Table of Contents

Introduction

Every business you see outside has some sort of digital presence. It could be a website, a social media account, and so on. 

It’s imperative to say that digital marketers are now more competitive than ever. With a lot of resources around digital marketing, it’s difficult to know where to begin and what to avoid. The challenges even go beyond the numbers and come down to customer psychology which requires extensive research.  

Hence, it’s important to talk about the challenges digital marketing poses today. This understanding will further make the marketer in you much more advanced than your competitors in searching for solutions digital marketers face today. 

What are the digital marketing challenges that marketers face every day?  

1. Knowing your customers more

Knowing your customers is not an easy task. Your users could belong to different segments like age, gender, geolocation (city, state, country), and other preferences.

To understand your audience’s interests, create and build your user’s persona. The user’s persona contains all the information about users that helps to further understand whom to target at what time. 

To create user personas, you can use Hubspot’s marketing tool called ‘Make my Persona’. In addition to that, you can always ask for feedback from users and do a poll on various topics to gather detailed user information. 

2. Generating Qualified Leads

According to the state of inbound reports for 2017 and 2018, generating leads is the global marketing issue along with generating traffic as well. 

To run any marketing activities, you would need to have good quality leads. Leads are potential prospects who are aware of your product or service.

To generate leads, multi-channel marketing will prove to be helpful. Create different brand channels like Webinars, Podcasts, Events, etc to gain attention from potential leads.

You can generate the leads in the following ways:

a) Include newsletter subscription on your homepage and collect mail ids of interested users.

b) Do webinars and share the registration form for the event across various communities. Every registration that comes in comprises a highly relevant audience. You can collect information like name, company, gender, requirements, and more.

c) Do podcasts and create exciting snippets out of them. Prompt your users to listen to the complete podcast through mail account login. This way you can generate the audience base who search for your brand’s related services and products.

d) Include contact forms in your web pages. The contact form page can be used to get visitors immediate queries and to find solutions for those. It could be a generic query, or a demo, or detailed information.  

As the led generation competition is getting tough and expensive tough day by day, it’s imperative to focus on budgeted sources. For example, you can use LinkedIn marketing to generate quality leads.

Important parameters to consider for generating quality leads from LinkedIn:

– Build a strong presence on LinkedIn.
– Engage in groups that your users are a part of.
– Publish regular posts that garner the attention of your audience.
– Optimize your LinkedIn profile. Use relevant keywords in the profile description that your potential users must be searching for.
– Tell your LinkedIn audience how a specific use case is handled through your product and how they will benefit from the same.

3. Building an effective and engaging content


Content marketing remains one of the top challenges of digital marketing as every online presence is competing with each other for content. 

To build effective and engaging content, it’s important to generate fresh and unique content. The major challenge of content marketing is how to guide readers from consuming information to reaching their end goal. 

Start your podcast channel, webinar show, active social media accounts, and more.
The different channels where your brand is present can be used effectively to generate new content.

For example, if you have a podcast or a webinar channel for your brand, this is how you can generate engaging content.

a) Create blog posts talking about the guest speaker and the discussion around it, and make sure to tag them on their social media handles. Your tagged posts would reach all the contributors and they would be happy to promote their mentions too.

– Insert Speaker’s quote or lines in your blogs and give due credits. Quotes have the power to grab user’s attention. 

– Be organic in what you post about. Every webinar or podcast you do for your brand will have your opinions included in some way or the other. Get natural and focus on user’s problems and propose solutions for the same. 

b) Mail these resources to guest speakers and ask for a mention about the blog on their website with a link to your domain.

The new marketing channels would serve different audience segments and cover a broad user base at once. You can also generate interactive content like dropping questions for your user base to answer. Collecting their opinions, facts, and more. And, finally publishing it linking to all the contributors. 

4. Keeping customer’s privacy and data safe  

In 2023, the data sharing regulations get more stringent, it poses challenges in digital marketing. 

Digital marketing activities require users’ data at some point or the other. When user’s data comes into the picture, it talks about users from different regions and countries that you serve. And, different countries have different data regulation laws. 

Therefore, every brand needs to follow certain rules like GDPR or relating to storing data, and at the same time, they should publicly display their data storage and privacy policies on the website. 

5. Making Websites Accessible

Another challenge in digital marketing is to make your website accessible to all. An accessible website is one that can be used by everyone including specially-abled people. In fact, in 2017, the fourth biggest challenge for marketers was managing a website.  

For example, visually impaired people should be able to understand what the image is about. For this to happen, you should always insert alt text into your images. Also, including title tags in all your web pages helps visually impaired people to differentiate the context of each web page.

Optimizing your web pages for specially-abled people will not only make their lives easier, on the other hand, it boosts your SEO. Web page algorithms consider accessibility a major factor while ranking pages in SERPs. 

Similarly, you can add keyboard navigation and font enlargement option to make your website more accessible and user-friendly.

You can learn more about Website accessibility on Web Accessibility Initiative.

6. Taking Mobile-Friendly approach

Another challenge of digital marketing is to make your product and services mobile-friendly. With most of the users available on mobile devices, one can not make their website suitable to only a desktop audience. 

Close to 55.9 % of time spent on the website is through desktop users, where the remaining 40.1 % comes from mobile users. This statistic is enough for us to understand how important it is to build mobile-friendly platforms. Also, let’s not forget how many of us do transactions through mobile every day. A mobile-friendly approach would for sure help your brand in long run with a loyal userbase.  

Make your website mobile-friendly. For instance, you can avoid large images and videos on your website that would increase the page load time (ideal website loading time is under 3 seconds). You can test all the features of your site on multiple devices and reduce any compatibility issues. 

7. Establishing an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

One of the most talked-about challenges of digital marketing is to build an omnichannel marketing strategy. 

Omnichannel marketing can be described as the marketing efforts to create seamless navigation from one channel to another. And, to build different channels of marketing to serve varied audiences. 

However, it’s not so easy to create an omnichannel marketing plan. As there could be plenty of platforms where your users would be present. And, having a presence everywhere without analyzing its output revenue sounds risky.

One example of omnichannel marketing is to include your social media handles link in your email campaigns. This would further connect you to your users on their social media. A strong social media presence would build and connect your user community that trusts your brand. 

8. Build brand authority and consistency

Setting up your brand authority as the industry leader requires long-term efforts. You need to give your users what other competitors are not giving. It could be detailed and useful industry-related topics, something that gives your brand, a voice. 

In the highly fierce environment, brands are looking for ways to expand their marketing efforts beyond only product or service. Focus on the unique selling point of your brand and stick to the same mission while promoting it.

Be consistent and follow the same content tone across all the platforms and channels.  

9. Keeping up with Google’s algorithm updates

Google keeps changing its algorithm to keep the SERP flow procedure secure and maintaining the quality of the search engine. However, it poses challenges in digital marketing as marketers need to find new ways of modifying and ranking their content. 

To get visibility on SERPs, it’s imperative to generate content that complies with the Google algorithms. Adapting to the Google algorithms updates and revamping your strategies accordingly will reap far more benefits in the competitive era.