Silos can have a major impact on any business. The larger the enterprise, the more likely they are to exist. And it doesn’t take much for poor communication and internal politics to creep in, which can cripple collaboration potential. So when it comes time to coordinate content campaigns across multiple silos, it’s no surprise when individual teams start working against each other and lack of communication leads to disjointed execution.
Many companies deal with this every day. In one study, lack of collaboration was cited by 86% employees and executives as a contributor to workplace failures.
So, how do you break silos down for more effective and efficient content production?
First, it’s important to understand the power of collaboration and how the modern business interprets it. In a global survey of over 1,200 business leaders, 61% noted that greater collaboration across functions was key to reaching strategic goals, even though over 55% said they work in silos.
Why Content Collaboration Is Valuable
Content collaboration is critical to producing engaging content experiences across channels that your audiences will appreciate. Better content experiences usually leads to more conversions, which is, of course, what you want.
Here’s what you can gain with successful content collaboration:
- Integrated planning: by getting the right parties involved early, content initiatives get the proper time and attention needed to reach their full potential
- Higher quality content: when you have different individuals involved and working together, you have more insights into your audience and more subject matter expertise, which should improve your content
- Message consistency: more collaboration means tighter alignment of messaging across all elements of a content campaign, thus giving your campaign a better chance of delivering on its objective
- Well-timed execution: when all stakeholders and producers are working from a well-coordinated schedule and keeping each other accountable, deadlines seldom get missed
- Adapt to change faster: with everyone working together, you can be more agile and respond better to internal and external changes
It’s hard to discount the value of content collaboration. But the virtual walls (or physical in some cases) of your silos may be positioned to stifle collaboration.
Hope is not lost, however, when it comes to removing silos in content production. There are specific tactics your team can take to remove the dysfunction and collaborate in a manner that fuels success.
Establish a Unified Vision for Content Production
One of the first things you should work on is a unified vision. With this in place, all team members can understand the expectations and work toward a common goal. Defining this vision includes developing certain elements.
Defining Collaboration
What does it mean to be collaborative? Use examples here of what ideal content collaboration looks like. Keep in mind that for content collaboration to be effective, it should be instant and constant.
The reason why it should be instant and constant is that most collaboration relies on communication. When there are gaps, projects often incur issues. Having a content marketing software solution can enable your team to overcome this challenge because you’ll be working with seamless communication.
Get Top Down Buy-In
For a unified vision, you must have leadership on board. Getting leaders to cultivate a collaborative culture will help all team members stay on the same page.
Training Team Members
Vision is great, but it will do no good if employees don’t have collaborative skills. While training will help your team get more out of the technology you use, it may also be a good idea to offer training for collaboration in general.
Centralize Ideas
Working in silos often means that ideas are kept there as well. When ideas are centrally available and accessible, then they can be put into action. Every piece of content has to start from an idea. When you have a repository where everyone can share these, employees feel more involved in the process.
This allows your entire team to be creative and share their insights, which could lead to more content production that’s resonating with your buyers.
Use Content Calendars
Content calendars are unique parts of content collaboration and something you absolutely need to put into place. With a content calendar, there’s no more discussion about due dates or who’s doing what or when that social media post is publishing. It’s all there in the calendar!
Provide visibility to schedules and timelines with a content calendar that all team members can access. Silos don’t stand a chance when you use this tool.
Enable Real-Time Notifications
We’ve already talked about the importance of communication in collaboration. It’s essential. But it can get complicated unless you use a content marketing system with real-time notifications.
When anything happens to a project or a timeline is changed, those who need to know will receive a notification, and manual updates (meetings and emails) can be kept to a minimum.
Create a Content Asset Search
Another collaboration breakdown can occur when the entire team doesn’t know what’s already available or where to find it. This can be a major area of waste and a huge drain on time as well. Having a centralized archive of content assets that includes an asset search eliminates these issues in a snap.
Leverage Project Management
When using content collaboration software, you’ll want to make sure it has project management features to help you navigate working together. Be sure you can manage your entire team centrally without the need for other apps and tools.
With these tools, content team members can chat about tasks on the dashboard to ensure that no details get lost and projects keep moving.
Remove the “Too Busy” Factor
Collaboration is often curbed by the fact that your team feels that they are too busy to work together. Our 2018 Content Planning report found that being “too busy” was the top collaborative barrier.
Everyone is busy. We all have competing priorities and deadlines. But when you have little time to work together, it’s going to impact quality and consistency. So, maybe it’s time to step back and look at what’s making your teams too busy to collaborate.
Much of it may because they don’t have the tools to be productive. Maybe they spend way too much time on manual activities instead of using content automation or other time-saving tactics. The best way to get time back for your team to work together is to invest in a content marketing platform that supports tasks that are eating up all your time.
Content collaboration across dysfunctional silos is a new problem for the modern content marketing team to overcome. See how you can improve content collaboration by using DivvyHQ. Try it free for 14 days.