Digital Marketing Issues

Businesses would need to compete in the digital landscape if they want to succeed and survive as a brand. But achieving a strong online presence can be challenging, and you need to be prepared for the task. Uncover some of the most difficult digital marketing issues that businesses of all sizes face and learn how to overcome them below. 

1. Defining the Target Market

One of the digital marketing issues that you’ll run into is defining your target market. Your marketing strategy and efforts can’t be formed and executed if you don’t know who your target audience is. Defining your target market is one of the big challenges with digital marketing because your audience might not be a single demographic or type. But it’s important to know what your target audience wants, what they need, and what their expectations are.  

Start profiling the target market you have in mind, and ask yourself some questions to build a customer persona. To get an idea of customer persona, start from their business name and also take a look at their social media channels.

If you already have a few customers, try asking them for feedback or inviting them to take surveys. Actively engage with your existing customers to get to know them better and discover what online platforms they frequent more often.

If you want to know more about defining your target market, consider taking a few courses from SC Training (formerly EdApp). They're a mobile educational platform that provides free online courses that can be completed in minutes. Knowing Your Market course will teach you the basics of market research as well as ways to keep your findings relevant and updated. With their Competitive Landscapes course, you can take your research even further by conducting a competitive landscape analysis. Discover how you can use competitive intelligence to further develop your marketing plan and counter-strategies. 

• Issue: Defining your target market and creating a customer persona is challenging
• Solutions: Profile your audience by asking questions, inviting feedback, and taking online courses to increase your knowledge, skills, and understanding

Join for free and check out SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s courses on market research and strategies today! 

2. Developing a Clear and Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you’ve determined your target market and what content they consider valuable, you can start developing a content marketing strategy around them. With most brands, their strategy isn’t clear or comprehensive. It’s only a general idea of what they want to do and achieve, and it doesn’t cross over with other marketing initiatives. Without a proper strategy in place, overcoming your competition won’t be possible. You need to define yourself and stand out from the rest in a crowded market by overcoming digital marketing problems.

Push out your prepared and targeted content to all of your marketing channels – your blog, website, podcast, emails, and social media accounts – and observe your audience’s reactions. Then, make adjustments on what you’re sharing and where you’re sharing it to better meet audience expectations. Also, learn to repurpose and reshare your content as well. Breaking down a blog post into multiple social media posts or combining posts into a single digital resource can bring back life to an old post or lead to more engagement. Plan a release schedule so that you can automate the publishing process, saving you time and resources to create more content or better engage with leads. 

If you’re a beginner in digital marketing or developing a marketing strategy, this step can seem intimidating. But after determining your target market, creating a plan isn’t difficult at all, especially if you have a guide with you. Consider using SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Digital Marketing course or Grow & Convert's content marketing course suggestions to help get you started with this step.

• Issue: Creating a cohesive content marketing strategy that helps you reach your goals
• Solutions: Determine where to publish your content, adjust your strategy to meet customer needs, repurpose and reshare old content, combine your marketing efforts, schedule your releases, and read up on the basics of digital marketing

3. Promoting Brand Awareness

Now that you’re publishing your content, the next digital marketing issue you might run into is how to effectively promote your brand awareness. You can say that promoting brand awareness itself isn’t a challenge, however, it’s creating actionable brand awareness that’s difficult.

Depending on your company’s history, whether you’re an established brand or just starting from scratch, you’ll be promoting yourself differently. If your company is new, you’re going to be creating a lot of introductory content, like explaining who you are and why you’re different. Meanwhile, if you’ve been around for years, you will have to learn how to communicate clearly what new value you can still bring, or what changes you’re doing to your brand and why. For example, a law firm that has been established for many years but is looking to expand its client base may use targeted law firm marketing tactics to promote its services and differentiate itself from competitors.

Use all marketing channels available to you. Promoting brand awareness takes a lot of effort like scheduling campaigns or creating events for your customers to engage with you. There’s no right or wrong approach to this, but you need to set measurable goals and strategies. You can also look for internet marketing training courses to refresh your knowledge or update yourself on new methods. 

• Issue: Encouraging actionable brand awareness
• Solutions: Set measurable goals, determine your strategy and approach, use all marketing channels available, and take marketing courses to gain new information 

4. Creating and Strategizing for Mobile-First Content

Nowadays, people are browsing and doing their shopping from their phones or tablets. For this reason, it would be good to present your content in a one-column format that requires scrolling through. If your content works on mobile, it will definitely work on a desktop computer or monitor screen. Certain choices like making sure buttons and links aren’t too close to each other, the text is easily readable without zooming in, and images and graphics don’t take a long time to load are important things to consider. These things can improve customer experiences on your websites and social media accounts, providing both an informational and enjoyable time with your brand.

