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Digital Summit MN 2025 - Breaking Down Departme...

Digital Summit MN 2025 - Breaking Down Departmental Silos

During this period of technological change and with AI fundamentally shifting how we work, it’s imperative that marketing leaders drive smarter decision-making through team collaboration and breaking down departmental silos.

In this session, you’ll explore the essential leadership strategies needed today to build a high-performing digital marketing team, foster a collaborative culture, and align cross-functional teams to drive maximum impact. We’ll go through proven frameworks to position your team’s work for greater visibility, encourage other teams to champion your successes, and effectively communicate wins to leadership.

After this session, you’ll be able to:
- Implement a cross-team collaboration strategy that encourages other departments to amplify and advocate for your marketing wins.
- Use a storytelling framework to effectively communicate your team’s impact and results to leadership, securing greater buy-in and resources.
- Create a team culture playbook that fosters accountability, motivation, and high performance in your digital marketing team.

Avatar for Zach Chahalis

Zach Chahalis

July 30, 2025
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  1. Break Down Departmental Silos to Unlock More Effective, Results-Driven Decision

    Making Zach Chahalis @ZachChahalis /ZacharyChahalis
  2. Zach Chahalis Vice President of SEO for Over 14 Years

    in SEO working with brands like: Socials: @ZachChahalis (X) and /ZacharyChahalis (LI)
  3. Why I’m Qualified to Talk About Marketing Leadership I currently

    manage 12 SEOs and Content Strategists/Writers. I also matrix-manage a team of 40 developers and several product managers. I’ve been a successful people manager for two S&P 500 companies and two major marketing agencies.
  4. And Departmental Silos Only Create Further Problems Paid and SEO

    competing against one another Marketing/Sales/ Product Targeting Different Goals Engineering and Product Misalignment
  5. "Leadership is not about being in charge. Leadership is about

    taking care of those in your charge." Simon Sinek
  6. Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common

    vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results. Andrew Carnegie
  7. We Cannot Be Successful If We Don’t Work Towards A

    Common Goal "Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success." Henry Ford
  8. Looking Back – Cost of Living Opportunity The SEO team

    identified an opportunity in early 2024 to incorporate cost of living data into our network to expand how we support the customer from an education standpoint … and also grow organic traffic. We did see competitors targeting this, but we felt we could provide an enhanced experience.
  9. Looking Back – Cost of Living Team Action SEO 1

    sourced and secured COLI data. SEO 2 and SEO 3 worked extensively to develop this idea into a functional headliner. Design 1 transformed the idea into a user-friendly, appealing interface. Team Data worked closely and extensively to ingest this COLI data in and create the endpoints needed to support this work. (Shout out to Data 1!) Team Dev 1 transformed the dream into a reality first creating metro area COL pages and then launching our Cost-of- Living calculator. Team Dev 2 with the assist helping to support some of the front-end efforts to support an aggressive timeline The QA team (Shout out to QA 1 and QA2) made sure that these features went out into production flawlessly.
  10. Looking Back – Cost of Living Result - Metro Pages

    Launched on 1/8 A total of XXX pages launched supporting major metros and top cities in the US.
  11. Looking Back – Cost of Living Result - Cost of

    Living Calculator Launched on 1/22 Check it out - https://www.apartments.com/cost- of-living/
  12. Looking Back – Cost of Living Business Outcome These pages

    immediately began to generate traffic and have capture over xxK clicks since launching – and continue to climb. This is also an asset our Digital PR team is actively promoting. Note: Rent Trends pages had a similar start and generated xxxK clicks in 2024 after launching in late 2023 … and extensive backlinks.
  13. Looking Back – Cost of Living Business Outcome The pages

    are moving up page one surpassing direct and indirect competitors We’re also getting displayed in AI overviews, featured snippets and People Also Ask results.
  14. Looking Forward – Cost of Living These pages will continue

    to get supported both with fresh data dynamically and supporting pages.
  15. Top Takeaways Silo-Breaking Is a Leadership Responsibility High-functioning digital organizations

    need cultural and operational alignment, not just technical fixes. Define a Clear Team Culture With Operating Principles Clarity, rituals, and psychological safety empower teams to perform and collaborate across boundaries. Shared Goals and KPIs Are the Foundation of Collaboration Aligning on OKRs and North Star metrics reduces friction and builds mutual accountability. Cross-Team Collaboration Requires Structure Use collaboration charters, roadmaps, sprint schedules, and conflict resolution frameworks to keep everyone aligned. Tell Stories That Leadership Understands Translate SEO/product/marketing work into business impact using simple storytelling frameworks. Make Wins Visible and Shareable Internally market your success stories in ways that allow other departments to amplify them. Build Trust Through Transparency and Feedback Loops Celebrate contributions across departments, share performance metrics, and stay open to compromise.