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Search can't live in a silo. If you want to see success, cross-collaboration across your organic, content, and paid teams is absolutely key. But that takes a huge amount of effort, from untangling communication to cross-training to getting buy-in from everyone involved. What's a search marketer to do?
If you missed her talk this year at MozCon 2019,
here's your chance to make up for it! In today's edition of Whiteboard
Friday, Heather Physioc shares her framework for successfully
integrating your organic, paid, and content practices for a smoother
search experience.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hey, everybody, and welcome back to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Heather Physioc, and I'm Group Director of Discoverability at VMLY&R. Today we're going to talk about nine tips to help integrate your organic search, paid search, and content practices.
1. Announce change all at once, but roll out changes one at a time

So your first tip is that you want to announce change all at once, but then you want to roll out the changes one at a time.
It can be overwhelming to integrate practices and change processes.
So you don't want to try to do everything all at the same time. It's
like trying to boil the ocean, and it's too much to stick. So while you
want to get everybody on board and aligned to the benefits and
challenges they'll be facing as you integrate, then you just
progressively roll out the changes iteratively over time.
2. Document new products & processes

Next, as you develop new capabilities and processes and offerings
together, you're going to document those processes in a shared, living
wiki, because those processes are going to continue to change.
So my team uses Confluence, where we document our shared workflows,
but everybody on the team has access and total trust to continue
refining those in the ways that they see are best for the team.
3. Make recommendations and report together

Your next step should be obvious, but a lot of people are not
doing it. You should be making recommendations and reporting together.
So a lot of times we'll collect all our data for reporting from all our
different channels.
We'll smash some slides together at the last minute before we throw
it over the fence to the client. It ends up with a pretty shallow,
almost meaningless set of data that doesn't tell a story. So we should
be getting together, sharing our insights, observations, and findings in
the room together to find the story that is the most meaningful and
help prioritize for our clients the best marketing decisions they can
make from that data.
4. Cross-train to build advocacy across teams

So your next tip is to cross-train so you can build advocacy across
the teams. We host a lot of workshops and hands-on training. We've even
done job swaps where we had SEOs writing performance content for product
detail pages. It creates this wonderful sense of empathy and
understanding for what others need in order to do their jobs well.
But it also creates these great mental checks where you ask yourself,
"Am I including the right people at the right times? Is there anyone
else who could add value here? Could my work be impacting someone else?"
So the purpose here is not necessarily to know how to do each other's
jobs so much as it is to empower people to be able to advocate for,
speak about, and cross-sell your other teams.
5. Reintroduce the team or capability

Next, when you've done your integration of processes and people,
everyone else in the organization may not necessarily know what that
means for them. So you'll want to reintroduce your team or your new
capability to the rest of the organization. Put faces with names.
Talk about what the new capability is and does and the value it
brings to the organization. Tell people how to engage with that new
offering and what it means for their project or initiative or client.
6. Market the joint wins

Up next, we're going to market the joint wins. As you're continuously integrating, you should always be looking for wins or warnings that you can share with others so they can learn how to better engage with your offerings.
So if you have a great case study, where you integrated paid and
organic or organic and content, make sure you're marketing those stories
out to your colleagues, your clients, your bosses, and of course your
team.
7. Hold roundtables to deep-dive search opportunities

Up next, we're going to do roundtables so we can deep dive search opportunities with other departments. So of course it makes sense to have roundtables between organic search and paid search or organic search and performance content, but also think beyond your immediate team.
Think about other marketing teams, like social media and pairing
search behavior insights with social listening data. Or think about
geographic teams. What if you sat your organic search team down with
your Europe group to figure out what opportunities make the most sense
for that region? Or even sales and IT and finding those areas of
intersection, where you can do great search work that supports more
parts of the organization.
8. Host mutual lunch & learns to cross-pollinate

Next, think about hosting mutual lunch and learns so you can
start to cross-pollinate different skill sets. So similar to the
roundtables, this is where you're going to bring different groups
together to talk about capabilities. But think about more than just
presenting your capabilities to other people. Also be sure to invite
them to present their capabilities to your group. For example, we've
invited the project management team or the client engagement team to
make us stronger in our search work through the value that they bring.
9. Give ownership of change to others

And finally, as you're making all of these changes, it can't just
come from the top, one person just handing change down for everyone
else to implement. It has to be organic, pardon the pun, and everybody
should have ownership over the direction that we're heading together. So
when we make changes to products or processes or we start to integrate
different groups or spin up little teams to work on specific objectives,
we make sure that those individuals from each side have ownership to
make those decisions together and roll it out to the rest of the group.
It helps make sure we've considered all the angles and greatly
impacts our ability to get buy-in across the team. So those are nine
quick tips to integrate organic search, paid search, and content
practices. Let us know what you think in the comments below. I want to
hear your tips too, and we'll see you next time on Whiteboard Friday.
Source:https://moz.com/blog/integrate-organic-paid-and-content
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