Digital marketing is important because it can help you reach your target audience in a more cost effective manner. What do we mean by this? Digital marketing can selectively show your advertisements to your target demographic through the information and data they collect on a user’s profile. For example, you can choose to show your posts to a specific target demographic (e.g. women under 30 years of age). You can even target it further to include people who are more likely to purchase your product based on their previous search history.
Despite the positives of digital marketing, there are some challenges. Here are 10 major challenges facing digital marketers in 2022 and how to overcome them.
1. Learn about target customers
SEO and paid advertising are becoming more competitive between different brands. It is a waste of time and money to focus on broad content and keyword strategy. Creating strong, targeted ads for your target customer is essential to ensure they are engaged with your brand. One of the ways you can solve this issue is to create a buyer persona, where you visualize your customer to better understand them and their needs. Another solution is very simple: ask your customers what they want! This can involve polls or surveys on social media, or surveys from email marketing.
It’s important to remember that there is no one type of customer or target customer. Knowing the demographic of your target audience is very different to what they want or need: so you need to ensure you are paying attention to both.
2. Generate quality leads
Quality leads can be created once you know your target customer and what they want to seek from your brand. Quality leads are customers who shop with your brand consistently, and are becoming hard to come by. This is due to many reasons: particularly with online brands because there are so many and they are increasingly accessible through delivery services.
It may take longer to build a relationship with a customer, however, it is very important and beneficial. According to Motista, customers with an emotional connection with a brand will have a 306% higher lifetime value and recommend the company to others (71%) at a higher rate than the average percentage (45%).
3. Manage cash flow
Businesses may suffer from cash flow issues from time to time. Business owners and marketers should be particularly wary of changing circumstances and cash flow during uncertain economic periods.
When cash flow becomes limited, businesses may have to move online to save money on in person expenses, such as retail spaces or offices.
4. Create engaging and interesting content
Content marketing is relatively new, but an essential part of digital marketing. Your brand’s online content should reflect what your target audience wants to see from you. Popular content includes short videos, live streaming and podcasts. However, the content is more important than the medium you use to communicate it. But how do you know what will engage your audience? You need to understand your audience, and create what they want to see. Show you understand their wants and needs as a brand, and then point them to the solution you are offering.
Tracking your customers (especially how they find you) is a great way to learn about their habits and what they consume, giving you a clear picture of what content is and isn’t working.
5. Privacy and Data-sharing Regulations
We can expect more legislation to come into play when it comes to customer data. Websites can attract visitors from countries internationally, so it is important to be compliant with international law if you are tracking consumer data. A great way to ensure your customer is informed on your data collection is pop up information regarding cookies, data sharing and any other policies you use.
6. Make your website accessible
Accessible websites are important because it allows people with disabilities to access your goods and services. People with disabilities can make up a large portion of your target audience, or can be a new market to tap into, and should not be ignored!
An accessible website ensures that people with visual, hearing or other impairments can access your website. There are simple solutions to make your website more accessible. For example, including an ‘alt text’ which describes your image to people with visual impairments.
7. Ensure your website is mobile friendly
More than ever, people are accessing and discovering brands from their mobile phones. Having a mobile friendly, or mobile first, approach to your digital strategy ensures that your customers are having a positive experience. An easy way to check if your website is mobile friendly is to test it on various devices, and be vigilant to ensure that all features are consistent across both mobile and desktop.
8. Establish a diverse marketing strategy
One channel marketing is no longer going to cut it. There are more diverse ways of marketing, including omnichannel and multichannel marketing. Both are effective, depending on your campaign and the message you want to give your audience. Omnichannel marketing has the same messaging and imagery across all channels. However, multichannel marketing has different messages across multiple channels, reaching multiple audiences.
Having a diverse effort across multiple platforms, whether it is omnichannel or multichannel, will ensure your customer becomes more familiar with your brand. Multiple channels makes it easier for a potential customer to discover your brand, and gives several places to follow you.
Here’s a tip: make it easy to transition from one platform to the next! For example, include links to your social media platforms on your email marketing platforms.
9. Maintain brand consistency
Brand consistency is so important in the digital age of marketing. Marketing with a team can have its own challenges: including which brand assets to use and when. Brand guidelines are the perfect place to start, as it is the ‘go to’ place for information about brand colors, logos, fonts and copywriting. You want your customers to see you as a reliable and authoritative voice in your industry, so ensuring your messaging is consistent across your platforms is key to customer trust and loyalty.
Maintaining brand consistency is not challenging when you use marketing operations software. This software helps with brand compliance, making sure each campaign is on brand and facilitating communication across departments. In addition, you can use digital asset management software to centralize your assets on one easy to access platform, which has secure permission based access and ways to approve digital asset creation. This ensures that you have control over the entire cycle of your brand’s campaigns, ensuring messaging is consistent throughout.
10. Stay up to date with the algorithm
Google is the largest search engine, and offers many benefits to customers if you are on the top of the keyword search. To compete, you have to pay attention to Google’s latest algorithms and rules released by the company itself.
Here’s a tip: if you are local, you need to ensure your Google My Business listing is current and accurate.
