In this age of digital-first business atmosphere, businesses no matter large or small continue to rely on digital marketing for achieving their business and branding goals. But the fast-changing landscape of digital marketing is creating many challenges. The overcoming of these challenges is crucial to ensure a result-oriented and effective marketing campaign. Here in this blog, we will explore some of the pressing challenges digital marketing professionals and businesses are facing in 2023 and suggest a way forward as well.
Ready to dive in? Let’s get started.
We first start with a brief overview of digital marketing.
Understanding Digital Marketing:
Digital marketing is a form of marketing that uses the Internet and other online marketing strategies to promote products and services. Digital marketing involves various methods and channels such as social media marketing, SEO marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, content marketing, and more.
Digital marketing has become a predominant form of marketing nowadays. In 2020, the value of digital global advertising and marketing was estimated at $350 billion and is expected to reach $786.2 billion by 2026. Businesses all over the world irrespective of their size, domain, and niche are investing massively to finetune their digital marketing strategies. They are bringing innovations and adaptations to further enhance the outreach and ROI of digital marketing campaigns.
But businesses as well as digital marketing professionals are facing some handicaps. These handicaps do have the potential to negatively impact adversely on online digital campaigns, wasting precious resources and time.
Digital Marketing Challenges that Need to be Tackled:
Here are some pressing digital marketing challenges that should be dealt with head-on.
Challenge#1: Targeting the Right Audience:
In this age of social media when almost every human on planet Earth is using social media, targeting the right audience is key to running a successful digital marketing strategy. However, targeting the right audience through various digital marketing channels is increasingly becoming a daunting challenge.
The marketers first develop a deep understanding of the target audience. They should know their needs, preferences, behavior, and location. Then they conduct online research and make data-driven decisions to adjust marketing tone and message to reflect their peculiar needs and preferences.
Challenge#2: Fierce Competition:
The increasing competition among online businesses is another major challenge. Now that almost every business is becoming digitalized particularly in the wake of the pandemic, it has become a serious challenge to stand out in the crowded market.
To overcome this competition, marketing professionals and businesses must come up with unique content and engaging marketing messaging and tone. They should provide the audience with what nobody else can provide. Incorporating the insights of experts and creating unique research can help a lot in overcoming this challenge in 2023.
Challenge#3: Acquisition and Retention of Top Marketing Professionals:
The rising inflation worldwide and the pandemic have created a trend that experts dub “Great Resignation”. This trend has created a largely unsatisfied workforce that keeps on doing job hopping. This job-hopping impacts adversely on digital marketing campaigns. The frequent leaving of jobs to seek better opportunities has created a challenge in acquiring top marketing talent. Apart from the acquisition of talent, retaining them has also become a costly affair.
You can overcome this challenge by creating a healthy and incentive-based working environment. You should provide a clear career progression pathway and offer market-competitive salaries and incentives. The frequent interaction between top brass and employees creates an atmosphere that is favorable for developing a dedicated and loyal workforce.
Challenge #4: Creation of Engaging Content:
The creation of engaging content is key to running a digital marketing strategy that is resulting-oriented. But the competition in the market is making it hard to come up with fresh and original content that can ensure customer engagement.
To overcome this challenge, you prioritize innovation, creativity, and out-of-the-box solutions. Businesses can also organize brainstorming sessions, follow content calendars, and leverage user-generated content to come up with deeply engaging and original content for various digital marketing channels.
Challenge#5: Generation of Leads and Traffic:
The generation of leads and traffic is the ultimate goal of every marketing campaign. This traffic should be converted or at least perform desired tasks such as subscriptions to newsletters. Restriction on tracking growing privacy concerns and increasingly stringent privacy regulations and laws are making this goal hard to achieve. This is one of the most serious digital marketing challenges in 2023.
How you can achieve this goal? Rethink your strategy. Use analytics to determine which digital marketing channel is the most effective in conversion. For instance, this year, it is content marketing has proved the most effective digital tool in improving conversion rate. Research extensively, consult with social media experts, and use analytics to come up with the most effective conversion-oriented content. In this way, you can remain in the business and stand out in this overcrowded digital marketplace.
Challenge#6: Keeping up with the Trends:
The next major challenge being faced by businesses and professional digital marketing experts is keeping with the trends. Digital marketing is an evolving field. Trends come and go. Every day, new trends and technologies emerge that make it hard for brands and individuals to catch up. However, it is also important to remain updated with emerging trends and technologies. How would you do that?
