just what you need for a robust and comprehensive content strategy.  

In case you needed some stats to back up this point, Deloitte found that 83% of digitally maturing companies use cross-functional teams to boost innovation and collaboration. And with a shared KPI and a sufficient budget, this collaboration can go an even longer way. 

Step 4: Utilise integrated planning tools 

There’s no point in trying to align content across the company if each team operates in isolation, using separate tools to manage their workload, track progress, communicate, and coordinate content production. This leads to the lack of overall visibility, making the job of a CMO, trying to break down the silos, much more difficult.  

One of the solutions is to set up integrations to try and connect the disjointed tools. While it can work for some apps, others will require creating APIs, which, in turn, will require extra developer time and can bring an entire host of problems with it.  

A much easier way to ensure there are no conflicting schedules, misaligned content, duplicated efforts, unnecessary admin, or rogue campaigns is to have a suite of integrated tools that are used by all marketing teams and offer support through the entire content process, from creation to approval to publishing.  

For example, you can choose an app for marketing-wide comms (Slack, MS Teams, etc.) to eliminate the need for back-and-forth emails and a project management tool that can also serve as a cross-team editorial calendar (Asana, Monday.com, Trello, etc.). This way, you’ll be able to have a high-level visibility into the entire content journey and easily spot gaps or issues in the production pipeline.  

Whichever tool(s) you choose, make sure every team member is appropriately onboarded, has access, and is comfortable using it.  

Step 5: Define clear roles and responsibilities 

Whenever I hear “We’re all wearing multiple hats here” from a client, a tiny alarm goes off in my head. Because while it became an unfortunate norm for bootstrapped startups and resource-tight SMBs, having the same attitude in bigger, more established companies is usually a sign of mudded roles and responsibilities. And with that come overlapping efforts, disrupted schedules, and entire projects that slip through the cracks simply because of the lack of ownership.   

Creating detailed job descriptions and ensuring that every marketing team member knows their focus areas, KPIs, and what’s expected of them is a good first step to addressing the issue. This can be implemented straight from the hiring process, with regular revisions that ensure that the description and the scope of the role remain accurate. 

When it comes to content projects, right at the planning stage, make sure to clarify who’s responsible for each part, how those parts interact with each other, and what is the expected timeline and output. Having an integrated tool that can help track progress and serve as a reminder of split responsibilities can be a great help here. 

Step 6: Monitor and optimise 

Strategise, analyse, repeat. 

Just like with any marketing campaign, to know whether or not your efforts of eliminating silos were successful, you have to gather data—and act on it accordingly.  

While the usual marketing analytics tools can offer you good, measurable insights, it’s also helpful to gather feedback straight from the teams. Make sure to capture the “before” stage, marking the start of your efforts so you can use it as a benchmark.  

Run monthly audits, organise regular check-ins and regroup workshops, send out surveys…and be prepared to stay agile and pivot your strategy based on the gathered data.     

Just one more thing…

At the end of the day, the biggest obstacle to breaking down the silos is… people.   

Even the most thought-through, comprehensive content strategy will fail if your team members don’t collaborate and adopt it.   

One of the key reasons for it is our natural resistance to change. But there are several strategies to overcome it.  

• Involve your teams in decision-making: they will be much more likely to get on board with the changes if they feel that they are contributing to the outcome. Focus groups, planning meetings, workshops, surveys are all good ways to make your team members feel heard and increase buy-in. 
  

• Communicate the benefits: highlight the need for change and the implications of its absence. While it’s helpful to showcase its benefits for the company, it’s always best to mention the direct impact the changes will have on people’s individual jobs.  

• Listen and iterate: make sure to actively listen to your teams’ feedback. After all, they are the ones impacted the most. By staying flexible and open to criticism, you’re much more likely to develop a system that’s effective, efficient, and helpful to your team. 
  

• Lead by example: to paraphrase an old saying, be the change you wish to see in your content team. Embody the steps above—become an expert in the tools you’re integrating, lead the planning sessions, drive brand alignment, etc.—and be visible at all times.  
  

• Provide ongoing support: from initial training to regular check-ins to offering helpful resources, your team needs to know that you’re there to support them along the entire change journey. 

   

To wrap it up 

Eliminating marketing silos doesn’t happen overnight. And while it can seem like an ambitious endeavour at times, the benefits of increased productivity, streamlined processes, a stronger brand, and enhanced customer experience are worth the trouble.  

At the end of the day, it all comes down to six key steps: 

1. Establishing a content strategy team

2. Ensuring key brand elements are documented and easily accessible

3. Running regular cross-team content planning sessions 

4. Integrating unified tools

5. Clarifying and communicating roles and responsibilities

6. Monitoring the effectiveness of your efforts and staying agile  

Simple, eh? Good thing you don’t have to go it alone 😉 

If you need a hand breaking down your marketing silos or developing a content strategy that’s adopted across your teams, or you just want to vent and talk about the hardships of reigning in content marketing chaos (I hear you), drop us a note.  

Let’s make that magic happen.