Today’s marketing world is now more difficult to navigate than ever.
The oversaturation of products offered and ways to market them, as well as the mass of competitors that exist, can all make finding success in marketing for your business seem overwhelming.
Finding proper ways to manage your daily processes and knowing where your company is positioned in the market is essential to obtaining the maximum return on investment and engagement from your audience.
It is now imperative to take stock of the new technologies that exist to improve your business and marketing experience, and ultimately, find the right tools for your business needs and size.
Difficulties of Digital Marketing:
From building webpage authority to tracking the success of your landing pages, digital marketers can juggle a number of tasks all in the same day. Keeping these tasks organized can be challenging, especially when your business is not equipped with the proper digital marketing tools and technology to do so. The following are some of the most common obstacles marketers face:Generating Leads:
As with most fields, digital marketing has its own unique challenges that make it difficult to get the job done at maximum efficiency. When it comes to relying on clients to reach daily, weekly, and even monthly goals, marketers understand more than ever the importance of generating and nurturing leads. Doing so on a wide scale can be extremely difficult, as modern customers are much more informed about the products they need and are less impressionable to advertisements and email blasts. When these methods no longer produce the results they once did, you’ll need to find a new way to generate leads. Additionally, managing leads once they are secured can be one of the trickiest and most time-consuming parts of the marketing process. Creating methods to obtain prospective client information in a way that is both interesting for the lead and simple for them to contribute their information can be one of the main roadblocks in the marketing funnel. Once this feat is achieved, following up with and answering questions from leads is the crucial next step to eventually close a sale. You will need to organize and maintain conversations with leads to achieve the results your business needs for success. Successful marketing teams know that alleviating their workloads through technology and a better strategy is key to opening up time to spend on larger marketing tasks.Being Strategic:
It can be difficult to figure out the best approach to a future marketing campaign without having insights to study from previous campaigns. Unfortunately, gathering these insights manually and analyzing all of the information can be time-consuming, and even more so when the results of this data are then used to create a campaign strategy. Business owners want to make sure their marketing teams are spending their time wisely, and increasing ROI, but when these teams have to wait until a campaign is completed to analyze the data collected and determine the profit from sales, a great deal of time and money can be lost. Finding the right tools: With so many bases to cover in the marketing process, finding the right technology to make each step a little bit easier for your company is of the utmost importance. Whether this be internal team communication to discuss the next steps in a customer journey or campaign, finding a way to manage all of the data that is created on a daily basis when talking to potential clients and closing sales, or organizing your pipeline of potential leads, there are so many tech tools that you can use to simplify these processes. It is a matter of finding which tools are the right fit for your business needs that provides the greatest challenge.Tech Solutions
Fortunately, digital marketers today are seeing constant advancements in business technology, many of which are applicable to marketing as well. Updating office technology to better reflect the needs of your business and promote maximum employee success will generally improve marketing success as well. And as an added bonus, your employees will be more satisfied using updated tech that they are not only familiar with but makes their work lives a little bit easier.Marketing Automation Technology:
The most notable advancement in digital marketing is the creation of marketing automation software, or “the use of software to automate repetitive tasks related to marketing activities and connect different parts of the marketing funnel.”
Making use of the data that is automatically collected from marketing automation software will allow you to make changes in real-time during a current campaign, which helps ensure that you are spending time and resources efficiently.
This also allows for rapid response during a current campaign, which can help turn profitability results more quickly.
For anyone working in the field of marketing, this development helps manage menial tasks on a daily basis, which allows for time better spent elsewhere in the marketing process, especially when it comes to in-depth market research or targeted dialogue with new and existing prospects.
Marketers will spend a great deal of time generating leads and spreading awareness about their brand to appropriate audiences, and even researching which audiences are the best fit for their current marketing initiatives.
Email marketing, for example, can now be automated, sending out campaign emails to the proper audiences, as well as automated follow-ups to free up employee time.
When these steps can be automated and left up to AI to learn and master, marketers can dive deeply into the more intricate aspects of their jobs, like up-selling, assisting with individual customer needs, and most importantly, closing a sale.
Data Collection:
Recent improvements in data-gathering technology have led to the creation and deployment of big data analytics. Big data automation collects mass amounts of data, which has the ability to predict behaviors and trends from potential customers. This is extremely valuable information for business owners and their marketing teams, as it allows you to make more strategic decisions when attempting to target a specific audience.
