The value of working as one integrated team

Working as part of an integrated team is more important than ever before. With so much insight to share across different channels and the lines between them blurring and overlapping more than they ever have, working in siloes simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Brands need integration—a consistent approach across channels, governed by an overarching strategy and with shared goals to work towards.  Only then can teams become more than the sum of their individual parts, achieving their own goals while helping others do the same.  

Testing it out

With that in mind, we decided to test out the value of integration with a social experiment.   We wanted to find out just how much of an improvement being integrated really leads to, so we set our teams a challenge. Gathering together people from different channel teams at Journey Further, we tasked them with building a tower out of bricks, which could take any form they liked. The catch? Nobody was allowed to speak and each individual was given their own instruction, which they couldn’t share with the rest of the team. Cue 10 minutes (the time they were given to complete their structure) of chaos. From failing to understand what others’ objectives were to individuals working in siloes and only caring about their own goal, there was conflict, confusion, and not much productivity. Then we switched things up. We repeated the task but, this time, everyone could see everyone else’s objectives. All of a sudden, the individuals were aligned, working as collective, collaborative teams. They were integrated.  

The results

And this showed in the results. First time round, the three teams we tested took an average of 9 minutes and 40 seconds to build their structures, with only 50% of the individual objectives completed. Second time round, the average time was just 5 minutes and 1 second, with every single individual objective achieved. When they were integrated, acting as collective teams, our groups performed:

• 48% faster: teams completed their tasks in almost half the time when they were integrated
• 100% more successfully: when the teams were integrated, they achieved TWICE as many objectives as when they were siloed

  This small (and fun!) task shows just how impactful integration can be: aligning goals across multiple teams and working collaboratively to become greater than the sum of their individual parts. We saw people working together to help others achieve their goals more quickly and efficiently.  

The takeaways

So how does this apply to you and your digital marketing? We spoke to some of our willing participants to get their observations and advice.

Dan Peden, VP, Client Solutions: “If you replace the task with PPC and SEO goals, your PPC can be doing a great job, but by smashing the SEO tower down. They don’t know they’re doing it necessarily, but they can be impacting other results, even though both teams are trying to achieve the same thing.  “Our job is to pull people or ideas from different departments together to apply to different client problems and create solutions. I couldn’t do my job if I didn’t integrate and understand how other teams work. “For example, understanding your visibility in LLMs and how that interacts with paid. Or reducing paid volume to allow SEO, where it’s prominent, to mop up, to take that cash to turn up the volume somewhere else.”

Dan Nutter, Director, SEO: “Getting away from just what you need to achieve and looking at the combined goal really makes a difference. Being clear on what other channels are working towards is crucial in delivering great work. “Ultimately you need to make sure you’re putting your budget in a place where it’s going to have the most impact. And you can only get that by having channel teams working together who understand what the overall goal is and who aren’t just trying to drive their own KPIs.”

Andy Johnson, Senior Manager, Strategy: “Make sure that whatever your business goal is, everything you do ladders up to that business goal. It doesn’t matter if SEO over here is trying to improve rankings or social over there is focused on improving view through rates. Actually what everyone’s trying to do is grow revenue for the client. So how does that all ladder up? If you don’t have that single goal to work towards, one channel could be to the detriment of what someone else is doing, unless you’re all talking.”

Sonya Karimkhanzand, Specialist, Content: “We’re all working towards one goal. So it’s really important that we’re all aligned and we work together rather than siloing ourselves.  “Content works really closely with the SEO team and the PR team and we find that when we all come together we create better work. We also create better relationships with our clients as well because we’re all aligned.”

Interested in levelling up your digital marketing with an integrated, multi-channel approach? Speak to us today to find out how we can help. Or, to see how we’re already helping brands integrate cross-channel, check out our case studies for Lily’s Kitchen, Sizzler and St. Moriz.