First, social listening, competitive analysis, and other social media solutions are big sources to stay updated. You should stay on top of industry news and trends by reading blogs, attending conferences, and reading newsletters. But you should be selective in choosing a particular trend. The trend should be relevant to your brand, otherwise, you will get reviews but little conversions or no conversions at all.
Challenge#7: Project Financing:
Maintaining current funding and securing a stream of funding for future marketing projects is another major headache. The uncertain economic conditions are certainly generating this challenge. Marketers are finding it hard to convince businesses to invest more to attain their stated goals.
How you can overcome this? Show a clear Return on Investment in your marketing initiative. You can demonstrate this by measuring Key Performance Indicators such as conversion rates, subscriptions, sign-ins, downloads, etc.
Challenge#8: Measuring ROI:
Measuring Return on Investment or ROI can be a daunting task in particular when you are using multiple digital tactics and channels. Measuring ROI is important because it informs you when tactics are working to achieve intended marketing goals and which one is falling flat.
You can overcome this challenge by setting and measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as sign-ins, subscriptions, conversions, etc. You can also use attribution modeling to track the journey of customers across various digital channels and touchpoints.
Challenge#9: Designing and Implementing Customer-Oriented Marketing Strategy:
With the rapid growth of digital platforms and channels, the journey of customers has become complex. It is no longer linear which makes it hard to come up with a customer-centric marketing strategy. Though businesses have started leveraging the omnichannel digital marketing approach using multiple tactics and channels simultaneously, it is difficult to design and implement a cohesive strategy.
Practicing of omnichannel online marketing campaign is the right answer to overcome this challenge in 2023. But you should move steadily, starting with simply integrated social media pages to website and emails, and then expand it on various digital marketing channels. In this way, you can come up with a holistic customer-centric strategy and lay the foundation for running a successful digital marketing campaign.
Challenge#10: Managing Data Privacy:
With increasing incidents of data breaches and misuse of data, the concerns regarding data privacy are growing rapidly and quite rightly. Customers are reluctant to share their personal information which is creating a challenge in designing an effective marketing strategy. How can you convince customers about the safety and security of their critical and sensitive data?
First, implement stringent security measures. You should be transparent about the usage of data. You should also provide the option to customers to opt out of data collection if they desire. Finally, you should also use first-party data rather than third-party data to design and implement more targeted campaigns.
Challenge#11: Shifting and Changing Google’s Algorithm:
Every year, Google, the largest search engine, updates its Google products thousands of times to improve user experience. These frequent updates impact the ranking of the website and make in-place marketing strategies largely ineffective. You may suffer from poor content performance and low search ranking. Hence, staying on top of shifting and changing Google’s algorithm is key to ensuring better outcomes of SEO and PPC marketing campaigns has emerged as a bigger challenge.
You must adapt to these frequent changes. Stay updated with the Google search ranking list and adjusting your digital marketing strategies accordingly is the only way forward.
Challenge#12: Advancing Capabilities Artificial Intelligence:
The AI is rapidly gaining human-like capabilities. There are many AI-based generative platforms such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Edge Bing AI, Google Bard, and the like. These content-generative tools have become a serious threat to human employment. Though some websites have started using AI-generated content for blogs and similar ends, Google considers it spam. Such content is also against the policy of Google’s webmaster guidelines. Nonetheless, in this age of AI, it is becoming a challenge to come up a content that engages customers through value addition.
First, you should prioritize human-generated content. The content must include value for customers rather than a monotonous and rambling write-up.
Final Thoughts:
Digital marketing is facing many challenges in 2023. These challenges if left unaddressed can adversely impact the performance of digital marketing campaigns. Advancing AI capabilities, changing and shifting Google’s algorithm and guidelines, difficulty in securing funding for running and future marketing projects, data privacy, lead, and traffic generation are some of the most pressing challenges.
But you can overcome them by some remedial measures. Staying on top of industry trends and emerging technologies, adjusting marketing campaigns as per updated Google algorithm, measuring ROI, offering value to the content, and creating original, engaging, and human-generated content you can effectively overcome these challenges. Furthermore, investing in new technologies, and designing and implementing an omnichannel digital marketing strategy can also help you achieve your intended marketing goals and targets.
Thanks for your reading. We do hope that this write-up will help you design effective online marketing tactics and techniques to overcome the above-discussed challenges.