When I went to business school, my core curriculum was filled with every commerce course in the book. From accounting and finance to economics and IT, the goal was to turn students into well-rounded business professionals.
After dabbling in different courses (and admittedly suffering through accounting), I found my calling in marketing. Finding a creative outlet where my love for words could be used strategically to turn a brand’s messaging into an engaging story felt like the educational stars had aligned.
A lot of peers told me I chose the “easiest” business major – until they had to take a marketing course for themselves. Marketing is so much more than just coming up with creative ideas (even though that’s a major part of it). Each day brings its own unique set of marketing challenges that you need to use your business and customer relationship skills to overcome.
Here are 14 marketing challenges that most businesses will encounter, and tips on how to work through them.
1. Going Off-Script During an Unprecedented Crisis
Handling an unexpected crisis was something we all had to learn the hard way. They never taught us how to do marketing during a pandemic in business school, and there wasn’t a playbook to turn to for a crisis of that magnitude. I think I speak for all of us when I say, we had no choice but to simply adapt and overcome.
But, there was a lot to learn from that experience: Every marketer eventually confronts a crisis at some point. In these situations, they may have no recourse to rely on other than their instincts and their audience insights.
When you’re trying to overcome an unprecedented situation as a marketer, the key thing to remember is to be empathetic with your target audience — especially if they’re directly impacted. It’s important to never exploit hardship in your messaging. Always focus first and foremost on how to be helpful.
If you suspect that your messaging could be perceived as you taking advantage of a bad situation, then you probably need to go back to the drawing board.
2. Adjusting to Consumer Spending Behavior
Every day, we make buying decisions without even noticing it, and it’s our job as marketers to grab viewers’ subconscious attention. To do this, you must first understand what influences buying decisions:
- Personal Factors
A consumer’s demographic can influence a consumer’s individual interests.
- Psychological Factors
Customers may respond to marketing messages depending on their personal beliefs and attitudes.
- Social Factors
An individual’s family, friends and level of education can all come into play when considering their buying decisions.
To gain insight into each of these factors, it’s important to segment your audience. Segmenting plays a key role in helping you adjust your individual marketing strategy. It creates a personalized user experience that aligns with their spending behavior.
3. Managing Audience Segments
Marketers aren’t just creating content for a client or brand, they’re crafting materials that will call their customers to action. Most marketing teams are creating content for 3 distinct audiences per client:
- Demographic
Building your customer data — such as age, gender, education and profession — will help you gather demographic information to segment your audiences and enrich your marketing strategy.
- Geographic
The where element of your marketing plan, geographic location, can provide valuable insight into customers’ climate, culture, language and population density for personalized messaging.
- Behavioral
This supports visualization of how customers are interacting with your brand. This allows you to identify their habits in terms of searching, browsing and spending, which makes future actions more predictable.
Building and analyzing your customer database in detail will be the first step to creating effective messaging that resonates with your target audience within your marketing campaigns. In B2B marketing, defining buyer personas may be more beneficial for promotional purposes. Both target audiences and buyer personas serve important purposes to help marketers identify who they are creating content for.
Review our 3-step approach to defining a target audience to help jump-start your marketing campaign.
4. Understanding Metrics and Analytics
Over 80% of B2B marketers agree that their biggest marketing challenge is measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns. Understanding your marketing ROI is essential for tweaking your budget and future decision-making. After all, digital marketing is data-driven marketing, but with the amount of information being collected from each campaign, it can be easy to become overwhelmed when deciphering which metrics matter most.
Measuring ROI is one of the more major digital marketing challenges, but it’s relatively easy to overcome. By utilizing Google Analytics, Woopra and other platforms, you can gain valuable insights into your business data. It’s also important to understand the two categories that metrics are divided into: vanity and value. An increase in social media followers and higher keyword rankings don’t necessarily have an impact on your business’s bottom line. Value metrics, like downloads, conversions and qualified leads, directly impact revenue.
Include these metrics in your reports to show clients or department heads how your marketing efforts benefited the company.
5. Navigating Social Media
Social media is one of the easiest marketing channels to use, right? Wrong.
