Digital Marketing can be seen as the use of electronic media to create awareness about products and services. It also allows brands and agencies, and others to identify leads and work on how potential leads can be converted to customers and brand advertisers.
Digital Marketing, as a concept and practice, has its benefits if well practised by organisations. It can assist organisations in generating leads and converting leads to customers.
This is capable of increasing the profitability level of the organisation as well. Please note that as more enterprises adopt digital marketing as a means of generating leads and making more sales. In this article, I want to look at eight significant challenges of Digital Marketing in 2020 and how these challenges can be addressed.
#1 Defining Content Marketing ROI
If you have ever worked for an agency as a Digital Marketer, or you are trying to apply for a job, one of the questions that you will have to answer is: How do we know that you are working? Most times, when campaign funds are released, organisations expect that you should have generated more sales for the organisation. Many have lost their jobs and credibility because the organisation cannot directly link sales to digital marketing efforts.
Solution
To address this challenge, the Digital Marketer has to take time to analyse the buyer’s journey to management. There should be more emphasis on awareness campaigns than other stages of the buyer’s journey.
Also, it is essential for the Digital Marketer and the departments concerned to come up with a realistic expectation as far as the ROI of Digital Marketing campaigns are concerned.
They also have to come up with a realistic KPI that is linked to business objectives. There is a need for them to identify the metrics that will work as a unit to tell a value story. They also need to analyse performing and non-performing metrics for each KPI periodically and use it to define a proper approach to digital marketing.
#2 Video Virality Issues
One of the significant issues in this period and time is the issue of creation of video contents that will go viral. It is a well-known fact that video tends to convert faster than articles or audio. This is due to visuality that comes with video marketing. Many of us relied on our phone to create videos. Some of these videos lack the desired quality outputs.
Solution
The high time we realise that it costs a lot to create quality videos, the better for us. Organisations and Digital marketing teams must be ready to make a pragmatic shift and invest substantial amounts in video marketing.
#3 Feeding the content beast
When you look at today’s digital marketing and content writing strategy, many content writers fail to create the right type of content. Majority of content writers fail to create content that aligns with the buyer’s journey. They fail to understand the question that customers are asking. Some are just writing contents that will satisfy their bosses and sales department. That is why the conversion rate is inferior.
Solution
To resolve this issue, you have to start by getting an insight into what your prospects and customer wants. You have to do keyword research based on the feedback you are getting from prospects and customers.
Most times, you also need to bring together customers and prospects data that are scattered across the organisation to have a content direction as well. There is a need for you to allow edit existing contents to identify holes and get new content needs into the content production process.
Most times, brands are finding it difficult to find their voice. At times, because the entire process is highly monetised, it is tough for relatively unknown brands to raise their voice. This allows brands that cannot persevere in losing their voice.
To break even, you need to think out of the box. You don’t have to be an expert or compete in areas where more prominent brands already have dominion. That is why many experts advise that you should look out for low, competitive keywords and develop your reputation in that regard.
#4 Budget
One of the significant challenges that a Digital marketer faces is the issue of funding of his campaigns. As a Digital Marketer, you will start having problems with the management if you fail to bring in sales. Many organisations have also been forced to invest in paid search to turn around their sales. This, at times, may not yield the desired result. That is why funding is essential.
Solution
There is a need for organisations to shift away from paid advertising and start investing in content marketing. Although it may take time, by the time more of these contents finally makes it to the Search Engine Result Page, they tend to have better ROI than paid search.
#5 Approval process
One of the things that are very common with organisations is that it takes a long time before contents submitted for approval are approved. This, at times, might not meet up with the approval process that you expect. The delays at times happen because the content has to pass through many tables before approvals are granted.
Solution
As a Digital Marketer, you do not have the power to stop others from performing their roles. You have to make sure that you figure out the time that it takes to get your content approved. This will ensure that you consider that buffer anytime that you want to create your contents.
#6 Branding
When it comes to branding strategies, it has to do what the organisation is known for. At the onset, it might not be challenging to maintain your brand identity as soon as you move out of your in-house strategy, and you start outsourcing your content creation to external teams and writers. It will become different to maintain your brand identity.
Solution
To maintain your brand identity, you need to know that contents are a way of telling your story. You have trained both internal and external teams on what they need to know about your account. It would help if you also avoided the temptation of changing your content writers often and often.
#7 Keeping up with the speed
One of the significant challenges that content writers and Digital Marketers always faced when they need to create content is the issue of speed. Some marketers find it challenging to create consistent content that will not lose relevance. As a content marketer, you have to avoid a situation where your organisation puts you on your toes. Some organisations have a timeline that dictates that you have to produce contents at a particular time. Most times, this kind of content does not meet up with minimum content requirements. They are not able to convert your audience after all.
Solution
To solve this problem, you need to understand your audience and the type of content that resonates with them. It would be best if you also allowed events and seasons as well as circumstances to dictate the pace of your content marketing strategy. Take, for example; you can create a specific content to cover Black Friday promo because your competitor also has a similar strategy.
#8 Keeping the pace
Another issue that many Digital Marketers have is that they stopped learning. Digital Marketing is an ever-evolving discipline and strategy. As a Digital Marketer, you should have a study strategy in place that allows you to keep on adapting to changes as it relates to your customers. This will enable you to predict the steps that customers are likely to take next.
Solution
This should be continuous training and retraining of Digital Marketers. Knowledge also has to be shared among team members. Furthermore, constant report submission and knowledge sharing will allow the team to adapt to new challenges.
Wrapping Up
In this article, I have discussed some challenges that Digital Marketers have been facing and they will continue to face as they move on from 2020 and beyond. Some of these challenges include branding issues, keeping up with speed, digital marketing issues, among others. I firmly believe that if some of the solutions recommended here are followed, it will reduce some of the burdens that Digital Marketers have to face every day.
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