Growth is great. The information silos that naturally grow alongside new departments? Not so much. Different teams may be sharing different branding and brand messages; work can easily be duplicated; and the chances of errors increases.

Centralized content creation is the key to breaking down information silos. In turn, your team can minimize errors, achieve effective brand growth, and improve productivity.

Why It’s Important for Marketing Teams to Think About How the Whole Organization Creates Content

Content marketing is the backbone of any growth-focused company. Marketing content can include Sales playbooks, material to be left behind during pitch meetings, price sheets, blogs, social content, FAQs documents for troubleshooting your brand’s offerings, and more.

Content that accurately reflects the business and also grows brand awareness is essential for attracting qualified customers. Clear, helpful content aides Sales and prospects during the decision making process. Collateral can further equip customer-focused teams in keeping clients happy.

Because every team at a company needs good content, the creation and ideation should be a collaborative effort.

Content Creation in Silos Is Problematic

When a company’s teams are siloed, content creation becomes difficult and, even, detrimental to a company. Teams do not have the right information available to make accurate content decisions, and duplicate work is created.

So, if content creation impacts every single aspect of a company, what happens when a company’s teams are working in silos? Teams do not have the right information available to make accurate content decisions, duplicate work is created, and content creation becomes difficult and, even, detrimental to a company.

Communication Is Inefficient

Communication becomes inefficient when an organization functions within silos. Two very common examples of this include the correct information not being shared with the right people and repetitive meetings and/or too many meetings.

Inefficient communication between different departments can lead to flawed decisions, making efforts to grow the business unfruitful. Additionally, inconsistent communication across departments interrupts project management, leading to the adaptation of undesirable practices.

Trouble Tracking Down Assets and Information

In turn, inefficient communication can lead to individuals unable to find the right information and content, which directly impacts performance and productivity.

Let’s use a specific scenario to understand the problem better: the Executive team updates product pricing and tells Sales, and then Sales communicates this to potential customers. Meanwhile, Marketing was not told about the new pricing, so, when asked to create pricing collateral, the website and PDFs are made with inaccurate information. Not only has a team spent time on work that cannot be used, but there is now also the risk of inaccurate brand information being distributed externally.

Teams can also duplicate work when content creation is not centralized. For example, if Marketing stores demo videos somewhere that is not accessible to the whole organization, Sales may start working on their own. Digging into the issue further, if Sales wants to update or personalize that demo, but cannot access the original assets, they need to start from scratch.

Wasted Time with Multiple Vendors and Workflows that Do Not Integrate

When teams are not working collaboratively, there’s a strong possibility that their software does not either. A large tech stack means teams have to go through additional steps to transfer information between platforms and the company is allocating more budget for more vendors.

How Marketing Teams Can Centralize Content Management

The marketing teams can help prevent information silos by centralizing content management. Centralized content management helps to establish workflows in which crucial information is shared and all departments work collaboratively. 

Here’s how to achieve this:

Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar will ensure every department has a written schedule of when and where upcoming content gets published. It helps all the team members remain organized and access the same information.

Create a Centralized Content Storage Library

Also, your marketing team can introduce a centralized hub where team members can access, store, or produce content ideas. The centralized hub can also help with project management and ensure stakeholders collaborate to achieve the main goal. In particular, when dealing with video content, having raw clips, video assets, and finalized videos in one place that everyone on the team can access reduces inefficiencies and redundancies.

Use Collaborative End-to-End Digital Creation Tools withBuilt-in Communication and Collaboration

End-to-end digital creation tools ensure fewer digital tools and less uploading and downloading to transfer assets between stages of a project.