Admittedly, there’s a lot of reasons your marketing team is struggling to find sleep. Maybe they love to party, or are scared of the monster that lives under their bed. Perhaps, they have a newborn keeping them up at night, or have just got the latest issue of Fallout and are determined to play it through as fast as they can.
I am willing to bet that if your marketing team keeps coming into work with bags under their eyes and loaded up on coffee that the reason is not any of the ones I listed earlier, but in fact, probably work related. Today we are going to look at common marketing problems keeping your marketing team up at night, and what can be done to solve them.
Your marketers are running out of budget
One of the biggest challenges every year for your marketing team, is to prove their efforts are worthy of a budget increase. Normally, if your team can prove their ROI, the budget increase is no problem. However, what happens when the budget increases but the results stay the same? More and more budget does not equal results.
Solution: With the rise of digital marketing, budget has had less and less of a factor in being able to do marketing efficiently and affordably. Is your marketing team using inbound marketing to its full potential? They should be making use of organic (read: free) marketing channels like blogging, social media, SEO, and email marketing to get the job done.
Your marketers don’t know which metrics to report on
It’s easy for marketers to get overwhelmed when it comes to measuring their marketing efforts. They have too many tools, not the right tools, or simply don’t know which metrics matter. Yet, metrics are what ties their budget and results together, what makes the case for an increase in budget, and creates data from which you can create new campaigns and create new strategies, based on what’s been working and what hasn’t.
Solution: The first step to make sure your marketing team is clear on the goals that need to be accomplished. Not just any goals either, S.M.A.R.T. goals. Your team needs to be given precise numbers and deadlines so they can measure the results of their marketing efforts.
Once they know what needs to be accomplished, they should be given a tool to measure their efforts effectively. Look for an analytics tools that integrates data from all your marketing channels, so you can get a view of your overall performance and a detailed view of each of your marketing channels.
Your marketers are struggling to create new content
Content creation is an essential part of a strong marketing strategy. However, it is not an easy one to maintain. You must maintain a good publishing frequency for your blog, create content for your various audiences, for their various lifecycle stages, not to mention all the lead nurturing content required to get them through the different lifecycle stages.
Solution: Begin by doing an audit of your existing content. Learn where your focuses are, what has worked, and what the gaps you need to fill are. Once you have an idea of what you need to add, start planning ahead. The most powerful weapon at your disposal is time. Sit your team down and have them brainstorm topics for ebooks, blog posts, lead nurturing emails, etc. By planning ahead, and using an editorial calendar to organize and plan your efforts, your marketing team will not have to stress their content creation.
Your marketers are using too many different tools
So, your marketing team already has to handle various marketing channels like blogging, landing pages, social media, email, etc. Do they also have to use different tools for each one of these too? What about the tool(s) that they use for analytics? Your marketing team is trying to build a scalable marketing strategy on 10+ platforms, that more than likely do not integrate well with each other, making it difficult to see the overall picture of how the various channels support each other.
Solution: Having an all-in-one platform (we personally use Hubspot) for your marketing takes the hassle out of your marketing day-to-day routines. It helps to better organize their efforts, and gives them a solid backing when building a sustainable and scalable marketing strategy, by allowing you to develop a uniform process.
Do you want to learn more about inbound marketing and how you can use it to help your marketing strategy? Check out our complimentary ebook, The Executive Guide to Inbound Marketing.
*Photo courtesy of Reggaeman via Wikimedia
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