Discover how to overcome all the marketing challenges your business experiences
The world of marketing is fast paced and always evolving. And there are many marketing challeges facing marketers today. All this makes it hard to find the best ways to understand and connect with customers to deliver tangible results.
Making it tougher still is the many different business applications marketers work with. This leads to more marketing challenges, with disjointed processes and a fragmented view of customers. Each app will hold a different piece of the puzzle. But the missing piece is the need for a centralised 360 view of the customer to ensure you consistently reach the right customers at the right time.
Explore the top marketing challenges facing marketers today and how you can solve them. You can use these to improve how you work and create better results for your business.
1. Understanding customer behaviour
For most businesses, you likely have more access to data than ever. But one of the biggest marketing challenges is putting this data to good use and pulling out the valuable insights from it.
Every interaction a customer has with your brand feeds your understanding of their needs and what they’re going to do next. With customers using different channels and devices, you need visibility of all the touch points with your business, to build a full picture of who they really are and, most importantly, what they want. Without this, you end up with fragmented customer data with leads incorrectly identified, or not accurately understanding where customers are in their journey or what they might do next.
When you use a variety of business applications, you often don’t get the whole picture of your customer. You might think you know your customers and their behaviour, but you could be missing a vital piece of information. This missing piece could better inform you of what your customers truly need at a particular point in time.
It’s vital to carefully analyse all the data you have holistically to gain meaningful insights. Without this it’s near impossible to personalise your messaging and communication to a customer’s personal journey with your business.
2. Creating a consistent customer experience
You can only create a strong and consistent customer experience by fully understanding your customer and their behaviour. Customers are used to tailored, personalised experiences – they don’t want irrelevant information or a disjointed customer journey. Seeing the wrong information at the wrong time risks losing your message or worse, a negative brand perception.
Creating a consistent customer experience needs a multi-channel approach. You need to see where each customer interaction happens and what stage they’re at in their journey. To make this happen, your different teams need to work together effectively. For example, if a customer is already known and in communication with your Sales team, then this knowledge is also useful for Marketing in order to tailor messaging to them. Likewise, if Marketing can see a customer has interacted with specific content on your channels, this can help inform how Sales interact with a lead.
Using multiple business applications for your marketing doesn’t just make it hard to get a clear view of your customer. It can also mean your customer won’t have a consistent experience when it comes to the look and feel of your brand across different channels and touchpoints. A centralised solution for your marketing activities helps give a cohesive look and feel for your customers and a seamless journey to ultimately build trust with your brand.
3. Generating leads
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to generating leads. But the right data, understanding your customers, and a personalised customer experience does lay the foundation for strong lead generation. It can sometimes take many interactions with your brand before a lead is ready to convert.
Your different business applications can help you capture and identify leads. But it’s your data and software that should be working hard for you to bring intelligence into the fold. For example, which lead would be best to interact with now and with what message?
You need to be able to track, reach, and engage with potential customers. And this is where your Sales and Marketing teams working closely can make a real difference. As we’re all so busy, you need to know who your best potential customers are. If your data isn’t centralised, easily discoverable and working hard, you risk losing customers to other businesses who have better intelligence.
4. Demonstrating ROI
One of the toughest marketing challenges to overcome is providing ROI for marketing activities. Proving that marketing is effective is vital for securing future marketing budgets. It’s also important to understand the most important areas for your teams to spend their time on. When budgets and times are restricted, you need to work in the smartest way possible to achieve the best results possible.
But are you always able to track the ROI of your different marketing activities?
In a largely digital world, marketing success is seen through webpage visits, clicks, downloads, and form submissions. For all your marketing campaigns you need to prove you’re generating leads and spending your time on the right channels.
The problem is all the analytics from these channels are too often disjointed. How can you show when in the journey a customer converted? Or how last year’s event and this year’s email worked in unison to convert that customer? Without intelligent linked up data this is impossible. Without making these connections your team may abandon a channel thinking it’s not successful, when it really plays a vital part in the holistic channel mix. ROI simply is not accurate without a multi-channel approach.
5. Teams working productively
For many businesses, disjointed internal processes means more time spent on manual and ineffective work. Your business may work less efficiently thanks to inconsistent data and disjointed processes. This causes a lot of companies to lose their competitive edge. It can also result in needing to spend a lot more as their data isnt working hard enough for them.
It’s important to identify areas where you can streamline processes and promote productivity through intelligent data. There is almost always a disjoint between Sales and Marketing teams. Finding a way for these teams to join up to work well together can make a real difference to your bottom line. For this to happen, you need to increase communication between different teams. You also need to improve visibility and ensure everyone has the right access to important data and information.
It’s not just about identifying leads. Your teams need to all working effectively to close them to ensure you’re gaining valuable new customers. Just as importantly, you need to ensure your existing customers remain happy too. By fully understanding your customers, you’ll know what your customers want and where they are in their journey so you can provide them with the best possible experience.
How do you do this? You need to:
- Get rid of rogue business line applications and centralise all information in one solution
- Create seamless business workflows
- Ensure your data joined up and working hard for you
- Empower your teams with the right information at the right time
Only when all this is in place will your teams be able to collaborate effectively to get the best possible results for your business.
Are you ready to transform how you work to overcome your marketing challenges and get more from your marketing?
It’s now time to get ahead of your marketing challenges and start working smarter. You can then get a better view of your customers and provide them with the experience they need.
Transform how you discover and convert leads and understand what channels provide the most effective ROI. To do this, you need the right tools for the job.
Using multiple business applications slows you down and creates disjointed processes, and prevents you from scaling your business when needed. All too often, time is wasted trying to bring all the pieces of the puzzle together. By centralising all your data in one consolidated business solution, you can be more responsive and gain the full picture of each of your customers, deliver the right experience at the right time, and obtain smart leads that result in sales.
For advice on how to overcome your marketing challenges, create your marketing strategy or choose the right tools for your business to meet your needs, get in touch with us today.
