In the 80s, a cartoon called Voltron captured my imagination. It featured a team of five space explorers who each pilot their own robotic lion to fight the evil Zarkon and his cronies. They combine the lions to form the “Full Voltron” – a 328-foot super robot. In this case, the whole is much better than the sum of its parts.
A common belief is that marketing functions should be structured by discipline – a content team, a branding team, a SEO team, and so on – a series of parts. The problem is that each team only focuses on optimizing for their own performance measures; content for consumption, digital for conversation, campaigns for leads. This structure causes marketing departments to get overly funnel-focused, with teams working at the top, middle, or bottom of the funnel and gapping or overlapping in the middle.
Digital marketers can avoid these pitfalls and improve acquisition and retention by implementing and measuring a holistic strategy across various disciplines.
A good place to start is to think about where fields overlap. For example, a comfortable place for a content marketer to start may be with SEO, analytics, and conversion rate optimization.
These specialties cover the top to bottom of the funnel, and none of them work optimally without the others. Results that could be gained by building strong collaboration and breaking down silos between these four disciplines include:
- Creating content that is relevant and actionable for audiences
- Driving additional qualified traffic via organic search
- Accelerating customers through the full funnel, from awareness to conversion
- Understanding user behaviors and conversion blockers by better tracking user interactions with content
- Evolving and updating content based on results
It will take time to get the Full Voltron effect of digital marketing but starting small and expanding as you go will benefit you, your company, and your customers in the long run.
