Every industry has its own problems and constraints.
In this post, I’ll be tackling the most common problems in digital marketing that I often hear from business owners and other marketers.
While these two terms have different meanings, a lot of people use the two interchangeably.
They are either confused about their meanings or don’t know which is a problem and which is a constraint. So, let’s clarify that in this post.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
Common Problems in Digital Marketing
Remember, problems are issues or situations where you have control of. What that means is you can do something about it.
Below are the common problems in digital marketing:
1. Not enough traffic
The first problem marketers encounter is the issue of traffic. This is usually phrased in some form like this:
I don’t have enough visitors to my website.
Traffic is the easiest problem to solve. The answer is content marketing.
A simple definition of content marketing is it’s a marketing tactic where you do two things:
This is a problem and not a constraint because by now, it’s a proven tactic that blogging and sharing them grow your traffic.
While you cannot “control” how whether people actually visit your site, by making yourself discoverable, you greatly increase your chances of getting more traffic.
Take a look at this case study. After doing 2 small changes, organic traffic grew by 76%.
Just because you have a website, it doesn’t mean people will find you. You have to make them discover you through content creation and distribution.
And when you start building traffic on your website, this brings us to the next problem…
2. Not enough leads
For marketers who are over the hump of vanity metrics, insufficient leads are the next thing they worry about.
Before diving deeper, let’s define a lead first.
At the most basic level, a lead is someone whose contact information is known to your organization.
The most effective way to generate leads today is to create marketing offers that people are willing to give up their contact information.
These marketing offers, often called lead magnets, can be any type of content that provides enough value.
These are PDF downloads like case studies and white papers, webinars, etc.
Newsletter subscriptions are not enough.
How this works is you have several landing pages set up that “gates” your offer. Once people fill-up the form on the landing page, they are redirected to a thank you page where they can access the offer and/or explain what to expect next.
If you don’t have this setup, don’t expect leads to come pouring in.
A proper lead generation strategy is essential.
3. Not enough customers
So, you finally solved your problems with traffic and leads. Now, we can tackle the part where most organizations focus on —getting more customers.
It is important to note that we started with increasing your visits and then your leads. You can’t expect to generate revenue from customers immediately without solving the first two stages — visits and leads. This is the marketing and sales funnel in action.
The most effective way to get new customers without being too pushy is through lead nurturing.
Without going too much into detail, what that means is you need to have a strategy to group different people into segments according to (1) similar behaviors and/or problems, and (2) stage in the buying cycle.
For example, you’re selling power banks / portable batteries. Using the first criterion, you can group people into reasons they use the power banks.
- For travel
- For that extra juice while doing my daily activities
- My phone battery’s dead and I need to constantly charge
Easily, these groups have different needs, therefore, generic messages won’t work for all of them.
Then, using the buying cycle, they could either be at one of the following stages :
- Awareness – figuring out if they really need a power back
- Consideration – looking for the best power banks and which ones are perfect for their devices
- Decision – already narrowed down the list. Currently looking at reviews, etc.
Again, using a generic message across the entire buying cycle doesn’t work.
The effective way to get these people to buy from you is to create targeted content that addresses their specific needs.
So, What Are You Going to Do Now
The only way to effectively solve these common problems in digital marketing is to approach is phase-by-phase.
Start by increasing your visits by creating content and distributing it.
Once the traffic is there, you now figure out what’s the best way to convert them into leads.
Finally, implement a lead nurturing strategy that will eventually turn these leads into paying customers.
Not enough traffic, leads, and customers are not constraints. They are problems that you can solve and address. Yes, it’s hard. But again, there’s something you can do about it.
