What is Your Biggest Digital Marketing Challenge?
Overcoming Today’s Marketing Challenges!
Whether you run a small business with a couple of staffers or a medium-size business with departments, today’s marketing challenges are real. We have compiled these articles with the hope of assisting you to navigate today’s marketing challenges.
So what is your biggest issue that faces your digital marketing?
[1]There are some problems that it seems everyone experiences at least once in the course of their digital marketing. There’s no point in wasting more time on mediocre digital marketing. From struggling with a small budget to floundering on social media, these are the four most common digital marketing problems — and the best solutions for each.
Making the Most of a Small(er) Budget
One of the biggest digital marketing concerns for businesses is how to stand out against bigger competitors without a commensurate digital marketing budget. This concern is commonly paired with the feeling that Google’s search algorithm is slightly biased towards brands — though Google says this isn’t the case. While we can’t speak to the veracity of that common perception, we do know that larger competitors can feel like they have an unfair advantage. The solutions that follow are some of the best ways to level the playing field.
Segment Your Audience
With any small budget, a major part of success is stretching every dollar. When it comes to digital marketing, you can get the maximum marketing ROI by segmenting your audience. Breaking up your audience into segments can help you market more effectively to everyone you reach. The segment categories will depend almost entirely on what type of business you run, but common ways to segment your audience include by demographics, lifestyle, and behavior.
Invest in Local
Again, whether a local marketing strategy will work for you depends on your business. Enhance your Google My Business page with advanced attributes and useful features like Q&A, chat, or posts. Make sure that you are listed or have claimed your business on other business directories as well — including local city-specific websites. Play up your local social presence — use location tagging in your social media posts and post about your local community. These efforts can help you rank in mobile search and improve your local digital marketing metrics.
Get Social-Specific
If you’re struggling with a smaller marketing budget, you might need to pick your battles. Depending on the budget differential between your business and that of your competitor, you might not be able to compete on all social media channels. This isn’t a cause for consternation. Pick your best-performing channels and dominating them is an excellent way avoid the stress of managing and half a dozen or more social media profiles all at once.
Use Paid Advertising on Social Media
Social media has been a consistently helpful way to engage with audiences and build a solid online presence without costing a cent. But if you want to make the most of your digital marketing budget, spend a portion on social media advertising. By choosing your most profitable social media channels and using strategic native advertising, you can transform just another social media page into a top lead generator.
Connect with Influencers
Develop relationships with local and industry influencers. Advocacy/evangelism and referrals are one of the best ways to spread positive word of mouth
[2]Not getting lost in the volume
The digital world is booming, and almost every business out there has taken its products/services online to reach out to the masses. According to a report by Experian, most marketers are now facing the challenge of making their brand stand out in the volumes available on the internet. This eventually leads to the difficulty of running a brand awareness campaign or acquiring new customers.
What can you do?
While it is a fact that at least some of your products/services might be similar to what another business has to offer, there is a minor aspect that is unique to you. Discover the USP of your product/service and find ways to convey the same. Conduct surveys on your existing customers and your target audience to better understand what they are looking for and identify which needs your brand can fulfill.
Driving relevant traffic to the website
Continuing on the point above, marketers today are consistently facing a challenge in spreading brand awareness in the right target market. This also makes it harder for them to drive the ideal traffic to their business websites. Therefore, understanding which channel to tap into and driving the relevant audience to your website to turn them into customers is becoming an ongoing challenge for marketers.
What can you do?
Conduct an audit of your online activity. Identify what tactics you are opting to reach out to your audience. Consider the content you’re producing, the channels you’re presenting it on, your social presence, and the paid/unpaid campaigns you are running. Use robust analytics to know which of them work the best for you and optimize your efforts simultaneously. But it is essential to measure your analytics at modest intervals of time to give each of your efforts enough span to work over.
Targeting the right audience effectively
The first and foremost thing that an effective marketer would do is identify their target audience in the market. With the number of internet users increasing by the day and their needs changing almost every second, targeting the right audience has become one of the biggest challenges for marketers.
