Breaking Down Silos to Build a Powerful Marketing Team

Hiring good marketers is not the winning recipe for building a great marketing team. Instead, you need to expose your team members to various sub-disciplines and processes to improve their knowledge and hands-on experience.

Successful teams feature members with diverse backgrounds and multiple skills. This is particularly vital for startups, which might not have adequate funds to hire employees for every role. That said, here are steps you can take to create a powerful marketing team that drives results.

1) Invest in cross-training

Today, marketing positions can be vacant for several reasons, and filling such positions on short notice is always tricky. This is where cross-training comes in handy, allowing you to use your existing team members to perform other tasks outside their assigned functions.

Ideally, cross-training offers a 360-degree view of the marketing world, allowing employees to learn essential skills for marketing operations. For example, a copywriter can learn account management, while an account manager can easily take on database marketing tasks.

In such a scenario, your marketing is connected and synchronized, allowing members to take on different tasks as they come up. Your team is not locked in silos of expertise, pushing your productivity and collaboration levels to new heights.

2) Develop team cohesion

As noted before, your team needs to be connected to achieve your desired results. Writers, designers, account managers, and programmers must work closely to deliver successful campaigns. To ensure seamless collaboration, you need to stem out the “Us vs. Them” mentality and break boundaries between teams.

Focus on fostering and nurturing team cohesion between the account management and creative teams. They need to work closely without the involvement of upper management while taking note of what’s working and not working. Team members must understand each other’s roles and processes to create a productive environment.

Also, take the time to identify potential conflicts and tensions—you want to iron these out while leveraging employee feedback and opinions to ensure a functional team. Bear in mind that any dysfunction impacts your deliveries to clients and the efficacy of your campaigns.

3) Advance with multi-skilling

Marketing is a dynamic field, and new techniques are bound to emerge. As such, you can future-proof your team by encouraging members to upskill in areas that are likely to be useful or in demand in the future.

For example, account managers can learn HTML, web design, and database marketing. These skills are essential in helping clients navigate technical tasks, or they can prove useful to other teams when needed.

Ideally, the more skills your team possesses, the more proactive they can be tackling any project. This reduces time spent on specific tasks as the team will not need to wait for the technical team or programmers to complete their task queues.

Build a world-class team

Today, the convergence of disciplines within the marketing field is compelling brands to cross-train their teams. This is the first step to building a successful marketing team and breaking down silos within your organization.

Leveraging technology, such as low-code development, enables brands to turn any team member into developers or programmers. This has streamlined web and graphics design tasks as any team member can complete such tasks.

Integration of applications and portability of devices has also improved collaboration and enhanced the functionality of modern marketing teams. Now, companies can set up versatile and powerful teams that understand their objectives and processes to deliver beyond any client’s expectations.