Many people consider themselves social media experts because of the time they spend scrolling through different platforms, but content consumption and content creation are 2 completely separate things. Because of social media’s accessibility and outreach, marketing on this channel can be very beneficial for small businesses and large corporations, but you still need a solid strategy and dedicated social media manager to increase sales this way.
While 74% of marketers around the globe invest in social media marketing, many of those marketers may not be using the platforms with the most ROI. For example, Facebook and Instagram are great for B2C small businesses looking to create a community around their product or service by sharing visual content. But LinkedIn is actually the best for generating qualified leads in the B2B domain. While you may associate LinkedIn with your last job search, 91% of marketing executives agree it’s the best social platform to find quality content.
A key aspect of successful social media marketing is to stay in tune with current, popular trends. Recent apps and features, such as TikTok and Instagram Reels, have taken over the social media space in the last year. In fact, TikTok has made a notable impact on the buying decisions of younger audiences. According to a StudentBeans study, 55% of TikTok users aged 16 to 24 made a purchase from a business after coming across their brand or product on the platform. To ensure the best results from your marketing initiatives, make sure you’re keeping up-to-date with the ever-changing motions of social media.
6. Building Article Ideas
Marketing and creativity go hand in hand. Coming up with original materials, titles and images that are optimized to reach target audiences is a challenge. It flexes both the creative and analytical sides of a marketer’s brain, which — after a while — can become exhausting.
Writer’s block is one of the most aggravating content marketing challenges, but we have a handy topic brainstorming cheat sheet that you can fall back on when the inevitable happens. If that doesn’t get the creative juices flowing, consider using a content ideation tool or scroll through social media to see what consumers are searching for, so you can tailor content to their interests.
7. Improving Email Engagement
When done correctly, email marketing can offer a massive ROI since it’s so easy to implement and directly reaches your target audience.
Of course, email marketing is only effective if existing and potential customers engage with it. Savvy marketers have realized it wasn’t specifically the email channel that caused their campaign to fail, but rather how they approached this form of communication.
Email marketing should be targeted, personalized and valuable to the reader. Consider using marketing automation tools to help with outreach tasks and manage drip campaigns. With a modern approach to email marketing, you can engage your core audience through a channel they likely check multiple times a day.
8. Choosing a Strategy
Content marketing. Pay-per-click advertising. Email marketing. Social media campaigns. These are just a few tried-and-true marketing strategies that creative professionals consider for their clients’ campaigns. Ultimately, marketers must be comfortable using a mix of these strategies to reach a wide audience at different levels of the sales funnel.
Think of it this way: You may have a content marketing manager create a unique eBook to boost qualified lead generation. Their team also writes blog posts promoting it on your website. Then, your social team may share the blogs on LinkedIn and promote the eBook on Facebook and Instagram. As the date of its release approaches, you have an email marketing launch plan in place to share the news with existing and potential customers.
Using these marketing channels and tools simultaneously improves the customer’s experience when interacting with your brand down the sales funnel. However, it’s important to note that implementing these strategies effectively requires expertise and dedicated resources. Many business owners turn to outsourcing agencies as a solution to ensure they have the necessary skills and support to execute their marketing initiatives successfully.
9. Generating Qualified Leads
Speaking of generating qualified leads, 61% of marketers rank lead generation as their number one challenge. Most potential customers who come across your website most likely won’t make a purchase. Creating content with specific calls to action geared toward consumers either further down the sales funnel or more likely to make a purchase is crucial for efficiently using your resources.
Content marketing, in particular, powers inbound lead generation by positioning your brand in front of your target audience in a naturally engaging way. The marketing materials draw interest from potential customers, who you then (hopefully) convert into qualified leads.
Qualified leads are more likely to become customers based on your collected data and buyer personas. Take the time to fine-tune your marketing activities to your target audience to garner better leads and improve your bottom line.
10. Determining Action Items Amidst an Abundance of Data
Even before a campaign is implemented, marketers are collecting data to help with their decision-making process. From ROI, customer engagement, bounce and click-through rates, it can be difficult to know how to use all the data available. While we already discussed vanity vs. value metrics, you can further categorize information collected through data-driven marketing into:
- Data for strategy.
