Digital Marketing Challenges and opportunities

According to survey of 4,000 marketers by Econsultancy, the top two digital trends in 2020 are going to be focused on customer experience (24%) and personalisation (23%). Those trends encompass myriad opportunities. They are indicative of a general strategic shift within companies towards greater customer centricity. The more specific sub-trends driving the move to customer experience are three-fold:

1. The rise of creativity and design
2. Marketing as a service
3. Connecting the dots

The Most Common Marketing Problems We Face, According to the 2016 State of Inbound Report by HubSpot

According to our report, generating traffic and leads and proving ROI are the leading challenges marketers face. Here's a look at this year's data:

Let's go through each of these top challenges and how marketers can address them.

1. Generating Traffic and Leads

Generating enough traffic and leads was the top marketing challenge, according to the 2016 State of Inbound report.

Clearly, marketers are struggling with producing enough demand for their content. And as the years progress and competition stiffens, this will only become more true. With so many options of platforms for marketers to publish their content and even more ways to promote it, it's hard to know where to focus your efforts.

What can you do?

When it comes to creating content that produces enough traffic and leads, marketers should ask themselves two questions: Are you truly creating high-quality content -- the type of content people would pay for? And, do you know the type of content your audience actually wants?

Once you know you're creating the type of content your audience wants, the focus shifts to promoting it in a way that makes your audience take notice. More than ever before, people are being flooded with content. Consumers don't have to use a search engine to find answers. Instead, articles fill their news feed or buzz in their pocket via mobile notification.

2. Keeping Quality Consistently High

Out of respect (and a keen sense of professional self-preservation), even sites with huge audiences and large teams of professional writers and copy editors frequently publish simply awful articles riddled with mistakes, lazy writing, or incorrect facts. Why? Partly because they have to, and partly because they can.

Some sites leverage their name recognition and branding to get away with publishing half-assed crap, whereas some of the most consistently excellent content I’ve read in recent months has been published on small, independent blogs run by a handful of people (or even a very talented individual). This means that, thanks to the relentless pressure to Always Be Publishing, opportunities to publish useful, insightful, well-written content (you know, the stuff readers desperately want) are right there for the taking – if you’re up to the task.

How to Overcome It

It would be na?ve to assume that an article published in a glossy monthly technology magazine doesn’t have more pull than even the best of posts on a scrappy upstart blog. However, if you consistently push yourself, take the time to develop your writing skills, and only publish the very best content you can, before long you’ll actually be publishing content that’s better than at least half of what ends up online every day. Keep it up, even when it feels like nobody’s reading you.

3. Providing the ROI of Your Marketing Activities

Measuring the ROI (return on investment) of your marketing activities has remained a top marketing challenge year-over-year. But, it also continues to be a vital way for marketers to understand the effectiveness of each particular marketing campaign, piece of content, etc.

Plus, proving ROI often goes hand-in-hand with making an argument to increase budget: No ROI tracking, no demonstrable ROI. No ROI, no budget.

But tracking the ROI of every single marketing activity isn't always easy, especially if you don't have two-way communication between your marketing activities and sales reports.

What Can You Do?

When it comes to providing ROI, there's a strong case to be made for dedicating time and resources to establishing links between marketing activities and sales results.

4. Securing Enough Budget

Securing more budget is a pressing challenge for marketing globally. And often, getting more budget is easier said than done -- especially for smaller organizations that aren't working with sizable nor flexible marketing spend.

But the key to securing more money for your team might not be that complex. Here's what you can do.

What Can You Do?The key to unlocking budget lies in being able to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts. According to our report, organizations that can calculate ROI are 1.6 times as likely to receive higher budgets.

5. Managing Your Website

Managing a website was the fourth biggest challenge for marketers in 2016. And chances are, your website's performance is high on your list of priorities. It's an asset that works around the clock to draw in visitors, convert them, and help you hit your goals, after all.

Issues with website management includes a variety of different factors, from writing and optimizing the content to designing beautiful webpages. Here are a few things marketers can do to deal with this challenge.

6. Identifying the Right Technologies for Your Needs

Finding the right technologies was the fifth biggest concern for marketers this year. Oftentimes, this is because feedback on technology is scattered. Marketers might turn to colleagues, friends in the industry, and/or analyst reports to figure out which technologies best fit their needs -- only to find that feedback is spread across emails, social media, and so on from people of varied reputability.

When you're looking for a tool, software, or piece of technology to solve a specific marketing problem, where do you go to find it?

What Can You Do?

For those of you looking for a tool, software, or piece of technology to solve a specific marketing problem, we recommend taking a look at Growthverse: a free, interactive, online visualization of the marketing technology landscape that focuses on the business problems marketers are trying to solve, and leads them to specific pieces of marketing technology that aim to solve those problems. We've found it to be a really well visualized map of carefully curated marketing technology resources.

7. Targeting Content for an International Audience

Targeting is a key component of all aspects of marketing. To be more effective at targeting, one of the first things any marketer needs do is identify their buyer personas to determine who it is they should be marketing to. If you're expanding internationally, it can be a big challenge not only to figure out the best ways to market to an international audience, but also to organize and optimize your site for different countries.

What Can You Do?

Remember, your website visitors might speak a plethora of different languages and live in totally different time zones. To make your content appealing to a wide audience, you'll need to keep your global visitors top-of-mind when creating all your content. This means being aware of seasonal references, translating units of measure and monetary references, and giving translators the tools and permissions to customize and adapt content for a specific audience when they need to.

Ref. Wordstream GoogleMarketing Hubspot Digtialcascade