Go holistic and work more closely with other marketers

Izzy says: “Befriend other marketers and go holistic. In today's digital marketing world, we can't focus on one channel anymore – especially for brands that want to go big in order to build their branding and target more broadly.

You can't just focus on one channel, like SEO. You have to go holistic and work with other marketers. You have to work with your brand as well, but you need to ensure that your strategies are aligned. You can't do one thing for SEO and another thing for social media or split what you’re focusing on.

Align everything together. That is the only way that you’re going to hit the business goals – which is always a sale. They want to make money; that's why they hired you. You have to ensure that you're working towards the same goal and, to do that, your strategies have to be aligned and you need everybody working together so that your efforts are not disconnected and going in completely different directions.”

How do SEOs befriend other marketers and go holistic?

“We talk to each other; it’s as simple as that. Talk to each other, and schedule meetings and regular catchups with other marketing teams. In one of the agencies I worked at, we used to have short meetings every morning with our PR people and project managers to ensure that we were working towards the same goal, we weren’t disconnected, and we weren’t working on something that might negatively impact other team members.

Make sure that you know each other and you know what other teams are working on because there might be things that you can help each other with. If Christmas is approaching, you might be writing some blog posts and trying to rank them. Your social media team could help by posting it on social media and boosting some of those posts.

You have to talk to each other in order to do that. If you’re going to focus on Christmas and they’re going to focus on one sale for Black Friday, then it's all going in different directions. You could help each other out if you just aligned your efforts.”

To ensure that nothing is forgotten, is there a formal process that you would recommend for working more effectively together?

“It all depends on the company that you work for. If you're in-house or agency side, it might be different as well. You could have Slack channels, and I would really recommend having an Asana board that everyone can contribute to so everyone can see what's going on.

You can have more formal meetings, perhaps once a week. I wouldn't do it too often, though, because you might run into the trap of just talking to each other and running out of time to do the actual work.

Once a week, you could have one formal meeting to go through your strategies. The teams can explain what they’re focusing on and go through their ideas together, so everyone is involved from the beginning of the process, and everyone knows what's going on. Then, at subsequent meetings, you can have a catch-up. If you have more structured management, management and department heads can make a plan and then you can involve your juniors in another meeting, so everyone knows what's going on.

The key is for everyone to know what's going on, and then you could use morning meetings to just touch base on what you're doing today and highlight any potential issues.”

Instead of having an SEO team, could you have a project team that includes one marketer from each channel being represented on that project?

“I used to work like this, and I think it can work really well. There were many people in the agency, but we worked in ‘pods’. Those pods would have an SEO person, a PR person, and a project manager – and then we would have our set of clients. Obviously, we could talk between different pods and share ideas, but we would focus on our set of clients. This way, we could make sure that we were aligned with each other.

I like the idea of not having different channel teams but having campaign teams instead, to make sure that you have representatives of every channel in every campaign. Then, you make sure that everyone knows what's going on.

That might be tougher in bigger organisations, but it's about coming up with a way of structuring the teams to ensure that everyone knows what's going on. It's also useful to make sure that your broader marketing team understands different channels. I don't mean specialising in different channels but, as an SEO, I know how pay-per-click works. I’m focused on technical and on-page, but I know how link-building and PR work.

If you're a T-shaped marketer, and you have an understanding of the broader marketing efforts, you know how those other channels work, what they’re working towards, and how that can be achieved. Even if something gets lost in translation, you can then spot potential issues. It’s really helpful to ensure that your team is educated to a certain level.

They shouldn’t be specialised in everything, because we can't specialise in everything. However, they should at least know what's going on and how things are achieved in different channels. Even if it's more difficult in different organisations, there are ways to make it work. There is always a structure, and there’s always someone that we're reporting to. This information can start at the top, with the heads of the departments, and they can then share it with the lower levels.

For really large marketing teams, you could have a plan drafted up so everyone can read it in their own time and understand how the different channels are going to work together. It’s vital, and I've seen firsthand what can happen when things are disconnected.

Even just in SEO, we have technical SEOs, local SEOs, content SEOs, etc. If these channels are disconnected, one person will do something and another team will see that it just doesn’t work for them. It can just lead to going back and changing things, and losing time fixing things instead of going forward.”

Could SEOs work in a pod one or two days a week and then go to their own team the rest of the time?

“I can see the benefit of that but it might be challenging if you were working on separate clients within the pods.

The pods we worked in at Re:signal were structured really well. Outside of working in a pod, we also had something called Land and Learn, where different team members would give talks, so we could all learn from each other.

We also worked very closely together, so you could always go to someone and talk to someone from the same channel if you had a problem or just wanted to have a chat. We also had internal newsletters to get updates on what was happening and a very good online internal communication structure.

There are different ways of structuring things. If you worked on the same client, you could work on different campaigns as a pod to make sure that everything is aligned. Then, as a bigger picture, you could come back to your teams.”

If you’re in an interdisciplinary team, how do you measure which channel has the biggest impact on the customer deciding to make a purchase?

“In an ideal world, you are a marketing team and you're fighting for the same goal, so you shouldn’t try to take individual credit. You can still measure your impact though.

The fact that you all work on the same campaign doesn’t change the things that you do. If you’re doing a Christmas sale, you would still run pay-per-click, do your on-page SEO, make sure the technical is done, and do your social ads, but you might drive them to the same page. You might advertise the same campaign at the same time that the social ads do and make a lot of noise around it because that is what’s most important to the brand.

You can still see the fragments. If you go to analytics, you can see who came from pay-per-click, who came from search, who came from social, etc. You’re not changing what you do so much as how you do it and how you approach it. You’re making sure that strategy is aligned, and you don't go in completely different directions. If you’re promoting your perfume, you want the content team to be writing a blog post on 10 Best Perfumes for Christmas, not 10 Best Christmas Gifts.

It's still possible to see who came from where and how much revenue is assigned to each channel, if you need to.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time focusing on what you suggest in 2024?

“Structuring your day better is always helpful, so stop checking emails at the beginning of your day. It might sound harsh but, when you start checking emails, then you do stuff for other people, and you don't do the stuff that you should be doing right now.

If you're not making to-do lists, start making to-do lists. To-do lists are gold. Also, have blocks of time dedicated to hardcore, focused work. I try to dedicate the mornings to that. If I've got a big project to finish, or a big chunk of work to do, I try to dedicate a morning to it. Then I start checking emails, replying to people, and doing bits and bobs.

That should mean that you have more time for communication and alignment with other teams because you've already done your main piece of work for the day. You can chat with other team members and tackle the work from the emails that you didn't check in the morning.

You can even leave client emails until later in the day. If something is terribly wrong and you don't see the email, they can always pick up a phone and call. The client will appreciate you actually working on tasks for them rather than just sitting and replying to emails. Replying to emails doesn't get things done. I'm not saying leave a client’s email for days, I'm just saying that you should give yourself two or three hours to dedicate to your important work.

If you were in a meeting and another client emailed you, you wouldn’t stop that meeting just to reply. You wouldn’t even check your emails during a meeting. Strategy meetings can last for two or three hours, so you have to leave those emails for that amount of time anyway. If you have these focused sessions of hardcore work, and you really do stuff for that client, they will see that and they will appreciate it.”

Izzy Wisniewska, the director of Creatos Media, and you can find her over at CreatosMedia.co.uk.