What really holds marketing teams back? It’s not outdated martech stacks or shrinking budgets. The biggest barrier is organizational silos.
According to new research from EMARKETER and Zeta, 40% of marketers say that these invisible walls between teams are their top obstacle to success. Silos create confusion, waste spend, and block collaboration. Fixing them isn’t a tech problem. It’s a people and process problem.
Silos aren’t new. But they’re more dangerous than ever.
Marketing didn’t choose to operate in silos. It was shaped by legacy tools and operating models that forced departments into narrow specialties: research, media buying, creative, analytics, and so on.[DM1] Each team built its own metrics, tech stacks, operating processes, and incentives. And the deeper those specialties grew, the harder collaboration became.
In today’s landscape—with customers demanding seamless, omnichannel experiences—this siloed approach breaks down. Teams can’t work in isolation and expect consistent, measurable outcomes. The market has moved on, but many internal structures haven’t.
The cost of misaligned metrics
When each group defines success differently, it’s nearly impossible to understand what’s driving real business growth. That’s why marketing continues to struggle with measurement. Dashboards are cluttered with fragmented KPIs that offer little clarity. What marketers need isn’t more data or dashboards of fragmented metrics; they need a shared framework for understanding what drives profitable growth.
Without unified measurement, teams default to optimizing for what they can control: ad impressions, email opens, CTRs. But those metrics rarely reflect customer profitability or long-term value. As a result, marketing becomes a cost center to defend instead of a revenue engine to scale.
Start with deterministic data
The solution isn’t a new platform. It’s a single source of truth. Deterministic customer data is accurate, persistent, and identity-based. It provides the foundation for aligning marketing around real outcomes.
With unified data, teams stop second-guessing the basics: Who is our customer? What are they doing? What matters most to them? Instead, they can apply their unique expertise toward shared goals. Strategy becomes sharper. Execution becomes faster. Measurement becomes meaningful.
When the core functions of marketing—recognition, reach, relevance, and results—are grounded in a common data layer, they reinforce one another:
- Recognition identifies valuable audience segments.
- Reach ensures efficient media delivery across channels.
- Relevance drives personalized experiences.
- Results focus on true business impact like customer lifetime value.
From tool coordination to customer creation
The marketing industry has spent billions trying to solve this through technology. But better tools don’t fix misaligned incentives. It’s not about coordinating platforms, it’s about creating profitable customers.
This mindset shift, from defending budgets to driving growth, changes everything. It moves marketing from reactive to strategic. From fragmented to focused. And from channel metrics to customer outcomes.
Why precision at scale Matters Now
CMOs need to orchestrate personalized, measurable engagement across every channel: email, CTV, social, mobile, and more. That means bridging brand and performance. It means executing with precision at scale.
Zeta helps marketing teams do just that. Our platform unifies paid, owned, and earned media, connects data to execution, and enables real-time optimization. When you start with accurate identity and tie every action to a measurable result, marketing stops being a siloed function. It becomes the engine for customer growth.
Learn how the Zeta Marketing Platform delivers a 295% return on tech investment.
