Introduction
Online marketing is something that can benefit your business in a variety of ways, but there are always going to be challenges that arise. If you're not aware of some of these common online marketing challenges, you might find your online marketing strategy falling short. With this in mind, today we're going to look at the five biggest online marketing challenges and how to overcome them.
There are many marketing challenges today — from new social platforms and alternative channels to mobile marketing and measuring ROI. In this post, I'll be outlining the five biggest online marketing challenges for eCommerce entrepreneurs and providing tips for overcoming them.
Lack of Strategic Planning
One of the biggest challenges for small businesses is that they're often not prepared to handle the online marketing needs of their customers. They may have a website or an online presence, but it's not always clear what needs to be done to keep that content fresh and relevant.
The best way to overcome this challenge is to engage in strategic planning, which involves identifying your customers' needs and wants, as well as your own goals and objectives.
You then need to create a plan for reaching those goals, which should include everything from creating new content for your website or blog to developing new strategies for your social media accounts.
You need to know exactly what your business needs from online marketing, and how it will benefit you in the long run.
You need to know which channels are most effective for your company and how you can use them to get the most value for your money.
The first step of any successful online marketing campaign is identifying your target audience and then building a strategy that targets their needs.
Unclear Goals and Objectives
The first challenge is to create clear goals and objectives. If you want to increase your online presence, you must define what you want to achieve. Make a list of all the things that you would like your company's website or blog to do for customers.
The best way to start is by considering what the customer wants from your product or service. Then, make a list of the benefits that customers will get if they choose your business over competitors.
Once you have defined your goals, write them down in front of you so that it's easy for everyone involved in the project to see what they are striving for.
The first challenge is to clearly define your business goals and objectives.
You can't truly measure success if you don't know what you're trying to achieve.
The second challenge is to identify the key metrics that will help you measure and monitor your progress.
Messy Metrics
Metrics are the statistics that show how your business is doing. They can be difficult to understand, but they're essential for making smart decisions about your marketing strategy. Most companies have a mix of static and dynamic metrics that tracks things like traffic, sales, and leads.
As a marketer, you want to track all of those metrics across all channels and tools so you can make sure you're always on top of what's working and what isn't. You also want to be able to see how these numbers compare over time, so you know which channels are bringing in more customers or generating more revenue than others.
The problem is that many metrics are difficult to interpret and often come with hidden costs attached — like paying for third-party services you don't need or giving away data that could be used by other companies down the road.
Metrics are the best way to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts. But it's not easy to get a clear picture of what works best for your business.
Metrics are often messy, incomplete, and inconsistent. It's easy to misinterpret what's happening with your website or blog, especially when there are multiple metrics tracking different aspects of your site traffic.
For example, you may see a spike in search engine traffic but no corresponding increase in social media activity. Or you may notice a big jump in social sharing numbers but not much else happening on the web.
Conclusion
In this article, we looked at five of the most prominent online marketing challenges facing digital marketers and businesses today, as well as three of the most effective ways to overcome them.
These tactics and strategies can be applied to any online business from a small online shop all the way up to multi-million dollar retail sites.
This is the first post in our ongoing challenge series, and it lays out five marketing challenges that every designer faces. We have included actionable takeaways at the end of each post, and we now repeat those takeaways here for you.