5 Strategies to Overcome Your Toughest Marketing Challenges
Marketing is uniquely challenging because it demands a delicate balance between the left and right brain. Creativity, and courage to step outside the box, must seamlessly blend with data analytics and psychology. Compounded with the ever-evolving era of digital, it’s easy to get discouraged and overwhelmed by the obstacles standing between you and your goals.
In this article, we’ll discuss the five biggest challenges marketers currently face, and how you can turn those lemons into lemonade. With these data-driven insights and strategies that you can implement immediately, you’ll have the confidence to tackle your marketing goals.
The 5 Biggest Obstacles For Marketers
From ever-changing social media algorithms to the diminishing milliseconds you have to keep consumers from bouncing from your website, the challenges that modern marketers face are almost endless. But above all others, there are five specific obstacles that make marketing effectively right now a challenge.
1. Creating A Successful Team
According to a survey by HubSpot, training new hires is the biggest obstacle marketing departments currently face. New talent usually needs lots of training, and productivity can stagnate as the individual adjusts to the learning curves of starting any new job.
It’s also tough keeping current employees ahead of the latest trends. From trying to find the right resources to finding enough time for skill-building activities, nurturing long-standing talent can get left on the back burner.
For companies growing at a rapid rate, it can be difficult to devote the necessary time to train these new hires. This can lead to the destructive “sink or swim” scenario, which isn’t fair to your new hire or your organization.
Strategies to overcome this challenge:
Get clear on what “training” looks like for your team, so you know how to prioritize and allot the appropriate amount of time.
Be realistic about how long it’ll take for new members to settle in. (Even ultra-talented marketers with sparkling pedigrees need time to adjust and build their confidence.)
Mitigate turnover (so you can avoid needing to pay for talent acquisition whenever possible) with competitive benefits and annual training that help your talent grow
Empower your team leads to take control of creating skill-building opportunities. After all, they know their team best and what skills matter most.
2. Lack Of Strategy
Successful marketing campaigns have one crucial element in common: a detailed plan of action. Marketing without a solid strategy is almost guaranteed to cause tons of unnecessary stress and lackluster results. In fact, according to a report by CoSchedule, “Organized marketers are 674% more likely to report success” in their marketing efforts.
As we said from the start, marketing is a careful blend of creativity and analytics, which culminate into compelling customer experiences.
Strategies to overcome this challenge:
Define a clear customer persona to know exactly what your target audience needs and the best places to reach them.
Define the problem your campaign will solve to help ensure messaging is consistent and focused on benefits.
Create a tech stack that helps you strategize, define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and track metrics.
3. Disconnects In Marketing, Sales, And Product Designs
While every department wants to contribute to the success of your brand, working in silos can cause a variety of issues that impact the efficacy or your marketing. When departments aren’t integrated to communicate and build upon one another, it creates disjointed, confusing, and frustrating customer experiences.
Strategies to overcome this challenge:
Prioritize shared goals so everyone is working toward the same result.
Incentivize knowledge-sharing by implementing collaborative apps and software.
Enable open and regular communication between departments so teams can ask questions, propose ideas, and build synergy.
Ensure department managers are on the same page so they can keep projects aligned with the big picture.
4. Effectively Tracking Marketing ROI
Defining KPIs to track the efficacy of your marketing efforts is as important as planning. Without metrics to analyze how your strategies are performing, you won’t know what is working and what needs restructuring.
Strategies to overcome this challenge:
If you’ve used similar strategies in the past, study their efficacy and establish a realistic ROI benchmark for the current campaign.
Analyze current channel performance metrics (e.g., what’s the average open rate on an email vs the average click-through-rate (CTR) on an Instagram post) .
Build a stack of analytics tools relevant to your specific workflow and goals.
Regularly monitor your specifically defined KPI metrics to look for areas of improvement.
5. Lead Generation And Traffic
There are more businesses online today than ever before. This makes generating high volumes of traffic with your content marketing a daunting task.
Seeing content that you’ve worked hard to create receive little to no attention is so discouraging—especially if you’ve made every effort to incorporate SEO (Search Engine Optimization) best practices.
Strategies to overcome this challenge:
Post consistently. Google takes the “freshness” of your webpage into account when generating search results. Consistency also shows prospects that you’re a reliable source of expertise.
Make accessibility a priority by optimizing images and creating well-executed alt-text so screen readers have an easier time translating. (Do not keyword stuff!)
Repurpose your content and post it on other platforms (such as YouTube or Twitter).
Hire an expert who knows how to create and publish result-oriented content.
You Wrote A Blog Post—But Now What?
You’ve completed a value-packed piece of content. It’s full of relevant information, speaks directly to your target audience, and establishes your expertise. Now what?
How do you make sure it has the best chance of reaching the right people and generating new leads? Publishing high-performing content is scientific but isn’t an exact science. It takes time, consistency, and even a bit of emotional endurance. Thankfully, there are strategies you can use to help improve your chances of seeing results.
Develop A Catalog Of Topics
A great way to maintain momentum, stay relevant, and incorporate SEO strategies is by compiling a list of topic ideas ahead of time. Here are three ways to do that right now:
Research similar brands to see what topics they’re writing about, and use it as inspiration. You can also look for opportunities to create content that fills any gaps your competitors might have overlooked.
Use surveys and social media platforms to ask your audience about the kinds of information they’re looking for.
Research keywords using a keyword analytics tool, or sites like Ubersuggest, Answer the public, to find topic inspiration and questions that your target audience wants answered.
Create A Schedule And Stick To It
Consistency is the secret ingredient to great content marketing. It helps the algorithm recognize your content, builds trust with your audience, and helps with SEO. Sticking to a schedule is tough, but you don’t have to post every day—or even every week. As long as you post on a regular basis, you can reap the rewards of content marketing.
Repurpose Content
One often overlooked content marketing strategy is repurposing content for different channels. That blog post you wrote doesn’t have to be just a blog post. It can transform into a Twitter thread, an Instagram reel, or a TikTok. As long as you adjust the formatting of the content to fit the platform you’re sharing it on, your blog posts can generate leads on a variety of platforms.
But don’t just copy and paste the post from one platform to another. If you want to share it on Instagram or Twitter, make it shorter and more actionable. Also make sure you understand hashtag strategies for each channel you’re posting on to increase exposure.
Converting blogs into YouTube videos is another effective way to repurpose content since you can use your post as a script with minimal tweaking. YouTube lets you convert written content into a format that appeals to audiences who’d rather listen or watch instead of read. Exponentially expanding your reach.
Next Steps To Tackling These Marketing Challenges
No matter the marketing channel, the most important elements of an effective campaign are knowing your audience and doing your research. When you’re diligent in planning, the execution is far easier and you can help overcome marketing challenges before they even start.
But what if your brand could reap the benefits of powerful content marketing without all the added strain on resources? Well, it’s easier, faster, and more cost-effective than you might think.
If you want help strategizing and executing incredible content marketing, our Comma experts can help. Schedule a free consultation to learn more.
