Overcome Marketing Challenges
Across the marketing ecosystem there are a myriad of challenges and obstacles that limit business growth. Whether in boom times, or economic downturns, it is imperative for businesses to get marketing right.Â
Businesses need predictable, repeatable, and scalable growth systems so they can plan for the future.
These are the 5 most common challenges with marketing, presented with solutions so you can become a better marketer.Â
1. Too Many Options & Not Enough Time
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media
- Email Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Public Relations and PR
- Website
- Advertising
- Ads - Banners
- Ads - Social
- Ads - Out of Home
- Ads - Digital Audio
- Ads - Radio
- Ads - TV
Solution
To make the most out of your available resources set a marketing strategy. This document helps you understand why you are in business, who you serve, why people buy from you, and how you’ll know when you are talking to your ideal customer. With that information in hand, the next step is to pair up this information with the channels you will want to be market in.
Then, plan the tactical work, and take action.
2. Growing Costs
Costs are increasing in every realm. Ad cost per thousand impressions (CPMs) are growing as publishers create more ad units with higher engagement rates. There are over 10 million advertisers on Meta. With more demand comes higher ad costs.Â
Even marketing tools, such as the popular SEO tool AHREFS is experiencing a price hike. One user’s annual cost is increasing from $2,500 per month to $17,500 per month, a 600% increase in overall cost.Â
Talent is also expensive. The median Marketing Manager salary in the US is $117,613 as of November, 2023. According to MarketingWeek the salary for this job increased 15.4% between April of 2022 and April of 2023.
Solution
There are ways to mitigate costs. Here are three.
1. Retain Employees Longer
If you create a strong work environment, a culture that people like, and you support the people on your team, people will stay longer. Their salaries will increase over time, but the output alone is worth it. People who know your business, understand your work, and can lead inside the organization are far more valuable than a person at the same salary who is new to the organization.
2. Hire Freelancers or Part Time Employees
These people are great when you need a specialized set of skills that you may not need every day. For example, you may need a gig-work coder for occasional website maintenance.Â
3. Outsource The Work
Work with an agency that gets paid when they do specific work for your business. Instead of paying a full time person a full salary, pay a fraction of the cost for a team of experts. You can get a team of 5-10 people to do content posting, creative development, advertising management, blogging, and video editing for less than the cost of one full time marketing manager.
3. Very Competitive Marketplace
Marketing is competitive. And the challenge is you need to focus on understanding your customer and breaking through, which is the hard part. It is estimated that people see 10,000+ messages per day across all the screens in their lives.Â
Solution
The way you break through is you have the strategy. You don’t need to be amazing to everyone. You just need to be good among your core audience.
You have experts on your team who know how to communicate effectively across the channels. And then finally, you iterate.
It doesn’t have to be perfect on the first shot, you will have plenty of opportunities to reach your customers. So the better you get, the more people who will see your marketing, and then as a result, you’ll get more attention. The feedback look is your customers will tell you what works and what doesn’t work through the content you create. Do the work every day until it’s good, and then once it’s really good, keep making it even better.
4. Adapting To Changing Algorithms
Platform algorithms are always changing. They change for a few reasons. They respond to changes in consumer behavior, laws and regulation, and evolving business incentives.Â
For example, when Facebook made live streaming an option, they gave preference to live streaming creators on the platform to get people used to taking that behavior on the Facebook.
You’ll see now with TiKTok, there is a lot of content around TiKTok Shop. The platform is heavily prioritizing TikTok Shop viewership because it’s an economic benefit to the platform. Google is known for changing their search algorithm to adopt to new usage patterns, and to make it harder for companies to game the search results.
Keeping track of the algorithms requires a lot of research and even with the requisite amount of research, the best knowledge comes from deploying various tactics in practice and using recent historical data to understand what works and what doesn’t in marketing campaigns.Â
Solution
So as a marketer, it’s important for you to understand how platforms want to be used. Either create internal systems to keep track of algorithm changes, pay consultants for access to current practices and do the work in-house, or work with an expert marketing agency that does this work for a living.
5. Attribution and Measurement
One of the most important things you can do for a marketing campaign is set up the proper tracking, attribution and measurement. This is difficult because it requires a little bit of knowledge across many different functions, including pixels codes, navigating an ad platform, and placing code on the website.
Conversion tracking pixels are the primary feedback loop that lets you understand what works and what doesn’t work in your advertising. You’ll understand the audiences, creative executions, targeting interests, keywords, and platforms. Without this information, you’re flying blind. You don’t have a real time feedback loop that lets you understand how your business is performing across these channels, and what you need to do to scale up your business and pull money into your business.Â
Solution
Work with freelance experts from gig sites like Upwork and Fiverr if you don’t have this knowledge in house. Conversion tracking will be part of the work your agency does. Or, have in-house talent who can bridge the gap across these key knowledge areas.
Once in place you’ll need a person or an agency to interpret the data and tell you a story about data. This is where the art and science meet in marketing.Â
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