Take 5 Minutes

You’re busy, we’re busy. We get it. So here’s ‘Breaking Down the Silo of Your Consumer Insights’ in four sentences or less:

Breaking down silos doesn’t just encourage a friendly work environment; it creates new opportunities for growth, revenue, and targeted decision-making. You can break down your silos by:

• Adjusting your company culture to promote transparency and open communication
• Implementing tools and platforms that centralize data sharing and analysis
• Encouraging collaboration through cross-functional meetings and workshops

Dig Deeper

Teams with strong cross-functional collaboration are powerhouses; by sharing their insights, reporting, and strategy, they set themselves (and each other) up for success. A good cross-functional strategy can:

• Dramatically impact brand growth results across the board
• Create more targeted campaigns with shared consumer insights
• Open the door for creative collaboration across multi-channels. 

So, when teams operate in a silo, meaning there’s no visibility or cross-functional collaboration, it stagnates growth and prevents faster and smoother brand results.

That’s why working towards transparency and data sharing is so important. It’s a team mentality where everyone wins together. 

Identifying Where Silos Exist

Understanding your data silos is a vital part of cohesive teamwork across all departments. It’s important to know where silos exist within your organization so that you can actively work on breaking them down. 

When it comes to marketing teams, oftentimes, silos prevent the internal sharing of consumer insights and results cross-functionally, whether you’re manually reporting or integrating systems.

Silos within experiential can lead to more than a few challenges for your team and others:

• Limited visibility into trends in your consumer data, making it hard to get the full picture of who your consumers are 
• Inability to effectively personalize marketing campaigns in other channels or extend experiential programs across multiple channels
• Missing entire pieces of the consumer’s journey with your brand
• Marketing campaigns that lack cohesive brand vision across all different channels

Understanding the customer journey is vital to B2C marketing, driving revenue and boosting loyalty. However, when each team stays in its own corner, it misses out on a deeper understanding of the consumer experience, which can fuel your strategy. 

For example, a brewery’s brand home can see that most visitors come from Italy. But what good does that do for the brand home as a whole or the teams that are trying to grow distribution?

When a brand home manager brings their learnings to the table, distribution teams can identify new areas to grow, marketing knows where to spend their ad dollars for greater impact, and leadership expands experiential marketing’s budget to target more programs in Italy since they’re looking to expand in the market. 

‍

‍

Take a look at your technology stack. What kind of data are you collecting? Who can benefit most from it? Which departments need the type of consumer insights you’re collecting? 

Once you answer those questions, you’re better prepared to collaborate more cross-functionally.

Benefits of Cross-Functional Collaboration

Often, siloed teams come from old processes and ways of doing things that might have worked when the brand had different, smaller goals. But now, if growth is a significant part of your strategy, collaboration is imperative for better performance.

When you create a collaborative environment, you enhance visibility and alignment across the board. Improving data sharing and team collaboration means you’re in the perfect place to understand the full picture of consumer behaviors and preferences. 

That way, all teams can work precisely to create a fully integrated plan, from experiential to digital marketing and beyond. More consumers will attend your experiences and share more information that you can use to retarget with personalized loyalty strategies. 

‍

Strategies for Breaking Down Silos

When it comes to breaking down the silo of your consumer insights, there are a few ways you can optimize your effectiveness. 

Approaching it from three different angles is going to help you out in the long run:

• Culture
• Technology
• Education

Culture

Adjusting company culture is always challenging, but you have the ability to champion transparency and open communication between teams. You’re inviting others to do the same and leading the way by giving details and elaborating beyond basics in meetings and reports.

For example, having an end-of-quarter meeting with multiple teams and departments to give updates and talk to one another about learnings is a great way to encourage community while also sharing valuable information and insights across the board.

Technology

Implementing tools and platforms that centralize data and make it simple to share across your tech stack makes creating a culture of transparency easier. Any team can access the insights they need where they need them, allowing them to work more efficiently and stay up-to-date without the need to go through your team.

Education

Encouraging collaboration extends beyond data. You can also prioritize learning together. Facilitating cross-functional meetings and workshops (and even book clubs) allows teams to get to know and learn from each other. That way, when they sit down at a meeting or are working on their own campaigns, they understand their teammates' strengths and feel less tentative about bringing them in as experts

How To Use Insights Cross-Functionally

It’s one thing to say, ‘share your insights,’ but another to know what they actually do for other teams. Here’s a quick rundown of what you can do to be a supportive department to the brand at large. 

Within Marketing

The marketing department as a whole has a few different functions outside of experiential that can benefit from the consumer insights you’re collecting. A few examples include:

• More effective targeting & personalization: Insights about your consumers who attended experiences and the types of events they went to can be used to target ads better and tailor future campaigns
• Database growth: Collecting opt-ins and info about consumer demographics and preferences can help build your database and effectively retarget everyone who engages with your events. 
• Justifying spend: Experiential results can help you make the case for additional budget and inform leadership decisions around investment. 

Outside of Marketing

The sharing shouldn’t stop at your department. Cross-collaboration outside the marketing department helps areas you usually don’t have much to do with that are valuable to your brand. A few examples of what that looks like include:

• Distribution: Knowing where attendees come from geographically can help you decide which markets to expand distribution into. 
• Retail: Having information on where your consumers prefer to shop and most frequently purchase your products can help determine retail and promotional strategies
• Loyalty programs: You can use insights into your consumers' identities and interests to introduce or improve loyalty programs and drive people to join.

The Takeaway

Breaking down silos doesn’t just encourage a friendly work environment; it creates new opportunities for growth, revenue, and targeted decision-making. You fully map out the customer journey, creating vital revenue centers and impact for your brand.

So, prioritize cross-functional collaboration and aim to share valuable insights across the business proactively. Your teams and consumers will thank you. Creating a new culture of transparency improves your team’s impact, the department’s budgets, and the consumer experience.