Common Challenges in Marketing Today

By September 22, 2014Marketing Tools

Marketing seems to take a whirlwind approach today. Here’s a glimpse at why and how we got there.

Marketing has grown, expanded, shifted, and flipped. Today marketing is not just about creating a campaign that drives business but about defining the business itself and giving it a voice. Businesses must make a splash across multiple platforms and connect with their customers in the most intimate and relevant ways we have ever seen. Through mobile devices customers interact with your company anywhere they find themselves and at anytime that is convenient for them. The key to successful marketing today is not about being seen but being heard and embraced.

Common_Challenges_in_Marketing_TodayToday marketers must not simply produce customers but brand ambassadors and establish their clients as industry leaders that are committed to innovation and change within the niche itself. The common challenges are real and the way your brand tackles each will make or break your marketing efforts and influence your overall marketing strategy for months (and in some cases years) to come.

Some of the most common challenges in marketing today began to surface in 2006. In 2006 North American businesses spent more than $9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 65 percent increase than that of 2005, according to SEMPO’s annual “State of Search Engine Marketing”. Companies quickly learned that their customers were turning to the Internet to learn more about their products and most importantly about how their products stacked up against competitors.

In ways there was a panic. Businesses felt compelled to respond and meet their audience online and yet were not all to sure just how to go about it. They knew that their customers were going to be looking for them online, however, they were not all to sure on just what the customers were expecting to find – and thus inbound marketing began to take shape. Marketers began to develop content and utilize text and images to share their brand’s message. We experienced an influx of irrelevant websites built to manipulate searches and found ourselves wrapped up in sales or “squeeze” pages with empty promises.

Overtime the challenges marketers faced swayed between the extremely bold practices and conservative yet reliable ones. Google has responded over the years with Panda, Penguin, and Pigeon updates while search engines as whole offered assistance through PPC options and local listings. Likewise, SEO experts began to help form better plans to give companies improved returns of investment. Lead generation became a staple in determining the success of a campaign, while inbound calls and foot traffic became obscure and ignored.

Today marketers are beginning to grasp just how it all should and can work together. As time moves on and technology grows beyond our dream marketers are moving with the trends and adjusting as needed. Each campaign is developed to achieve a particular purpose while data and analytics from these campaigns are used to better target customers and deliver information customers crave.

Addressing the challenges of marketing today is becoming an integrated process that mixes some of the older practices of marketing such as direct mail with some of the newer practices such as social media marketing. Integrating traditional marketing and modern techniques is key to success today and tend to help marketers address the challenges of marketing today head on with boldness and confidence.

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