Every marketer deals with different challenges. Even though we typically discuss similar goals, a few teams are stuck on hiring best talent, while others are receiving trouble finding the right technology for their needs.
Whatever the case may be, almost always there is at least one area you are able to improve to turn your own marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.
But marketing is often fast-paced, so it can be difficult to identify which areas an individual develop to assist in stronger growth in 2021 and beyond. For that reason, it’s important to temporarily stop for a moment and reflect on the biggest difficulties marketers feel they will face this year.
Why? Because complications are much easier to deal with once you’ve correctly discovered them.
So… what’s occurring in 2021?
Below, let’s evaluation the current global advertising issues impacting the industry, according to marketing experts.
Biggest Marketing and advertising Challenges [New Data]
To start, I surveyed more than 120 marketers to gauge the biggest issues affecting the industry in general.
By far, “Generating visitors and leads” had been marked by almost half as the greatest challenge marketers are facing this year.
This challenge was followed by 21% who said “providing ROI for your marketing and advertising activities” was their particular biggest challenge.
“Delivering an account-based marketing strategy” (8%), “securing sufficient budget” (6%), plus “managing your website” (5%) were the other three notable difficulties marketers feel she or he is facing in 2021.
You need to note, a few other entrepreneurs marked “targeting articles for an international audience”, “training your team”, and “hiring top talent” as their top challenge… but these 3 challenges were proclaimed by less than 3% of the respondent swimming pool, so they’re much less statistically significant.
Let’s dive into these much more detail, along with specialist tips to combat these types of challenges, next.
1 ) Generating Traffic plus Leads
Producing enough traffic plus leads is the best global marketing challenge in 2021, based on the data mentioned above.
HubSpot’s new Condition of Marketing statement supports this — in fact , “Generating more leads” is the top priority of marketers within 2021.
Why It’s a Challenge
John Shelter, Head of Evangelism at Microsoft Marketing, believes that generating leads will be a particularly big challenge meant for marketers in 2021. He told me, “Getting quality traffic is not a challenge today, and likely won’t be tomorrow. There has been growth searching and content advertising in 2021. Brand new channels continue to surface area and show promise, too (TikTok or sound chat rooms anyone? ). ”
“Through the 2nd half of 2021 and beyond, the challenges will lie elsewhere – maintain and growing potential clients or sales, tracking and scaling, etc . ”
Shelter adds, “‘Sea change’ is the phrase that comes to mind for the state of digital marketing today. Change in the realm of personal privacy, identity, and adjustments to cookies. Modify in the form of lost data clarity (will cookie-based conversion tracking continue to work, GA4, access to search queries, and so forth ). And all of this sits within the framework of change in order to how and exactly where we work and economies in flux as the world continues to move through the outbreak. ”
Fortunately, privacy changes will not mean the end of generating leads — this simply means learning how to re-think strategy. As Lee told me, “To weather this storm associated with change, marketers have to be vigilant in checking and understanding industry-wide acceptance of privacy protocols and improvements to search, social, and display/native platforms (consumer-side and marketing/advertising-side). And last, but not least — lean in to the power of peer support and network for sharing guidelines and learning. ”
Additionally , marketers are struggling with making enough demand for content. And as the particular years progress and competition stiffens, this can only become truer. With so many options of platforms for marketers to publish their content and even more ways to promote it, it’s hard to understand where to focus your efforts.
What Can You will?
When it comes to developing content that creates enough traffic plus leads, marketers need to ask themselves two questions: Are you truly creating high-quality content — the type of articles people would pay for? And, do you know the type of articles your audience really wants?
For instance, when asked how they’d most like to learn about a product or service within 2021, 69% stated they’d prefer to view a short video more than a text-based article, infographic, or ebook. This means, if most of your product-related content is within ebook format, you may be missing out on the majority of customers who prefer video.
Additionally , the size of videos produced by companies is increasing. In fact , the number of videos within the 30-60 minute group grew 140% within 2021, compared to 2019 — suggesting that will long-form video content material is becoming a more popular option for companies.
To ensure if you’re creating content that resonates best together with your audience, you’ll want to refer to analytics often. Make use of effective tools to properly track the forms of content that performs best with your target audience to generate more network marketing leads in 2021.
Additionally , once you know you’re creating the kind of content your viewers wants, the focus changes to promoting it in a way that makes your own audience take notice.
More than ever before, individuals are being flooded along with content. Consumers don’t have to use a search engine to get answers. Instead, content articles fill their news feed or hype in their pocket via mobile notifications. Maintain, consider exploring alternate distribution methods — like social media or even podcasting — to improve brand awareness.
