Disruptions, data and challenges of digital marketing
In today’s age of multiple screens and Big Data, one field has risen to power. No prizes for guessing the answer – it’s Digital Marketing. Today, digital marketing interacts with many business aspects – bringing in gains from both ends of the sales funnel and hence increasing business value.
But new technologies and changing tactics have different uses and effects which create new challenges for digital marketing teams and sales strategists. Let’s look at some common digital marketing challenges and some ways to resolve them.
· Personalisation Strategies – Today, the tools for effective personalisation marketing are changing and getting updated all the time. Due to constant change, many businesses struggle to keep up with using personalisation strategies. Challenges that digital marketers face include issues to define scope, create frameworks geared towards decisions and understanding variations in content. Some ways to overcome these challenges include using multi-source data to make customer segments, identifying next best techniques and implementing these at several moments of digital customer journey. Creating content to match data-proven needs of customers and using AI and machine learning so that decision-making is automated also helps to improve personalisation strategies.
· Data strategy – Despite several years of data mining, organisations are floundering and a single view of the customer is still beyond reach. But the best marketing businesses have a data strategy in place with clear goals and insight gathering techniques and have integrated platforms to store and analyse such consumer insights.
· Proper team and structures – Digital marketers of today have to be adaptable to disruptions in the digital spaces and always have to consider new ideas. Digital companies can improve their teams structure to adapt to such challenges. Having integrated departments and up-skilling team members to equip them with experience design, analytics, search and content strategy goes a long way.
· Impact and its measurement – Although there have been improvements in how marketing’s return of investment are demonstrated, even the best of organisations and the best advertising agencies struggle to clearly show evidence of their impact. That’s because it requires proper understanding of new use cases in digital marketing and ways such use cases create demand and revenue for digital marketing. Showing returns also requires marketing platforms that can measure exact metrics and initiatives to communicate impact.
· Budgeting – You should plan your digital marketing budget effectively because doing so allows you to use more of advanced systems such as automation and AI which help to focus on marketing tactics such as personalisation, growth strategies and segmentation. Effective budgeting also allows you to allocate resources according to priorities. Lastly, effective budgeting also helps re-balance your expenses so you can focus on new prospects.
· Teaming up with sales – Effective digital marketing and use of technology helps the sales teams to not only to meet their goals but also effectively manage human relationships. This collaboration means that efforts to identify and convert new consumers are always ongoing and sales teams are more effective due to effective customer targeting, data and tools.
· Relevance – In today’s digital world, staying relevant is difficult which is why consistency in searching for new ideas in different spaces for content strategy, experience and messaging is the way forward. Organisations should try new ways to find customer behaviour and needs, explore new ideas to either defend or engage dominant entities and evaluate which initiatives should be discontinues to free up resources.
