I went to a professional basketball game with my son a couple of years ago. We happened to sit behind a group of marketing team members who were building social media content as the game was being played. With my marketing background, I was quite intrigued by seeing them work. As a piece of video was shot that would make a great highlight, the videographer saved the digital file to a thumb drive, and one of the marketing interns ran it to an editor, who clipped it and sent it to one of the several marketers who were each handling a different social media platform for the game.

As halftime came and the marketers took a break, I approached one of them – a young lady – and asked about the work they were doing. I was curious how quickly they were getting the video up on social media, what kind of response they were getting from fans and several other inside marketing questions. I received a rather rough response from her. She clearly did not want to interact with me or any other fan who was in the building, even though she was surrounded by people who were the target audience for the basketball team. We were fans and had paid good money for our tickets. We would be the people who would share, like and comment on the posts they were making available to us. However, that was lost on this person. Maybe she was having a bad day. Maybe she was leery of old men asking her random questions about her work. Whatever the reason, it was very clear that she was in a marketing silo.

What is a marketing silo? It is when you are sure people will buy your product, but you don’t care to interact with them to find out anything about them. You have cut off any interaction with them. You don't know what they are thinking or how their views impact their buying habits. Inevitably, you will make a mess of things if you stay in your silo. That may take the shape of your marketing crossing the line of good taste with your customers or underwhelming them with what you thought was great marketing. More often than not, however, you will lose customers because they sense you simply have disengaged with them.

If I could give you one piece of marketing advice that would make a world of difference in selling to your customers, it would be to intermingle with them. Listen to what they have to say. Relay their opinions back to your marketing and sales team. Here is a marketing tip: People like to be valued. They are smart enough to pick up on it when you are dismissive of them. It is marketing’s job to make them feel valued. You will never do that if you have siloed your marketing department off to where they only make decisions based on their own inward-focused self-talk.

If you are in the marketing silo, make a decision to get out and relate to your customers. Base your marketing on these interactions. Otherwise, you will find you have alienated the very people you depend upon to keep your business open, and that is never good for sales. That is what happened when the snotty young lady made it known she would not play nice. I hope her boss figures it out before the next game.