2 . Supplying the ROI of Your Marketing Activities
Measuring the RETURN ON INVESTMENT (return on investment) of your marketing activities has remained a highly regarded marketing challenge internationally year-over-year.
In fact , when asked exactly how confident marketers are when making budgeting decisions to invest in programs that influence revenue, approximately half (48%) stated they were only fairly confident.
This continues to be a vital method for marketers to understand the effectiveness of each particular advertising campaign or piece of content.
Plus, proving ROI often will go hand-in-hand with making an argument to increase budget: No ROI monitoring, no demonstrable RETURN ON INVESTMENT. No ROI, no budget.
Precisely why It’s a Challenge
Although return on investment is a crucial stat that will shows your promotions success or progress, tracking the RETURN ON INVESTMENT of every single marketing and advertising activity isn’t at all times easy, especially if you have no two-way communication between marketing activities and sales reports.
What Can You Do?
Providing ROI frequently comes down to using effective analytics measurement equipment. For instance, Beautiful. ai Director of Marketing Kim Giroux informed me, “Marketers are constantly challenged to illustrate the ROI of the efforts and 2021 is no exception. Proving ROI doesn’t always have to mean additional work or hard work though. In fact , particular technologies bake ROI into existing work processes. ”
Giroux adds, “Take presentation software, for instance. Savvy marketers nowadays can create and make use of pitch decks with built-in presentation analytics that offer real-time information — such as how much time was spent viewing individual slideshow. Armed with these insights, marketers can better gauge stakeholder interest, notify their strategies, plus adjust their advertisments. ”
Christina Mautz, CMO of Moz, believes calculating ROI comes down to defining the marketing procedure as a whole. She informed me, “My biggest challenge, and one all online marketers face in providing ROI, is the prospective client of meeting traditional KPIs in the contemporary workspace. ”
Mautz says, “Instead of leads plus trade show achievement, marketing wins are now largely digital: interesting prospects and generating more clicks, downloading, and page appointments. ”
CMO of Moz Christina Mautz says, “To better measure marketing and advertising progress, we have to redefine the marketing process, encouraging collaboration along with sales and achieving KPIs together. inch
“For example, statistics such as page visits per sale or rising higher in the search engine results web page (SERP) give marketing experts and SEOs real evidence as to how their work can be meeting their ROI. New buying designs and a customer-centric planet require a divergence from your old, but measuring ROI will look far different than it did before and some commanders may not understand how or even why. ”
When it comes to providing RETURN ON INVESTMENT, there’s a strong case to be made for saving time and sources to establishing hyperlinks between marketing activities and sales outcomes. This means using both marketing software (like HubSpot) and a CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT solution (like HubSpot’s free CRM), and tying them with each other to close the particular loop between your marketing and sales efforts having a service-level agreement (SLA). That way, you can straight see how many potential clients and customers are usually generated through your marketing activities.
3. Securing Enough Budget
How can you develop a winning marketing campaign without a budget? The truth is, that it is pretty hard. However even when you have a excellent, revenue-generating idea, you’ll still usually need to get your finances approved by a higher-up.
Particularly within the aftermath of the worldwide pandemic, some companies don’t have the way to increase marketing costs in 2021. Consequently, marketers are faced with the challenge of achieving high levels of growth with minimal monetary support.
Why It’s a Challenge
Securing more budget is a pressing challenge for marketing and advertising globally. And often, obtaining more budget is a lot easier said than done — especially for smaller organizations that do not get working with sizable or flexible marketing spend.
But the important to securing more income for your team might not be that complex. Which you can do.
So what can You Do?
The main element to unlocking budget lies in being able to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts. According to the report, organizations that can calculate ROI may receive higher budgets.
Again, success with inbound advertising also plays a huge role in driving higher budgets. Effective strategies obviously generate results and make a strong case with regard to increasing budget. Somebody, inbound marketing is really a long game. If you get off to a sluggish start, you should never back off — in fact , you might consider duplicity down.
To learn more about how to understand plus leverage marketing RETURN ON INVESTMENT, check out this simple guide.
4. Managing Your Website
In 2021, 64% of companies are purchasing website upgrades.
Although managing a website is consistently a challenge to marketing experts, it seems to be expanding less threatening. Within the data mentioned above, just 5% of marketers listed “managing your website” as a best challenge.
Why It’s Nevertheless a Challenge
Chances are, your website’s overall performance is high on your list of priorities — particularly since web site speed and performance plays a major part in your website’s SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking. It’s an asset that works around the clock in order to draw in visitors, convert them, and assist you to hit your objectives.
