Marketing is simple — you bring your value proposition to your target audience, explain how your product or service improves their life, and invite potential clients into your physical or virtual sales environment to make a purchase. Yet 50–60% of companies (HubSpot State of Marketing Report, Deloitte CMO Survey, Gartner) estimate that their marketing does not deliver the desired results.
The main reason is the fragmentation of marketing channels, data, teams, strategy, and technology. In addition to direct financial loss, marketing fragmentation also makes decision-making and strategy development more difficult.
Why is marketing fragmented?
Marketing is primarily a game of capturing the target audience’s attention. Segmenting the audience based on interests, habits, age, gender, or any other characteristic is beneficial for marketers, but as a result, the field has become heavily fragmented over the past decades. There are more marketing channels, tools, data, and customer journeys than ever before; these are constantly changing and each operates according to its own logic. This means that even the most capable generalists (even with the help of AI tools) cannot compete in a constantly evolving marketing landscape with those who specialize in specific areas of marketing.
Practitioners know that getting different specialists to work effectively together brings a whole new set of problems:
Fragmentation of marketing channels
The target audience’s attention and the channels they use are constantly changing. The first requirement is to know which channels the target group uses to consume information. Usually, there are several such channels, all working differently and presenting measurable results in their own way. For example, for an experienced Meta marketer, TikTok content and advertising is a new world with new rules.
Data fragmentation
Measuring marketing and business processes is a prerequisite for effective marketing. The problem is not so much the existence of data, but how to gather data from different channels into a single system and in a consistent format.
Adding complexity is the fact that the customer journey is no longer linear — ad → click → purchase.
Today the customer journey often looks more like this: TikTok → Google → YouTube review → online store → Instagram → Google remarketing → purchase.
Misinterpreting data becomes expensive very quickly.
Team fragmentation
Small and medium-sized companies generally do not have all the in-house competencies needed for effective marketing. Missing skills are covered by specialized service providers. However, team fragmentation quickly leads to a situation where each person responsible for their part focuses on their own area and believes that poor results are caused by the person responsible for the previous or next stage.
This endless witch-hunt may add some excitement to daily work, but it does not bring the company closer to its goals.
Strategy fragmentation
Too often, a company’s marketing strategy simply boils down to a desire to sell more. Less often is it clearly defined to whom, what, in which channel, and with what value proposition to sell.
A marketing strategy cannot be static — it must be a continuous, feedback-based process grounded in the company’s priorities, resources, and the measured results of marketing channels.
How to minimize marketing fragmentation?
Based on our experience, we recommend focusing on one marketing channel at a time. When the customer acquisition cost (CAC) in one channel has reached a satisfactory level, you can move on to the next. When optimizing several channels simultaneously, it’s easy to end up in a situation where no one understands which channel actually generated the lead/inquiry/sale.
Using support services (ad specialists, content creators, developers, etc.) is a reasonable and sustainable way to implement a marketing strategy. However, it is essential that marketing is led by someone who has a comprehensive understanding of the company’s goals, resources, and marketing as a whole.
Every organization needs a generalist to lead marketing — someone with sufficiently broad experience and knowledge to measure the performance of different work streams, budget, supervise (also substantively) the work of support service providers, and continuously adjust the marketing strategy based on results.
This can be an employed marketing manager or any form of service-based collaboration (wink-wink). The ideal solution is to find a marketing partner who has as much in-house competency as possible to cover the necessary skills.