From social media campaigns to blog posts, the same mobile-first design principles should apply to all of your marketing channels. If you’re still unfamiliar with social media and how to generate responsiveness from there, think about looking at this course on Social Media and Electronic Communication from SC Training (formerly EdApp). There are also many social media training programs out there, so find one that suits your brand when strategizing for mobile-first content. 

• Issue: Presenting content that’s not in a mobile-friendly format could have your customers bouncing from your site to others
• Solution: Transform your content to be mobile-first and responsive for all of your marketing channels

5. Going with a Multichannel or Omnichannel Strategy

Now that you’ve started putting your content together and publishing them in as many places as possible, you need to refine your approach and go with either a multichannel or omnichannel strategy. You might have heard these terms before, but let’s better understand and differentiate the two. 

Going with a multichannel strategy includes formulating strategies based on each channel, making it easier for customers of that platform to take action. While it’s straightforward, easy to manage all social media in one place, and cost-efficient, it fails to provide a seamless and unified customer engagement across all those channels. Meanwhile, the omnichannel strategy aims to provide customized and integrated experiences across all platforms and engage with already existing customers. This approach treats all channels as part of a whole, rather than separately, and is why it needs more resources to make it possible. 

Your chosen strategy would depend on your company’s current target market, brand awareness, budget, and resources. Both strategies have their advantages and disadvantages, which is why it’s important to determine which will work best for your brand. 

• Issue: Choosing a long-term marketing strategy that works best for your brand
• Solution: Take into account your target market, budget, resources, and brand awareness before picking an appropriate strategy. 

6. Staying Current on Changing Trends and Algorithms

Google’s dominance is unlikely going to change in the next few years as the largest search engine. As a result, it can be a digital marketing issue to stay on top of an always-evolving digital landscape with regular features, rules, and algorithm changes. The key to staying current is continuously learning, analyzing, researching, and experimenting.

Nowadays, not using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies could end up hurting your business. SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s SEO Course is a good place to start learning more about SEO and how your digital marketing strategy could benefit from it. There are other resources like Moz and Search Engine Land that can also help you stay updated and informed on any new digital marketing trends and updates. Additionally, you may consider hiring the services of a digital marketing agency like Digivate which specializes in SEO. If you can stay on top of digital marketing trends, you’ll be able to possibly take your business to the top of the search results and improve brand awareness. 

• Issue: Staying updated with the changing trends, rules, features, and algorithms of digital marketing
• Solutions: Learn, research, and experiment constantly and stay informed with a trusted digital resource on any updates

7. Allocating Budget and Managing Cash Flow

During economically challenging times, companies might have cash flow problems. For example, people hold back from spending once the holiday seasons pass. Businesses and marketers need to be careful when budgeting and managing their cash flow by expecting some months to have a shortage of buying customers. There are also cases where you’ll have to decide whether or not a few paid ads, tools, advanced features, and other digital marketing resources would be worth the cost. You can track your ROI so that you can allocate your funds appropriately. 

Make the most of your budget by investing in engagement features like a chat box or Q&A forum to encourage engagement from your customers, creating optimized posts, and investing in local marketing strategies. Additionally, you can pick your best-performing social media channels and develop a relationship with advocates and influencers to better sell your brand. You can also consider managing fewer marketing channels if they’re not working for you as expected. 

• Issues: Using and managing your budget and cash flows wisely and effectively
• Solutions: Track your ROI, invest in customer engagement features and tools, focus on your best-performing channels, and develop relationships with influencers or advocates for your brand

8. Generating Quality Leads

One of the biggest digital marketing issues is finding new repeat customers, also known as quality leads. This can be hard to come by as evaluating customers can take time and effort. But if you know what your target customer looks like, you will also know what a quality lead means to you. Similarly, you should also know the best way to reach out to them – from social media like Linkedin using a LinkedIn scraper to create valid mail lists, blog posts, or emails. With these two key pieces of information, you can successfully develop your lead generation strategies. 