Issues with site management include a variety of different factors, from composing and optimizing the information to designing gorgeous webpages. Here are a few points marketers can do to cope with this challenge.
What Can You Do?
First, try HubSpot’s free website grader to determine how your website stacks up on essential metrics including SEO, mobile, and protection performance — and how you can improve this.
If your primary challenge along with managing a website has to do with the skills and resources you have available, you aren’t alone. This is especially true for small companies who don’t have all the talent in-house required to cover articles, optimization, design, plus back-end website management.
One alternative? Hire freelancers and agency partners. To get freelancers, we suggest:
- Tapping into your individual and professional system by posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks with a description of what you would like.
- Browsing freelance article writers and designers based on their portfolios plus areas of interest. Intended for writers, check out Zerys and Contently. Designed for designers, check out Behance & Elance.
- Browsing HubSpot’s Solutions Marketplace, which listings a wide variety of designers from partner companies plus agencies we’ve considered credible.
General, you can make website administration easier on your team by hosting your site on a platform that will integrates all your marketing and advertising channels like HubSpot’s COS.
Lastly, for the projects you want to keep in-house, this is a list of ebooks plus guides that might be useful to your team:
- Run a Website Grader report
- E-book: Website Redesign Tutorial
- Ebook: seventy seven Brilliant Homepage Style Examples
- E-book: How to Design and Optimize Landing Webpages
- Blog: 27 Ways to Drive Visitors Your Website
- E-book: The Ultimate Workbook designed for Redesigning Your Website
- Ebook: The Marketer’s Guide to Mobile
5. Targeting Content for an International Viewers
Targeting is a key component of all of the aspects of marketing.
With 65% associated with marketers currently marketing and advertising internationally, and at least one-third of online marketers planning to initiate an international strategy in 2021, it’s important to have an global strategy.
To be more effective at concentrating on, one of the first things any marketer needs perform is identify their buyer personas to determine to whom they must be marketing.
Precisely why It’s a Challenge
If you’re expanding internationally, it can be a big challenge not only to figure out how one can market to an international audience, but also how to to organize and optimize your site for different nations.
Here are a few other top challenges whenever marketing internationally:
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What Can You need to do?
Download our free ebook, The Global Marketing Playbook. There are some really helpful tips in there that’ll help give you some direction on global marketing, which includes how to identify your own top three development markets, how to discover local trends, and tips on choosing the best localization providers.
In addition , when marketing to some new region, the most common tactic marketers make use of is to shift their particular product offering.
Remember, your website visitors might speak various different languages and live in totally different period zones.
For making your content appealing to a wide audience, you’ll need to maintain your global visitors top-of-mind when creating all your content. This means being aware of periodic references, translating units of measure and monetary references, plus giving translators the tools and permissions in order to customize and adapt content for a particular audience when they have to.
When in doubt, solve for local or cultural issues by hiring regionally. With a newly cross workforce, physical area is no longer a limit to who you can hire.
Finally, be sure you will absolutely optimizing your website designed for international visitors, as well. For more SEO-related ideas and resources on global marketing enlargement, take a look at How SEO is Different Around the World, Based on HubSpot Content Strategists.
6. Coaching Your Team
As companies scale and technologies continue to evolve, training your own team will become a greater challenge for internet marketers.
Why It’s a Challenge
Be it training them to the concepts and equipment they’ll be using each day or making sure most are achieving their complete potential, the struggle is real over the board.
In order to combat this, I can share some guidelines I’ve used during my trainings to make sure the particular concepts and device tips stick and also have a lasting impact on your team and your marketing.
What Can You Do?
To get an overall idea of exactly where your team stands, take a few minutes in order to assess each of your own team members’ advertising strengths and weaknesses, levels of expertise, and passion/commitment for your company.
Then, objectively rate the priority (or degree of importance) of their expertise and their share to bottom line goals (ROI) to date. Here is a simple assessment tool from Lean Labs to help you evaluate your team so you can find out who needs identification and who needs coaching.
Additionally you might consider requiring your team members in order to rack up some online marketing certification. HubSpot Academy, for example , offers accreditations, documentation, and coaching programs to help people master the basics associated with inbound marketing. Search engines also offers training and certifications on analytics with their online Analytics Academy.
What about new hire exercising, specifically? We suggest creating a training policy for new team members. Here at HubSpot, each brand new marketer is provided a document to lay out specific goals and help new hires demonstrate their particular effectiveness. To create your personal 30, 60, or even 90 day plan for new hires, check out The 30-60-90 Time Plan: Your Manual for Mastering a brand new Job [Template + Example].
7. Hiring Top Talent
Hiring best talent is another problem marketers commonly report experiencing.
