7 of the Most Common Modern Marketing Challenges and How Your Business Can Meet Them
If marketing were ever easy, businesses wouldn’t have entire departments of experts or outside professionals to handle it for them.
As time goes on, though, marketing challenges shift with every change in technology and buying habits.
In your business’s ongoing journey to improve your marketing results, take a look at these common challenges you’ll face and how you can solve them.
1. Understanding Your Target Audience
The “information age” is the perfect term for the time we’re in now. People have far more information than ever before about the businesses around them.
The key to modern marketing success is a crystal clear understanding of the challenges facing your buyers. Your messages must be aligned with how your buyers describe the problem. How you describe your product doesn’t matter if you aren’t connecting with the needs of your audience.
2. Standing Out from the Crowd
When it comes to changing the marketing landscape, technology is both a gift and a curse. On one hand, it’s allowed businesses to reach huge numbers of people in a short period of time. On the other hand, it’s allowed all their competitors to do the same.
Today’s consumers see around 4,000-10,000 ads per day. Business buyers are no different. They too are bombarded with messages. This creates a challenge for marketers: how do you stand out from the crowd?
As you plan your marketing campaigns, thinking outside the box is key. Tracking your past campaigns will show you what you’ve done before so you can branch out and find new ways to reach your customers.
3. Managing Big Data
This is another one of those ways technology is both helping and hurting businesses when it comes to marketing.
The amount of data that is available for a company’s marketing seems unlimited. You can find out so much about where a customer comes from, who to target, and more. In fact, the challenge is keeping tabs on all that data.
The trick is having a marketing software system that keeps everything organized. This lets you see what information is relevant and when.
The software also allows you to see and compare data from different sources. To get a clear picture, you’ll need to look at your website analytics alongside your revenue data, as well as your social media metrics and more. Pulling everything together in a minimal amount of time is far easier with the right tools.
4. Maintaining a Steady Flow of Competitive Content
As most marketers know, content marketing is one of the most essential aspects of any business’s marketing plan. The problem is that your competitors know this as well.
Now that the trend of content marketing is growing, it’s getting more competitive. Your search engine optimization skills are more in-demand now than ever because there are more companies vying for those coveted first-page positions in Google search results.
The other reason content marketing’s popularity is becoming more difficult is that it’s a struggle for businesses to keep coming up with original content. As a marketer, you want to show potential customers that you can deliver useful content that adds value to your relationship.
The best way to do this is to hire professionals with distinct experience in content marketing. These team members will have the creativity and knowledge to build your strategy from the ground up.
5. Keeping Up with the Need for Personalization
As we mentioned above, the growth of big data gives you plenty of information about how your marketing campaigns are working. It also gives you information about how to make them successful in the first place.
Today, it’s all about personalization and targeting. Business buyers respond well to ads that are relevant to them but they’re annoyed when they see irrelevant ads.
The key to targeting lies in the data and the software. Your content management software can help you categorize and target your content, catering to every reader.
6. Proving Success
This challenge may not be new, but it’s certainly growing. Decision-makers are having a harder and harder time getting the data that proves their marketing is successful.
It’s ironic, but this is a difficult task whether your company is doing well or struggling. When a company is successful, some executives think they can scale back on their marketing because they have plenty of business already. When the company is struggling, executives are looking for any expense to cut.
This is why your marketing department needs ongoing ways to collect data that proves how successful your campaigns are.
It all comes down to keeping your data organized. You also need to know which types of data are the most telling and which translates the best to your revenue.
For example, a boost in website visitors means far less to executives than concrete data about the conversions coming from your pay-per-click ads.
7. Appealing to Multiple Decision-Makers
In B2B companies as in B2C companies, you need to know your customers. In today’s business world, that’s trickier than it seems.
In fact, most purchasing choices in a company will involve 3-5 decision-makers. Those decision-makers could span multiple departments and seniority levels.
For B2B companies, this means you need to know how to appeal to the goals each decision-maker has.
For instance, a purchase may need approval from the CFO, the customer service department head, and the CEO.
The CFO is concerned about the expense, while the customer service team wants to know how the purchase will affect customer satisfaction. The CEO is thinking more about the way the decision will impact their future performance.
Solving Your Biggest Marketing Challenges
When you think about it, marketing is all about getting as close to mind-reading as possible. Trying to figure out what your customers want and how to appeal to them can be difficult to say the least.
Knowing the top marketing challenges you can expect to face on a daily basis is the first step toward solving them.
Our unique software can help. To find out for yourself, learn more about our Sureshot software.