Your lead generation strategies can include ways to improve your existing content marketing strategy, create a new social media marketing strategy, network on sites like LinkedIn, nurture relationships with existing customers and convert them to quality leads, and more. Similarly, consider learning more about the Solution Selling Strategy from SC Training (formerly EdApp) as a potential client strategy. Generating quality leads, including implementing effective lead generation ideas, takes a lot of upfront work and planning, but if you’re clear in your goals and specific with your target audience, you’ll experience an easier lead generation process. If you're unsure about it, there are many lead generation tools available online, which can make this process easier for you.

• Issue: Producing quality leads requires a lot of time, resources, and effort
• Solutions: Be specific about your target market and customer persona, set clear goals, improve your existing content marketing strategy, nurture customer relationships and convert them to quality leads

9. Measuring and Analyzing Data

Now that you’ve set everything up, you need to measure the results to know how effective your strategy really is. Depending on the marketing channels you’re using, you may end up with multiple reports and analytics dashboards. Google Analytics, for example, is used to track website traffic, click-through rates, visitor demographics, and more. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram all come with their own metrics that measure engagement with posts and ads. 

Knowing how to use data analytics in marketing what each marketing platform provides in terms of data and analytics is important. Make sure you know what tools you’ll need, what data you’re trying to measure, and where you’re looking for them. Being able to interpret that data properly is needed to act appropriately with your campaigns. Remember to make your goals measurable too. If they can’t be measured, you won’t know if your marketing efforts worked. 

• Issue: Figuring out what data and metrics to measure
• Solutions: Familiarize yourself with the analytics dashboards, have measurable goals, establish what data you’ll be tracking, know where your data can be found, and interpret and use your findings appropriately with your campaigns

10. Improving Conversion Rate

The last digital marketing issue on this list is turning your clicks and visits into conversions. Now that you’ve brought traffic to your website and other social media accounts, it’s time to turn those visitors into customers. However, it can be frustrating to see so many clicks, but no increase in sales. This also diminishes your ROI. If you want to convince your visitors to buy into your product or services, you need to optimize and improve on certain points in your strategies. 

One way to convince visitors to buy what you’re selling is to optimize your landing pages and make sure you’re giving them an enjoyable experience on your website. Having a persuasive copy, active sales techniques, and attractive visual elements can all tempt visitors to make purchases. Working towards a consistent tone of voice and message across all channels and platforms can also help.

But, achieving this level of optimization requires ongoing effort and expertise. Consider using Conversion Rate Optimization services to help you identify and implement specific changes that will significantly boost your conversion rates and maximize your online sales. If you focus on always improving and making changes to your digital marketing strategy to improve your conversion rates, you can have a successful business. 

• Issue: Not enough visitors and clicks are turning into paying customers and conversions
• Solutions: Optimize your website, choose the best domain with a website name checker, improve customer experience, use persuasive sales techniques and copy, attract customers with visual elements, and stay consistent with your brand and voice.

11. Combating Ad Fraud

One significant digital marketing problem is ad fraud, which refers to deceptive and illegitimate activities that aim to generate revenue through fraudulent advertising practices. This can take various forms, including fake clicks, impressions, or conversions. Advertisers may end up paying for interactions that have no genuine value, leading to wasted budgets and skewed performance metrics.

Ad fraud undermines the integrity of digital advertising platforms and challenges the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns. To combat this issue, marketers often employ fraud detection tools, adopt stringent verification measures, and seek transparency in their advertising relationships to ensure their budgets are invested in genuine user engagement.

• Issue: Wasted budgets and skewed metrics from fraudulent ad practices
• Solutions: Use robust tools to detect fraud, don't compromise on your company's verification measures, and always be transparent and genuine when advertising.

12. Navigating Privacy Concerns and Regulations

Challenges with digital marketing include navigating complex privacy landscapes with the increasing awareness of online privacy and the implementation of stricter regulations. Collecting, storing, and using consumer data for targeted advertising requires sticking to stringent privacy regulations, and any violations can result in severe penalties.

Balancing the need for personalized marketing with the protection of user privacy is an ongoing challenge. Marketers must prioritize transparent data practices, offer clear opt-in/opt-out mechanisms, and stay informed about evolving privacy regulations. These will build and maintain trust with their audience while remaining compliant with the law.

• Issue: Strict privacy regulations with violation penalties
• Solutions: Invest in tools that will protect your clients' privacy, prioritize data transparency, stay informed, and always comply with privacy rules and regulations.

Try SC Training (formerly EdApp) at no cost and solve your digital marketing issues with their courses today!