Exactly why It’s a Challenge
Many companies are shifting more resources to inbound marketing, which means higher and increased demand for top marketing and advertising talent. But supply simply isn’t maintaining. From sourcing the best candidates to analyzing for the right abilities, finding the perfect person could take weeks… or more.
What’s more, the type of marketing talent companies are looking for is usually changing, too. According to a 2020 review from LinkedIn, companies are seeking marketers along with soft creative ability sets as well as difficult technical skills. As well as the quick rate from which the demand for the jobs are increasing has caused a marketing skills gap, “making it difficult to get candidates with the technical, creative, and business proficiencies needed to succeed in digital marketing. ”
What Can You will?
Stefanie Grieser, co-founder of Shine Bootcamp, a professional speaker accelerator for women, understands the challenge of employing top talent.
She told me, “When I talk to high-growth companies or marketing agencies (and the marketers running those teams), I’ve found that hiring not only best talent, but diverse top talent is extremely challenging. Actually I was just working with a conversation with an agency owner who hires SEO and paid marketers, and he told me, ‘Hiring is still the biggest challenge we encounter. ‘”
In 2021, hiring talent can be incredibly difficult — particularly a lot more companies become aggressive with 4-day work weeks, transparent salaries on job explanations, and the adoption associated with remote work, which enables companies to hire anywhere.
Fortunately, Grieser provided me with a few tips for employers to stand out from the particular crowd. She informed me, “My suggestion the following is for marketers to invest heavily in their company brand for the extensive. Just like you need to marketplace your product, you also need to dedicate sources, time and energy into advertising your company as an company. ”
Grieser adds, “I would suggest Diversity Technology Co, Tech Women, and Girlboss as go-to resources to publish jobs. These agencies are run simply by incredible individuals who actually care about diversity, equity, inclusion and intersectionality. I’m also seeing niche communities plus job boards pop up. For marketers particularly, I would post your own open roles here: Dave Gerhardt Marketing and advertising Group, Hey Marketing experts, and Superpath (which is focused on content material marketers specifically). inch
Although it might seem random to discuss employer branding in a post about marketing and advertising challenges, it isn’t — since it’s often the particular marketing team that cultivates a strong company brand.
As Grieser points out, “Airbnb comes with an Engineering and Data Science blog, Intercom system has an Instagram focused on their design team, and Dooly articles short, LinkedIn blogposts (see an example here) interviewing their enjoyable team with a few fun hashtags #doolydreamteam and #meetadooligan. ”
“Guess which leads this initiative? The marketing team. Think about how you as well as your team can display your work and your team’s work. I won’t try to assume that employer brand name falls solely inside your court, but being a marketer, you have organic skills that will lend themselves to marketing the company as whole. ”
LinkedIn data from 2020 shows that 87% associated with active and unaggressive job candidates will consider new work opportunities. Additionally , the main reason candidates may consider or take a job is career growth. This means that job listings and a corporation culture that offers workers a plan for growth will see the most curiosity from talent.
8. Delivering an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a new tendency, which is a growth technique in which marketing and sales collaborate to create a customized buying experience for an identified set of accounts.
However , interestingly, the most common challenge with ABM is providing a personalized experience.
Why That is a Challenge
Presently, there isn’t a lot of software that’s focused on account-based marketing. Many companies that are implementing ABM strategies are using guide methods, which means a few accounts are getting dropped in the cracks.
However , marketers highly agree that personalized content (56%) and advanced data administration (43%) are keys to ABM’s success.
What Can You Do?
To deliver a more customized experience, you should use an application that helps you combine your sales and marketing information.
For example , HubSpot’s ABM software help bring together your marketing and product sales teams with collaborative, intuitive ABM tools that create seamless purchasing experiences for your highest-value accounts.
This particular software can enable collaboration among groups and personalize content.
Additionally , HubSpot’s software has account-level targeting added to the LinkedIn Ads integration, giving you the ability to target companies by focus on account status or tier, and contacts or subsets of contacts at target accounts.
The account overview sidebar, the ABM playbook for sales reps, and a native incorporation to link your own HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator balances, help further deepen your relationships with people over time, helping build more authentic connections with stakeholders inside each account.
Does your company face any of these marketing problems?
A thorough evaluation of your marketing strategy as well as current performance can help you discover where your own biggest marketing possibility lies. This will allow you to focus on improving the areas that need the most attention, so you can start producing your marketing far more effective.
In case you are faced with a challenge and want ideas means best tackle it, you can always consider getting some help by one of the various types of marketing coaching that are available.
Editor’s Note: This awesome article was originally published in November 2012 and has been up-to-date for freshness and comprehensiveness.