How to Break Down Team Silos and Take Your Mobile App Marketing to the Next Level

Morry is the Sr. Director of User Acquisition at Bumble, a leading social networking app that connects users for dating, networking, and friendships. Two years ago Morry had the opportunity to join Bumble in Austin to run their Facebook campaigns, and quickly expanded into managing all organic and paid mobile campaigns. He has been growing the mobile marketing department ever since.

Learn more from his Mobile Hero profile.

To succeed as a digital marketer, you really need to know how to work with the different teams at your disposal — but not how you might think. Ad-hoc requests for your design team is not “working with them.” In order to truly collaborate with other teams and departments, you have to educate them. When I started at Bumble almost two years ago, one of my main goals was to break down silos between digital marketing and the rest of Bumble. Here’s how I did it.

Creative

The first thing I did was sit down with our creative team to review all the different dimensions the performance marketing team needed. Whenever we have new creative, I’ll go over all platforms we’ll be running ad creative on, what audiences we tend to hit on those platforms, the quality of users coming from those platforms, and the ad size requirements for each platform.

Based on our discussion, the creative team has a better understanding of who will be actually seeing the ads so they can make creative decisions accordingly. Then after a month or so of running the ads, we will fully analyze and discuss which creative worked for which audience and why. I always find it quite rewarding to see the creative team dying to know which static, video or animated ads worked best so they can get more insight for the next round.

Non-performance marketing

Another big department I’ll sit down with is our non-performance marketing team – think field marketing, out-of-home (OOH), influencer, partnerships, etc. These teams run some incredible and cohesive campaigns, but need to build paid digital into their promotion plans. It was extremely important for me to have conversations with this team about new campaigns so I could offer up a performance marketing strategy from the start. For example, how Facebook ads could compliment the campaign, or how we could leverage Google search with search engine marketing (SEM).

The most important point to illustrate in these meetings is the impact digital performance marketing can have on the campaign. And to run a truly comprehensive marketing campaign, paid digital must be in the mix to close the gap between brand awareness and conversion.

Brand standards

Finally, the most important conversation (and ongoing conversations) I have at Bumble is with our brand team. Without Bumble’s mission and dedication to end misogyny, everything we do — from our product features to marketing — all of our decisions, would have no meaning behind it. On top of that, with Bumble’s unique brand identity, anyone familiar with the brand could identify Bumble content in an instant. The last thing I want to do is ruin that with a poorly designed digital marketing campaign. Meeting with the brand team helps ensure we have checks and balances in place so that my team could move quickly while adhering to our brand identity guidelines.

Since there is no way our Chief Brand Officer would be able to spot check every single piece of creative my team designs, instead we created an approval process across teams that helps us make the final call. My advice is to identify different team members that can serve as brand advocates within multiple departments to get as many points of view as possible. Tie these advocates into email threads or set up quick syncs about new creative or audiences if you have any doubts. Provide continuous feedback on what’s working and what isn’t.

By building cross team relationships that didn’t exist before, our team was able to break down barriers and reduce friction within the digital marketing process. The infamous black box of digital marketing is now an open book. My final piece of advice is to be as transparent as possible with the ads you are running, where you’re running them, and who you’re running it to. This will keep all teams happy and help ensure that everything will run much smoother!