This data-gathering technology can have a large impact on a business’s profits by creating less wasted employee time, providing suggestions for risk management, and providing information for future financial decisions.
Business owners and their marketing teams can decide where exactly they should be targeting their marketing efforts for maximum levels of success and profitability.
The information gathered by marketing automation analytics software includes trends in customer activity and behavior in response to your marketing campaigns.
Information like clicks, time spent on a certain webpage, and the amount of traffic to your campaigns all help to determine the success of your marketing in real-time.
Rather than having to wait for sales results or until the next campaign rolls around to switch up your strategy, you can make changes much sooner in response to the latest customer interactions. Additionally, this AI software has the ability to predict the success of future campaigns based on the information gathered from past campaigns.
This information creates a guide for shaping your business’ next big marketing venture, rather than leaving marketers to analyze and predict campaign success on their own.
Unified Office Technology:
Of course, there’s no way to succeed in marketing without having all of the right tools to pair with your marketing automation solution. Video meetings, phone calls, instant messaging, etc. are essential to daily marketing operations. Keeping in close contact with not only leads and clients, but coworkers as well make up a large portion of the workday. After all, you’ll find it difficult to make progress on any team projects without effective communication. Now, most offices have phones, computers, and in-person communication amongst coworkers, but these interactions have been updated to be even more productive and time-effective. Unified communications platforms are one of the most efficient forms of office technology to help improve daily workflows. This new technology has the ability to synchronize the multiple business communication applications your company utilizes on a daily basis to improve communications in the office, with remote employees, and most importantly, with your clients. Unified communications guide also help businesses transform their tech and tools without having to completely get rid of all the technology they have already invested time and money into. With the ability to synchronize various business applications to keep the conversation going over a variety of channels, businesses can keep the tech they already have, while improving employee and customer communication. And, as has been observed, greater levels of communication make for higher sales, and therefore greater employee productivity. Keeping yourself, the marketer, updated on the latest modes of communication will help you reach your goals and keep your clients satisfied. Not only this, but your daily expectations will be easier to accomplish when you are equipped with the proper tools and technology you need to get the job done efficiently. Studies show that offices with average to strong digital culture (which is defined as the incorporation of new digital technologies into a given workspace) have a greater impact on productivity and innovation levels. Innovation is especially important to the digital marketing field, where new ideas and methods of targeting the right audiences are necessary for achieving success. Employees also appear to feel more empowered when their workspaces have updated technology, likely because they are properly equipped with the tools they need and are therefore able to push the boundaries of their typical workflows.Other Helpful Resources
While the aforementioned technologies will potentially produce the most noticeable results for your business, there is still a wealth of smaller technological changes that can be made to improve daily operations as well. Maybe you own a small business, or simply don’t have the budget to do a complete overhaul of your office technology—if so, these small changes will help to steer your company in the right direction.- Training Courses: If you are new to the world of being a business owner or the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, consider taking a digital marketing training course from industry experts.
Not only will these courses prepare you for a career in digital marketing, but courses can be tailored to fit your personal journey into this new career path, whether you’re starting your own business, recently graduated from college and looking to get a head-start on your career, or if you’re already in the workforce and are looking for a change in career.
Even if you already work in digital marketing, the speed at which digital trends evolve is so rapid that it can be challenging to keep up. Online training courses give your teams an opportunity to explore traditional marketing themes or enlighten yourselves on some of the new strategies available to digital marketers today.
- Free Google Tools: Especially for small businesses, taking advantage of all free offerings makes a big difference when it comes to profitability. Google analytics is a free tool that is incredibly helpful for digital marketing.
This tool tells you how much traffic is coming to your site and for what reason. Typically this is just simple information that tells whether a lead came to your site through organic or sponsored content.
While this is basic information, the impact it can have on guiding your marketing efforts is quite large. Whether it be putting more time into your organic content production or spending more money on sponsored content to better reach your prospects, this free Google tool can help redefine the way you run your marketing.
- Social media: When it comes to building brand awareness, social media may be the single most important tool your business can use. There is a wide variety of social media post scheduling technology that can benefit your digital marketing efforts.
Planning when and what to post ahead of time helps to save employee time in the future when it matters most: at the launch of your newest marketing campaign. Additionally, social media sites like Twitter offer free analytics information about interactions with your social media posts.
This is helpful to indicate which posts are most successful and drive the greatest amount of traffic to your site. Especially with small businesses and startups, building communities on social media is a great way to start growing your audience and to generate leads for the future.
