There are some challenges that marketers tend to face in the course of their job. These challenges might vary across different marketing teams at different points in their marketing campaign. But the core of the problem has remained the same over the last few years. According to research , here are some of the greatest challenges that marketing teams face.
Top Challenges of virtual teams
1. Leads and traffic generation
This is one of the all-time biggest problems for marketers and marketing teams. Providing content for their website is one of the marketers’ jobs, but they need people to consume that content. And with the increasing number of brands online, the competition is only getting worse. There are also so many platforms and different ways for marketing teams to publish and promote their content, and this leads to another problem of knowing where to place their focus.
To tackle this issue, content creators have to ask themselves specific questions. Have they been creating the type of content that the audience wants? Is the content that you’re making of high quality or not? These are issues that you have to deal with and sort out first before any other thing.
2. Generating ROI for marketing campaigns
Everybody who invests their money into anything wants to see what it has yielded after a while. That’s the ROI (short for return on investment). As much as marketing teams want to have something to show for their effort and also find out if their strategies were effective or not, it is often hard for them to measure the ROI for their marketing activities. It is even harder if there is a communication gap between the team leaders of the marketing team and the sales team.
Communication between both sales and marketing teams is the best way to measure the ROI of your marketing activity. To get the right ROI, marketers have to dedicate enough resources and time to establish the link that is between the sales results and marketing activities.
3. Budget
It is one thing to have a winning marketing strategy and a different thing entirely to have the budget to fund the strategy. Securing enough marketing budget is a recurring problem for marketing teams. The problem, most times, can be strongly linked to an inability to generate the ROI for their past marketing campaigns. If you have nothing to show for the last few funds allocated to you, you will find it harder to secure enough funds for future campaigns.
To get more budget, marketers must prove that their marketing efforts are bringing in the right ROI. Marketers that are able to prove the returns on their marketing investment have a higher likelihood of getting higher budgets.
Also, the amount of success that a marketer has in their inbound marketing helps them in landing more budgets.
Using effective marketing strategies will always produce the right results. Marketers who are confident or able to inspire confidence in their marketing strategy have a 2X likelihood of getting a bigger budget for their marketing activities. However, inbound marketing is like a long-distance race, and the fact that you have a slow start doesn’t mean that you should stop or back off. That should be the more reason that you double up.
4. Identifying and choosing the best technologies
This challenge is one that continues to resurface yearly and has become consistent in recent times. In one of their publications, dissertation help reports that there are newer technologies emerging in different industries every year. This has led to many options and choices for marketing teams to choose from. So, they seek recommendations from friends, colleagues, industry analysts, and continue to get scattered feedback. It becomes even harder to identify the technology that is right for them.
5. Website management
At some point, this was the major problem, but it has become less of a problem in recent years. However, many marketing teams still struggle with it. For marketing teams, the performance of their website can make or mar their marketing campaigns. The website is essential to attract people and convert them (the goal of marketing campaigns). But common issues with website management can range from designing great web pages to writing content and optimizing it. Other problems include website speed, user experience, etc.
To counter this, you have to find out how well your website ranks against millions of other websites. This means that you have to analyze the most important elements of the website design and performance, including mobile-friendliness, website security, SEO, and average load time.
Most of the problems that you will have with your website management will involve the resources and skills that are not available to you. This is worse for small companies as they don’t have all the in-house talent that can help them cover design, optimization, back-end web management, and content.
6. Targeting international audience
There could not have been an effective marketing campaign without audience targeting. It is an integral part of marketing. But to be effective with audience targeting, the marketing team has to create a buyer persona. This will help them determine the type of people their marketing campaign should be focused on. This becomes a bigger problem when the company is trying to go international. The marketing teams have the responsibility of organizing and optimizing their website and website content for people in different countries.
When a business is entering into a new region. It is common that they have a change in their product offering. This is the most typical marketing tactic in this case. You have to remember that not all your website visitors will speak the same language and they also live in different parts of the world with different time zones. To make sure that your content is appealing enough to the different audiences. So, when you’re creating your content, you need to put the broader audience at the top of your mind. This will make you even more aware of many things such as seasonal references, monetary references, translation of measuring units, as well as allowing the translators the permissions and tools for customizing and adapting your content to be specific audience whenever it is necessary Also, make sure that your website is also optimized to receive these international visitors.
7. Team training
Training marketing teams (or new members) become more of a problem as the company continues to expand, and technology also continues to evolve. The problem varies from training them on new tools to use or concept to learn and adapt to ensuring that they can achieve their full potentials.
In order to understand your team dynamics and areas, focus on training, assess your team members, and learn their strengths, weaknesses, commitment levels, and level of expertise. This will give you an idea of areas you need training.
To get an idea of your team’s readiness, you should take the time to assess them individually based on their strengths and weaknesses in marketing, passion, and level of expertise. You also need to understand how individuals contribute to the success of your ROI. This will help you to not and differentiate those that need coaching from those that need to be recognized for their service.
8. Hiring the best talent
The scramble for the best marketing talent is a problem that will never go away. The best marketing teams want to continue to hire the best so that they can maintain their level. At the same time, other marketing teams are also looking for the next best thing to elevate their marketing teams and have more productive marketing activities. Finding and evaluating the skill needed in the best candidate also takes months, at least, and there is no guarantee.
9. Managing customer expectations
With the changing times, the expectations of customers have also continued to change. This makes it even more challenging to manage because what they wanted previously is not what they want now, and what they want now might not be wanted later. Marketing teams have to be adaptable as they’re at the mercy of the customers. You have to provide them with an interactive and personalized experience. The great idea is to input growing technologies such as Artificial Intelligence with your marketing strategies.
10. Overload of data
This is one problem that marketing teams face that is not talked about as often as the others. The marketing teams are exposed to a lot of information regarding the customers and what they want. But as they continue to gain more prospects through their marketing campaigns, they get more and more data, which creates a new problem for the marketing teams because they would not be able to handle or tackle that much data on their own.
11. Producing the right content
The goal of online marketing is to drive traffic to your website, and make conversions through your website content. There are different types of content and identifying the right content to push traffic to your website is a major problem that marketers have to deal with. When you consider that customer expectations are always changing, you realize how big a problem.
12. Communication
Like with any remote team, communication is extremely important for remote marketing teams. Even centralized marketing teams need to communicate regularly. Everyone needs to be on board with the marketing strategy. Apart from internal communication within the team, there also has to be an established two-way communication with other teams such as sales teams, creative design teams, and the website design teams. Marketing teams need to be able to get what they want. So, this communication with other teams is important to the success of their marketing activities.
Conclusion
The biggest opportunity for marketers to lie in thoroughly analyzing their marketing strategy to discover how well it is performing. Marketing teams are also able to discover the areas where they need to improve themselves in order to have more effective marketing campaigns.