- Data for audience targeting and planning.
- Data for topic ideation and content creation.
- Data for distribution and promotion.
- Data for performance metrics and measurement.
- Once you know which information should be used for each category, you effectively expand your analytics capabilities and improve your marketing strategy, and in the end, your bottom line.
The way marketers use cookies has recently changed. With Google’s push to eliminate third-party cookies on Chrome browsers, marketers are left with no alternate identifiers to track user data. Since then, 41% of marketers believe their biggest challenge will be their inability to track the right data to engage customers, per GetApp’s survey. But, with any major obstacle, it’s important to understand how to adapt and know when to go back to the drawing board. Luckily, there are still cookies to use and non-data-driven methods available that can be just as effective.
11. Tackling Reoptimization
You might think that once you send a piece of content out into the universe the marketer’s job is done. That’s not the case. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing their criteria for what it takes for a website or article to rank high organically, which in turn, affects SEO best practices. This means a social post or blog might not get the results you were expecting after a few months or years of being live.
If an article doesn’t perform well organically the first time, find out why. By reevaluating why the article didn’t engage with the target audience well, you can first learn from your mistakes and then improve upon the existing content. Sometimes, content reoptimization is as simple as creating a more engaging title and adding relevant subtopics, but it could also mean a complete rewrite. Either way, there’s always the opportunity for improvement.
This can also mean checking in on existing, well-performing pieces and ensuring that they continue to rank high in the future. Update statistics and modernize the content so it continues to engage the audience and promote your brand.
12. Personalizing the User Experience
You’ve done it. You have a one-in-a-million marketing idea that you believe is perfect for your brand. But just because you like it doesn’t mean it’s the best way to enhance the customer experience to guide them down the sales funnel. Customer experience is one of the most important brand differentiators when it comes to the consumer’s decision-making process to make a purchase. That’s why it’s essential to customize the experience and tailor it specifically to them.
The customer experience begins when they first interact with a brand, and that’s usually through marketing materials. As a marketer, you must always remember that your content needs to engage with the target audience across channels and devices. These communications can create individualized experiences for customers. For example, using demographic data, you may utilize your email marketing channel to encourage customers to make a purchase that’s popular among their age group and gender.
13. Working on a Budget
Time and money are a few of any business’s most valuable resources, and for marketers, it’s no different. According to Insider Intelligence, digital marketing budgets worldwide will not grow as robustly over the next 2 years as they expected in their Q1 forecast. As a result, marketers for small businesses and large companies alike may feel their creativity is restrained by a budget.
The best way to work with a limited budget or other constraints is to invest what you do have in tools and strategies with the most ROI. For some, that means outsourcing inbound marketing to an agency that already has the knowledge and resources to do this, but you may also want to look into how marketing technology and automation solutions can assist your efforts. While the best investment depends on your business’s immediate needs, long-term goals and capabilities, most organizations are allocating their marketing budget across agencies, martech, media and labor.
14. Training New Hires
Your marketing tactics are only as good as the creative team you hire to craft the baseline materials necessary to implement them. A skilled content writer or digital designer can turn your message into engaging content aimed to drive a potential customer to take action, so hiring the right team is crucial.
When hiring or training a new hire, look for and foster these traits to help them succeed. There may be a bit of a learning curve, but ensuring you’re onboarding the best talent makes for smoother transitions down the road.
15. Staying on Top of Trends
On top of staying vigilant to all this information, marketers must always be thinking 2 steps ahead of the next promotional trends, apps and channels, such as TikTok and podcast marketing. From account-based marketing to automation tools and AI, there are plenty of exciting marketing opportunities for content creators to explore.
Take the time at the end of every week, or at least once a month, to search online, read the latest marketing reports, use free industry tools or simply see what other competitors and marketers are doing to stay updated on these trends and try them out for yourself.
So, for the record, marketing is not the easiest business major. Every day presents different marketing challenges to overcome and there’s no other way I’d want to spend my time than working in a field that challenges my creativity, analytical skills and customer service.
Editor’s Note: Updated May 2023.
