Digital marketing challenges come in different shapes and sizes; some are experienced industry-wide, while others are seemingly unique to a particular business. In this blog, we look at the top problems in marketing brands are up against in 2023. We also added some tips if you’re looking for digital marketing solutions to weather the storm this year.
Challenges in Marketing #1: Lead and Traffic Generation
Marketers are unceasingly focused on generating traffic they can ultimately convert. While the evolution of privacy and tracking restrictions continue, it’s not all doom and gloom for marketers this year. You must rethink your digital marketing solutions or strategy to generate traffic and leads. For instance, content marketing remains effective in driving qualified leads, so you should double your efforts in this area.
When creating conversion-driven content, you want to consult your website or social media analytics. Find out which type of content resonates with your audience the most and the channels that drive you the most traffic.
Challenges in Marketing #2: Top Talent Acquisition and Retention
Owing to the concerns brought by the pandemic and inflation, a job crisis referred to as “The Great Resignation” emerged. Millions of employees have voluntarily left their jobs, looking for something better, whether a higher salary or a more flexible work setting. As digital marketing trends lean toward complexity, the demand for top marketing talents rises. Employers seek out professionals with solid skill sets.
And even after you succeed in acquiring top talents, retention becomes the next hurdle. With this, you want to intentionally develop a healthy workplace culture and a clear career pathway for your employees.
Related article: The Great Resignation: How To Attract Great Employees To Grow Your Business
Challenges in Marketing #3: Project Financing
Many economists submit that the U.S. is still not in a recession despite the rising concerns and apparent symptoms. So given the current economic downturn, financial unease adds to the many problems in marketing. Marketers are concerned about maintaining its current funding and securing new financial support for future projects, from paid advertising to in-person events, now that we’re back to “normal.”
One way to combat this is by effectively demonstrating a clear return on investment (ROI) of your marketing initiatives. You can do this by setting and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website sign-ups or downloads.
Challenges for Marketing #4: Customer Centric Marketing
The rise of platforms and channels led to a complex and nonlinear customer journey, making customer centric marketing essential for brands. An omnichannel marketing strategy employs integrated online marketing solutions that result in a seamless and impactful customer experience across every touch point. Yet many brands struggle to pivot their strategy, failing to deliver an omnichannel experience.
A hurdle that many face with an omnichannel strategy is pushing their brand everywhere all at once. While that is the goal, you can simply begin by integrating your social media pages into your company website and email campaigns.
Related article: Why Omnichannel Marketing Is the Secret to a Customer-Centric Strategy
Challenges for Marketing #5: The Coming and Going of Trends
Next on our digital marketing challenges list is all about trends. It’s no secret that keeping up with trends allows brands and individuals, particularly influencers, to stay relevant and attract viewers. But with the non-stop influx of content online, digital marketing trends are ever-changing. Online marketing solutions such as social listening and competitor analysis are proven instrumental if you want to produce trendy content.
With this, be selective and only jump in on relevant trends to your brand, offerings and target market. Doing otherwise will only result in a high number of views with little to no conversions.
Challenges for Marketing #6: Google’s Ever-Changing Algorithms
The ever-evolving nature of search engine optimization (SEO) is all thanks to search engines’ constant algorithm updates. Top SEO issues that many businesses experience today include poor content performance and low search rankings. These issues can be attributed to the plethora of updates that Google releases. The search engine giant states that it updates its product, Google Search, thousands of times yearly to improve experience and results. However, such updates often cause site rankings to dip and current strategies to be out-of-date.
Besides embracing the fact that Google algorithm updates are inevitable, your website content should always add value to users. To inform your online marketing solutions and strategies, keep up with Google’s Search ranking updates list.
Challenges of Digital Marketing #7: Advancing AI Capabilities
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, and many see it as a threat to employment. For instance, many are dabbling with AI tools to produce content such as blogs. But during a Google SEO office-hours hangout, Search Advocate, John Mueller, reveals that AI-generated content is considered spam and against the search engine’s webmaster guidelines. Yet Mueller also didn’t explicitly claim that Google can tell apart human- and AI-generated content.
With this, Mueller clearly warns that when Google does detect automatically generated content, its web spam team could take action. You can listen to Mueller’s full take on the matter here.
Challenges of Digital Challenges of Digital Marketing #8: Website Accessibility
Many businesses have trouble implementing website accessibility. But making your website accessible ensures all potential users — including those with disabilities — have a positive user experience and can quickly access your content. For instance, you can add an alt text to every image on your blog, so those with visual impairments can understand it. Alt texts are metadata that also help with search optimization.
Pro tip: Visit the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website. The org spearheads the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) to help businesses and individuals make the web more accessible to people with disabilities, providing strategies, standards and resources.
Challenges of Digital Marketing #9: Brand Consistency
In this list of digital marketing challenges, we talked about trends and omnichannel marketing. These two marketing facets often threaten brand consistency. With trends, marketers are tempted to go on a whim and jump on the bandwagon, no matter how irrelevant. And with omnichannel marketing, marketers fail to practice consistent brand voice when engaging across the many channels customers employ.
If you want to improve brand consistency, develop or reinforce your brand guidelines with your team. Brand guidelines should serve as a rule book that transforms your mission, vision and values into a cohesive look and feel.
Other Common Problems in Marketing
Here are more general marketing problems you should be aware of.
• Email marketing challenges
• Social media marketing challenges
• Content marketing challenges
Let’s briefly look into these marketing problems below.
Email marketing challenges. In recent years, the emphasis on data privacy resulted in email marketing challenges such as unreliable email metrics. For instance, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) update preloads email content, including images and pixels — even without the recipient opening the mail. To solve email challenges, you can focus on other metrics other than open rates and apply time-based triggers.
Social media marketing challenges. We’re continuing to see a shift of interest in favor of short-form video content from TikTok, Facebook and Instagram Reels, as well as YouTube Shorts. Brands accustomed to marketing long-form video content find it hard to yield to the shift. To this, you can simply start by sharing user-generated content (UGC) or partnering with influencers.
Content marketing challenges. Another issue brands face today is failing to drive lucrative results through content marketing. While many are successful in widening the reach of their content, it seems most lead to just that — a wide reach. For example, if you only target popular search terms in your blog, you’ll likely attract a high number of users who will not necessarily convert.
Thrive: Complete Digital Marketing Solutions for Your Marketing Problems
Are any of these challenges listed too familiar to you? We at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency can turn things around for you. With our complete suite of services, we help you overcome everything from SEO issues to branding challenges and enable you to navigate the complexities of the digital space. Talk to us today!
