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What are the Current Marketing Challenges?
What is Marketing?
The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines marketing as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society. Over the years, marketing has transformed from being print and TV media-dependent to relying more on the internet because of the reach and scope of the latter. The primary objective of marketing is to take a product or service, identify the ideal/target customers or consumers, and draw their attention towards the product/service.
The overall marketing strategy depends on consumers’ perception or understanding of the product, quality, durability, availability, and price point.
Current Marketing Challenges
Marketing challenges have always been there, and more so since 2020, when almost all companies had to relook at and reassess their marketing plans. However, the marketers know techniques and can overcome the challenges and generate positive results.
Let us look at some of the significant challenges in current marketing. They are as follows −
Hiring and Retaining the Right Resources
For any organisation, finding and retaining the right resources have always been a challenge. A marketing team and its strategies are only as good as the talented people they have on board. There is, and there will always be attrition when talented employees leave for better opportunities, and the void they create can pose a significant challenge for any team.
The ideal solution to this will be –
To create such a culture within the organisation that will make the employees feel valued and appreciated
The management issues must be addressed effectively and immediately.
There is also a need to incorporate various team-building activities that will make the employees enjoy their work. This will make each employee a potential brand ambassador for the organisation and help bring in fresh talents to the team.
Employee retention will help the team to benefit from its employees' expertise. To increase retention, invest in your employees with competitive salaries and benefits or increase the flexibility of your workplace.
Having Sufficient Budget
Insufficient funding is often a major delimiting factor for the marketing teams. This happens mostly when the organisation is facing losses or when there isn’t enough return on investment for the existing campaigns. But on the flip side, insufficient budgets will not let the marketing team utilise their strategies and as a result, the company’s growth will get shunted.
To sort this issue, the marketing teams must establish their value to the management by tracking and reporting on valuable performance metrics, such as −
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) − This shows how much money is spent to gain a new customer. It can also project how new customers are brought in at high rates while maintaining low costs.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) − Average revenue that customers generate for a company during their association.
Conversion Rate − Conversion rates establish the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by measuring how many customers make purchases after viewing advertisements.
Return on Investment (ROI) − The ROI ratio measures how much revenue a company generates for every rupee it spends on advertising.
Lead Generation − Lead generation is the process of gaining the interest of potential customers to increase future sales. It is a crucial part of the sales process of many companies. The primary objective for any organisation would be to convert these leads into potential customers. In industries where there is massive competition, this becomes a major challenge.
For example , if we look at the market for antivirus software there are tons of service providers, and a potential customer will show interest in multiple options before zeroing in on one.
To mitigate this issue, marketing teams will have to incorporate certain methods.
Monitor new developments.
Rehash the marketing strategy.
Compare their products to those of your competitors.
Identify what content appeals to the potential customers.
Track your conversion rate to understand what worked and what didn’t.
Ways to Solve the Current Marketing Challenges
Following are some of the solutions to solve current marketing challenges −
Finding the Right Tools
Marketing tools and tactics, along with customer expectations, change quickly. Thus, it is important for marketing professionals to identify and use the most effective marketing tools for attracting and retaining customers.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is one such marketing tool. This software can help the marketing team track its contacts, learn more about them and develop effective strategies for getting their business. Companies also consider using analytics software or marketing automation tools, which can automatically track important metrics related to online campaigns. Marketing automation tools can also implement automatic checkout and follow-up to help customers complete purchases.
Avoiding Risks
Marketing can involve occasional risks. This compels some marketing teams to be extremely reluctant to change the marketing strategies that they've used for years. This often prevents the teams from discovering effective marketing techniques and pushes them behind current trends. As a result, it potentially slows the company's growth.
Marketing teams should be open to taking risks, and one way would be to monitor developments in the industry to find out what works and which new trends to pursue.
The same can then be incorporated and implemented alongside the current strategy. Also, testing new tactics on a single campaign should be considered to ensure that the team is comfortable with them before applying the tactics to large sections of business operations.
Moving into New Markets
Every business’s primary objective is to grow. But it may bring in new challenges. For example, if a company that is known for its telecom products in India decides to expand into new markets, such as the Netherlands, it may lead to the marketing teams' existing strategies, goals, and structure becoming ineffective. Thus, when moving into new markets, especially international ones, companies must conduct extensive research and recruit local marketing professionals who can provide insights, offer recommendations, or share important linguistic abilities for expanding into their market. Online presence, including website and social media, should also be optimised for international markets.
Thus, when moving into new markets, especially international ones, companies must conduct extensive research and recruit local marketing professionals who can provide insights, offer recommendations, or share important linguistic abilities for expanding into their market. Online presence, including website and social media, should also be optimised for international markets.
Customer Retention
Customer retention is one of the most important goals for marketing teams. It is always more cost-effective than acquiring new customers or converting leads. If a company cannot retain its customers, it is possible that it will have to spend more on its advertisements.
Companies should attempt to invest in retention strategies to ensure the business reaches a sustainable profit margin. Offering discounts to existing customers or remaining in contact with them can make customers feel valued and may increase the association period.
Choosing Effective Tactic
It is important for companies to identify which campaigns and strategies are most effective, and which ones consume more resources than they produce. Focusing on effective campaigns can help lower costs and increase profitability.
One method to identify the most profitable tactics is by tracking the metrics on all the campaigns and advertising platforms. It is better to use automated tracking to make this process easier and more thorough. Once it is understood how the campaigns are performing, the inefficient platforms can be eliminated and more can be invested in the best strategies.
Facing Increased Competition
In industries that experience growth, marketing teams may face fierce competition from similar companies. With this challenge, some teams try producing content at a higher rate to increase their market share. While this may be effective, it's often more helpful to make the content more competitive by improving its quality.
Analysing different campaigns and focusing on the most effective ones will help. Then more resources can be put into further developing these strategies. Increasing the quality of output should be considered and the focus of the advertising should be on the unique aspects of the product or service. This can be effective in ousting competition, even for companies whose output is low.
Conclusion
Marketing is a vital process that most companies use to expand their business and have more customers on board. And every industry has its particularities and peculiarities. When the marketing team faces challenges, it directly impacts growth and makes it less profitable.
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