Making your way through the ever-changing field of digital marketing can be a challenge to most marketers and small business owners. Digital marketing is constantly evolving, and new and emerging trends and technologies make developing strategies, gathering results, and overcoming challenges more and more difficult.
Digital marketing roadblocks are something that you are bound to come across as you work on marketing your small business and growing your reach. Thankfully, you aren’t alone in dealing with these challenges. This list of helpful tips will support you in overcoming your digital marketing roadblocks and coming out the other side with confidence and strength.
Introduction to Digital Marketing Challenges
Most of the roadblocks of digital marketing come from the fact that it is a constantly growing and evolving field. The same tactics that worked five years ago, two years ago, and even six months ago may not be applicable to situations you face today. Keeping on top of that information can be challenging, even for experienced digital marketers.
Another common way that roadblocks arise is due to the breadth of activity that falls under the “digital marketing” umbrella. Everything from social media to SEO to content creation to emailing are all considered digital marketing activities. Finding the right channels and knowing how much time and money to spend on them can also throw business owners into a loop.
While the challenges of digital marketing can seem overwhelming, it’s important to face them head-on and make sure that you are adjusting and growing your online presence. If you don’t face your digital marketing roadblocks, they only become bigger and cause you to fall even further behind your competitors. When you decide to take charge and overcome your challenges, that’s when you’re really able to build a strong online presence for your business.
Identifying Your Digital Marketing Goals
Before we begin looking into the challenges, we first need to talk about goals. Your digital marketing goals are the specific targets you want to achieve. It could be a certain amount of revenue, new customers, or even smaller goals like growing your social media following and email list. No matter what the goal is, having them defined, clear, and measurable improves your digital marketing efforts.
When you have well-defined goals, you have more motivation to overcome your digital marketing roadblocks. Because you have something to strive for, you’ll recognize when a problem arises that slows your progress to the goal so you know what exact challenges you need to overcome.
Navigating Digital Marketing Roadblocks
Now that you know how to set up your program for success, we can focus on key areas that present roadblocks to digital marketers and give you tips and tricks on how to navigate through them.
Technical Challenges
The first roadblock is technical challenges. That might include things like website issues, slow loading times on your pages, and delayed mobile responsiveness on your apps or mobile website. These challenges are not only difficult for you, but they also present problems to your customers that can drive them away.
In order to overcome technical issues, you should put time and effort into optimizing your website. The better performing your website is, the better the user experience is for your customers. Hosting your website on a high-quality platform, regularly doing maintenance checks and audits, and listening to user feedback to find problem areas are great ways to help overcome technical roadblocks.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Challenges
The next challenge comes in the form of search engine optimization, or SEO. This refers to your ranking on search engine results pages. You might come across challenges with ranking, visibility, and algorithm updates that throw your previous work out of position.
To address these issues, you should have a dedicated SEO strategy in place. You can optimize regular areas of SEO, like both your on-page and off-page tactics. Things like properly formatted pages, meta titles and descriptions, and backlinks can all help improve your search rankings.
Content Creation and Quality
Creating content regularly is an important part of a successful digital marketing program. But making sure that your content is of a high quality and is made fast enough is another story. Trying to produce high levels of quality content strains resources, whether you do it in-house or outsource to another company.
The key is to make sure that the content you create is engaging and valuable, and that it resonates with your audience. Readers will appreciate content at a lower frequency if it has useful and educational information. Rather than going to quantity, use quality as your checkmark for great content and spend your resources on higher quality content that is meaningful to your audience.
Social Media Engagement Hurdles
Social media is another major part of digital marketing. Even posting regular content and being active on multiple platforms doesn’t mean you’ll have an engaged audience. Getting more followers and getting them to interact with your account is a roadblock that many small business owners face, and overcoming declining organic reach is a common obstacle.
A good tip to start with is to think about the algorithm of the platform you are using. What type of content tends to get promoted? When are the most active hours for users on the platform? And what style of content is preferred, be it image, video, or text? Using the algorithm to your advantage can help you overcome declining engagement rates on all social media platforms.
Paid Advertising Obstacles
Paid ads are another part of digital marketing that many small business owners find challenging. Things like budget constraints and increased competition for keywords can make getting discovered online difficult. After all, you don’t have the resources that a large company has to spend on paid advertising campaigns.
In order to overcome this roadblock, you need to get creative. Think about your audience. What can you do to narrow it down and be as specific as possible in your targets? You can also rethink your bidding strategy. Rather than going for highly competitive keywords, you can do research to find long tail keywords that are less competitive and still relevant to your niche. Consider negative keywords as well.
Measuring ROI and Analytics Challenges
Another common roadblock comes in the form of analytics. Measuring the return on investment, or ROI, of your campaigns has become increasingly difficult. With so many different channels and platforms in play within a single campaign, it can be hard to pull metrics from these different sources into one, cohesive report on your campaign.
In order to get a good picture of the success of your campaigns, you need the help of analytics tools. Marketing and analytics platforms will help interpret and pull metrics from your different touchpoints and compile that information into a single report, which you can use to improve decision-making and guide your business in a better direction.
Adapting to Evolving Technologies
Technology is constantly changing, in marketing and in other areas of digital culture. Trying to stay up to date with rapidly evolving digital technologies is a headache for business owners of any size.
Overcoming this roadblock relies on you being willing to adapt to new tools and platforms in order to stay competitive. Don’t be afraid to explore new technologies and experiment with other platforms if they can be helpful to your business. By being open-minded and willing to try new things, you can adapt to different technology much easier.
Building a Consistent Brand Identity
With so many platforms and channels for digital marketing, it can be challenging for small business owners to maintain a consistent brand identity. You want to be recognizable no matter where someone finds you online, but you also need to be unique enough for each platform’s algorithm.
The key to overcoming this obstacle is to focus on your message, your visuals, and your values. These three components make up your brand identity, and if you can keep consistency in these elements, you have more room to play around with things like tone and content types,
Overcoming Resistance to Change
The final, and sometimes most challenging, roadblock to overcome is resistance to change. Oftentimes digital marketers find themselves at odds with stakeholders and executives within an organization. Getting them on board with a new strategy can be like pulling teeth.
In order to change minds and overcome resistance, you need to clearly communicate the benefits of change to key individuals. Explain how the right digital program can improve business tactics and, ultimately, the bottom line.
Leveraging Surefire Local’s Platform to Overcome Challenges
At Surefire Local, we understand the digital marketing roadblocks that you face. That’s why we developed our platform to address these challenges and more. Our tools help you streamline efforts and achieve better results. With Surefire Local, you can conduct all of your marketing activities out of one platform, without trying to work disparately across multiple channels. You can also access it at any time, from anywhere, making marketing on the go easy and seamless.
To learn more, request a demo of the Surefire Local platform today and discover how we help you overcome all your digital marketing roadblocks.