It’s no secret that the last several years have challenged marketing leaders across industries. A shift in buyer expectations, emerging technology, and a global pandemic all greatly impacted marketing and demand, while posing new challenges for marketing teams.
Marketing in a digital and post-pandemic world is rapidly evolving. To stay ahead of the changing landscape, marketing teams must adapt and be creative to reach their target audiences, generate new leads, and help their businesses meet revenue goals.
The start of a new year marks the ideal time for marketing leaders to take a “think outside the box” approach to their marketing campaigns and overall strategies. In this article, we’re covering the top challenges that marketing leaders are facing this year and how to solve them by shifting to new strategies and tools.
Table of Contents
Challenge #1: Shift in buyer expectations
Consumers are now savvier than ever and know when a marketing campaign fails to speak directly to their personas and needs. Today, consumers expect a soft marketing approach from trustworthy businesses.
Consumers also expect businesses to be empathetic. For some marketing leaders, this softer approach can be a challenge as it requires more creativity and a deeper understanding of consumers.
Solution: Taking a more human-centric approach to marketing campaigns is a great way to meet consumers where they are. New strategies should rely on more specific details about customer personas, including their challenges, desires, interests, and needs. Making marketing content more human and intentional will help consumers feel heard on their level.
Challenge #2: Unifying content across mediums
From social media to influencers, the world of digital marketing has recently exploded. While this digital expansion creates many new marketing opportunities, it can also be challenging for marketing leaders to keep content unified across so many channels.
Adding to this concern, consumers expect businesses to generate content that speaks directly to their needs and desires, whether via video, social media, blogs, or ads. Campaigns that stretch across multiple channels and still remain unified can be a challenge to create—but mastering this provides more opportunities for even better customer experiences.
Solution: Unifying marketing campaigns begins with unifying the marketing team. Marketing leaders who keep their teams aligned on strategies will ultimately produce the type of content that consumers now expect.
While each channel will need a different approach to the content, an aligned team is necessary. This will ensure that the overall campaign shares the same purpose and offers the same values, whether through a blog, social ad, or video.
Challenge #3: Effectively measuring ROI
One of the biggest challenges marketing leaders face today is how to effectively quantify and measure the ROI of their campaigns. Without properly understanding this key metric, marketing teams may struggle to know the profitability of campaigns and properly plan budgets.
This metric simply cannot be taken lightly in the evolving marketing landscape. Thankfully, new software exists today that can help provide these insights for marketing leaders.
Solution: Accurately quantifying ROI is easier when marketing teams have defined goals, budgets, and the correct measurement formulas in place. This provides more solid numbers for marketing leaders to leverage, especially when also measuring “soft” metrics like user engagement or brand awareness. Leveraging a data collection platform also provides a streamlined way to centralize consumer data and turn it into insights for marketing campaigns.
Challenge #4: Analyzing data
Modern marketing teams have access to more data today than at any other time. Often, however, marketing leaders find it difficult to understand how to properly analyze and leverage the data they collect from leads. Without good analysis, marketing teams can miss out on valuable insights that would otherwise positively influence marketing strategies.
Solution: A centralized and clear picture of data makes analyzing this information more streamlined and strategic. With these insights, marketing leaders can better understand customer behavior or how leads interact with marketing efforts. With accurate data analysis, marketing teams gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey, which is necessary for creating effective marketing campaigns and boosting revenue.
Challenge #5: Repetitive manual tasks
Repetitive tasks not only lower employee morale but also hinder productivity and create bottlenecks. While these tasks are essential, they can take up more time than necessary and keep marketing teams from focusing on bigger projects.
Marketing leaders faced with low productivity may need to address how much time their team spends on repetitive, time-sucking tasks each day. Modern technology provides a way for marketing teams to automate manual tasks so they can focus on generating high-quality content.
Solution: If teams are bogged down with tedious processes, it’s time for marketing automation tools. Process automation software, whether powered by AI or not, provides an easy way for marketing leaders to relieve their teams of endless busy work and burnout. Eliminating these tasks ensures greater productivity and more time spent on other more important projects, which directly impacts business success.
Streamline marketing processes with FormAssembly
While marketing leaders face many new challenges this year, it’s possible to overcome all of them with the right insights, strategies, and tools. One way to simplify many marketing processes is by leveraging FormAssembly, an all-in-one data collection platform with seamless Salesforce integration.
FormAssembly provides a user-friendly solution marketing teams can use to streamline data collection, capture qualified leads, and understand customers. With FormAssembly’s newest solution, Workflow, teams can create visual roadmaps of data collection processes for improved decision-making, communication, and efficiency. Ultimately, FormAssembly’s powerful platform enables marketing teams to gain better insights into the data they collect and provide better customer experiences—all while increasing efficiency and productivity. Start exploring FormAssembly Workflow today!