Every marketer has a story about common marketing problems or a project that kept them up at night. This could be anything from budgeting to traffic to lead generation.
Although many marketers can attest to the same woes they face in the industry, most marketing problems do have solutions—you just may need to take an uncommon approach. It is our job as marketers to make sure we stay abreast of the latest marketing trends so that our businesses don’t get left behind. While we might get stuck in a marketing problem at hand, it’s important to seek out solutions so that we can move forward in our marketing efforts.
8 of the Most Common Marketing Problems
According to a HubSpot marketing survey, these are the top eight marketing issues that marketers face globally.
- Generating Traffic and Leads
- Providing ROI for Your Marketing Activities
- Securing Enough Budget
- Managing Your Website
- Targeting Content for an International Audience
- Training Your Team
- Hiring Top Talent
- Delivering an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Solutions to Your Common Marketing Problems
Creative solutions can be found to any marketing hardships you may come across. It takes innovation, inspiration, and “out-of-the-box” ideas to get over some marketing blockages. Let’s take a look at the solutions that can help you sleep better at night.
Generating Traffic and Leads
Coming up with ways to effectively generate traffic and leads can be a difficult task. Marketers won’t have the budgets for a guess-and-check approach.
First and foremost, you’ll want to make sure you have a developed strategic marketing plan for each of the platforms you use in your marketing efforts. In this strategy, you’ll outline how you plan to generate leads from your posts or campaigns. Once you implement your strategy, you’ll be able to monitor how they are performing and adapt accordingly to make them perform better.
Great marketing strategies to generate traffic and leads include:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Blog Posts
- Video Content
- Gated Content
- Social Media Campaigns
- Landing Pages
Providing ROI for Your Marketing Activities
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of any marketing activity, including campaigns, is beneficial for your company so your marketing team and stakeholders can get an understanding of the effectiveness of specific marketing activity.
You’ll first want to determine how your marketing and sales team qualifies a conversion. There are two methodologies to measure ROI for marketing activity—single attribution and multi-touch attribution.
Single attributions are the easiest to calculate and either give credit to the first or last touch that the customer makes. Multi-touch attribution takes into account everything that a customer had to actively click through or see for it to be counted as a conversion.
Once you’ve determined how you should qualify a conversion, you can then research a data compilation platform that will best serve your marketing team. This will remove the manual work for providing ROI reports and can automatically create reports for monthly or quarterly meetings.
Securing Enough Budget
You’ve done the initial legwork—strategy meetings, workflow layouts, campaign planning. Now, you need to secure the budget to make sure this marketing activity will run. You’ll have to get buy-in and the most important factor in doing so is doing your research. Stakeholders are going to want numbers—how many hours will content development versus SEO versus website development take? What is the timeline for the project and when can they expect the project or campaign to review?
When developing your budget, consider your:
- Marketing goals
- Target audience (buyer personas)
- Market and competition
- Marketing channels
This is where your project management hat comes in handy.
Managing Your Website
Your website showcases your company’s look, persona, and professionalism. The attractiveness of your website will aid in selling your potential customer or client when they are deciding whether to work with you or not. Because websites play such a big part in this decision, keeping your website up-to-date and running with working links, contact forms, blog posts, and testimonials are all ways to effectively manage your website and show the website visitor that your company is active.
A great way to keep you accountable in updating your website is by installing a plugin to the back end. This plugin should alert you to updates, SEO information, and broken links that you may be missing.
Targeting Content For an International Audience
A marketer’s goal is always to expand their company’s audience and sometimes, that can involve international audiences. The first step to navigate how to target an international audience is understanding who they are and from where they’re visiting your website. Optimizing and translating your website to accommodate international visitors are the top solutions.
When digitally marketing to international audiences:
- Start with cross-cultural competency.
- Understand regional laws and regulations.
- Customize search engine marketing based on local usage.
- Optimize website design.
- Adapt social media for various languages.
Training Your Team
Training your team on marketing activities is a good sign of company progress and growth. It can mean that your team is gaining skills and insights into more technical marketing activities that could give way to the expansion of your company. So, how do you effectively train them to do so?
For new hires, having a plan in place to train them is not only beneficial for the company in terms of productivity but for them as well. This can be a detailed plan or checklist that trains a new hire on their job within the company. This checklist can range from introductions to program training. By creating a checklist for a new hire, it ensures that every new hire has been briefed or trained on the same things. This can help with keeping all employees on the same page.
Another solution is continuously training employees. This allows employees to re-learn programs or learn more about the program or activity that they are using. Subscribing to a reputable marketing newsletter or frequenting marketing blog posts will bring the training to your employees without you or them having to go searching for it.
Hiring Top Talent
Of course, you want to hire the best talent for your company. The challenge is knowing who is the most qualified candidate. Prior to the interview process, ask your team what qualities they would be looking for in a colleague/supervisor. Do extensive research on the best forming qualifications for your specific company. For example, a Marketing Manager at a startup may only need five years of previous marketing experience to fulfill their job requirement. However, the same position at a large established company may need a candidate with over 15 years of experience. Creating a thorough job description and requirements list will ensure that the right candidate will fill the open position.
Delivering an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a fairly recent B2B marketing strategy that combines both marketing and sales efforts to turn targeted accounts into customers. This strategy requires both teams to work alongside each other not only to identify the properly targeted accounts to ensure the ABM strategy runs smoothly and performs optimally.
Regardless of the marketing problems keeping you up at night, there is always a creative solution that can solve them. If you have run into any of these common marketing challenges and are looking for a deep dive into their solutions, feel free to set up a 30-minute strategy call today!