Keeping in mind what your business has to offer and what kind of problems it would solve when put to use, create your value proposition. This will help you identify who or what demographics would resonate with it the most when targeted.
What can you do?
Look at the general demographics of the market that you want to reach out to. Identify their needs and create customer personas taking into consideration their online behavior and possible future needs. In this case, companies like Wigzo equip you with machine learning and predictive analytics tools to enable better persona creation.
Lead generation using social media
When it comes to the various social channels, most businesses and marketers don’t know how to remain consistent. Most of them feel that it is all about the paid campaigns they are supposed to run for brand awareness and lead generation. Although, both of them is a constant challenge with the ever-increasing market competition.
Even though considerable marketing budgets are set aside by businesses, most marketers cannot run their engagement into revenue. But you mustn’t just build your social following – you need to get conversions that add up to the overall business goal.
What can you do?
The most effective way to leverage social media is to integrate your marketing and sales efforts. Sharing behavioral data and interaction levels with leads on social media can help the sales team define a custom, personalized customer journey for them – which they are more likely to convert on.
Optimizing marketing budgets and ROI
With the increase of digital channels and advanced analytics tools, marketers are now expected to optimize the marketing budgets and the ROI to best suit the business’s needs. He is expected to measure each effort and its value to achieve the end goal – the number of leads generated or the revenue raised.
What can you do?
Tap into the power of machine learning and robust analytics regularly. An effective marketer can gauge the value of every single lead generated from a marketing effort. Understand the impact of each digital campaign on lead generation, test different variants and approaches of reaching out to your target audience to optimize your campaigns for much better results.
While you measure the digital inbound results, ensure that you consider the outbound efforts being made by your business and what kind of results it is yielding.
Keeping up with the changing trends
The digital market and marketing techniques have changed drastically over the last few years. And it continues to change even today to cater to the modern-day addressable market needs. Hence, marketers need to stay up-to-date with all these changes.
Be it the launch of a new social media platform or a technology that would make a marketing effort more robust, marketers need to remain on top of things to ensure their business does not lose out on possible conversions.
What can you do?
Consistently engage with your target audience on platforms that they are most active on. The most effective way of doing so is to leverage social listening using tools like Hootsuite. They help you understand what people are saying about you and your product/service, what they expect – allowing you to become a part of their conversation.
A Check on Increased Security Risks
We have come across cases wherein online security has been compromised. The news and media keep it afresh. Since more information is shared online, hackers get more incentives to find ways to get through security. Shopping, bill payment, application submission, order copies, certificates, and other essential documents, and so much more are stored online for easy access – making these spaces a treasure trove for hackers and thieves. Venturing into digital marketing sure comes with its cost of security getting compromised as most of the work remains online. Security comes as a challenge.
What can you do?
You may already have a good firewall, HTTPS encryption, and maybe a good antivirus program. But that’s not enough. You will need more. Sit out and work with an authentic security team and identify your website’s weak spots and apps to create measures to reduce risk.
Lesser Focus on Keywords
Keywords were the bread and butter of SEO sometime in the immediate past. You just needed to find the right keywords and use them right, and your site could shoot up to the top in the search results—helping you with more exposure and traffic.
Now Google has changed algorithms making the keywords less critical. However, they are still to be used but are not the focus. Instead, it has become a topical approach rather than seeking and finding one, meaning that Google first gets an overall scope of your website.
What can you do?
First, you need to use search phrases instead of keywords and build content around topics rather than coming up with content for each keyword you want to target. Make your website a resource for the phase or question you need to target and see the changes.
[3]Remember, people like to talk to humans, so don’t shy away from conversing with your customers. Brands like Wendy’s and Netflix have such a solid digital presence and a wide customer base because they regularly respond to their customers.
So if you want to build a up your digital presence, engaging with customers is a must.
In Conclusion
Digital marketing is vital to all kinds of businesses, but it is even more important for small businesses. If you keep the above in mind while designing your digital marketing strategy, you will be able to reach out to a wide audience and ensure better ROI. So, map out a good digital marketing strategy that avoids these mistakes, and you can build up your brand sustainably.
Article Compiled by hughesagency.ca
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