Pressure from executives, other marketers, and even consumers, makes it extremely difficult for marketers to see past daily execution and tactical work to focus on strategy and innovation. Here, we’ve outlined four of the most difficult challenges in marketing today, and what you can do to successfully overcome them.
Challenge #1: Increasing Customer Expectations
Modern consumers have more control now than ever before. Thanks to the rise of mobile devices, broad accessibility of internet, and the abundance of resources, consumers have 24/7 access to the information and interactions they want, whenever they want them. This means they’re extremely well-informed and consume an immense amount of content before making any purchasing decisions. Not only are customers typically conscious of marketing tactics, they also have very high expectations when it comes to brand interactions.
Solution: Personalized Content
Today’s consumers expect innovative, personalized shopping experiences, and when a brand doesn’t deliver, they notice. In order to meet these rising consumer expectations, marketers must deliver exceptionally targeted, personalized content. With an abundance of new technology and solutions, it’s now easy for marketers to deliver this ideal brand experience without added resources or hassle.
Challenge #2: Crowded Marketplace
What’s another drawback of today’s social media-heavy consumer marketplace? There is an abundance of noise: emails, text messages, blog posts, Facebook videos, and many more, are all competing for a few precious seconds of consumer attention. The challenge for marketers is to break through this noise while simultaneously delivering on the promise of strong, personalized content.
Solution: Customer Engagement
B2C marketers can break through the noise by meeting customers where they are. This means building a clear picture of a consumer audience, knowing how and where they spend their time, and engaging them in meaningful conversations. It’s also helpful to establish clear branding and messaging across multiple platforms and channels, so consumers can pick right back up with a conversation no matter where they interact with a brand.
Challenge #3: Limited Time and Resources
Even if marketers realize the need for personalized content and the importance of breaking through an overcrowded marketplace, execution on smart strategies can often be held up by a lack of time or resources. This is most common when it comes to new marketing technology and solutions. There is no shortage of the shiny new ‘must have toys’ in the market today. Unfortunately, these new tools don’t always lead to new results.
Solution: Robust Platforms
Marketing solutions are intended to be utilized by competent marketing teams. No matter how shiny or sophisticated the platform, if a team doesn’t have the bandwidth to fill the gaps, they’re not going to be successful. In order to overcome this hurdle, marketers must look for robust platforms that combine multiple aspects of marketing strategy and technology. That way, team members aren’t left sorting through or aggregating data manually, which can take precious time (almost 4 hours a week, to be exact). Instead of implementing (and paying) for separate solutions to track critical metrics like leads, web traffic, or sales volume, why not combine all of these features, as well as innovative technologies like artificial intelligence, in a single, holistic platform? To top it all off, having a single marketing platform means a team only has one technology to implement, onboard, and learn how to use.
Challenge #4: Data Overload
The last, and perhaps the largest, challenge for today’s marketers? The massive amount of customer data out there, which is only expanding. The rise of machine learning and big data has made it possible to mine the tiniest consumer insights from any interaction. And while this is an amazing advancement, it can sometimes leave marketers feeling a little overwhelmed and underprepared.
Solution: Unified Data
Data, unfortunately, is really only useful to marketers if they have a way to unlock it for a big-picture view of trends and ideas. With the right access to data, marketers can begin to build innovative, personalized campaigns and interactions. Data is often spread across multiple platforms and channels, making it difficult for marketers to gain this cohesive view of overarching trends. This, in turn, makes it even harder to dig deeper and uncover individual insights.
Marketers must be able to combine all aspects of data collection into a single place to begin unlocking consumer insights. With this data in an actionable format, marketers can begin to make proactive steps towards delivering on consumer, executive, and marketing expectations.
Final Thoughts
Has your marketing organization experienced some of these same roadblocks? You’re not alone, these are challenges faced by many of today’s brands. Your team can easily overcome these challenges by leveraging competent marketing solutions.
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