Being a marketer is pretty awesome these days. 

Email marketing automation platforms, AI-powered analytics tools, social marketing management software, powerful keyword explorers, you name it – and all this is what modern-day marketers have at their disposal. 

But, on the other hand, we can’t deny that this industry has become fiercely competitive and subtle nuances have the power to decide whether a campaign is success or failure. 

This leaves marketers caught up between their clients’ high expectations and all the perks that the latest technologies offer. 

Apart from that obvious issue, here’s what their other biggest pain points are these days. 

1. Lead Generation

63% of marketers say that generating leads and traffic is their biggest challenge. 

We can put this down to the lack of resources – the time, money, and skills necessary to attract traffic and generate high-quality leads that the sales department can use to close deals. 

This is a complex subject that needs a detailed discussion, but there are some crucial things that can be outlined and stressed as crucial for the success of lead generation:

• Creating a lot of useful and relevant content 
• Having a proper SEO strategy in place
• Using social media channels for generating leads
• Implementing marketing automation.

In other words, deploying different strategies and taking a comprehensive marketing approach is the only way to find the right people who’ll be interested in a particular product or service and nurture them into becoming paying customers. 

2. Communication With Other Departments 

It may sound silly that people whose job is to actually communicate the right brand message to their target audience could have communication issues with their co-workers, but that’s true. 

It’s particularly important to make sure that the marketing and sales teams are on the same page because it frequently happens that marketers send half-baked, unqualified or poorly-nourished leads to salespeople, and it all turns into a waste of time and energy without rendering any results. 

On the other hand, salespeople fail to communicate the feedback they get from prospects and help marketers see a bigger picture and create the content which will be relevant to their prospects. 

That’s why it’s of crucial importance to organize regular meetings between different departments to share the important information and keep everyone on the right track. Or even better, go a step further and implement smarketing, that is the process of aligning common goals of sales and marketing and focusing on them. 

3. Customer Engagement 

Even after generating leads and converting them into customers, marketers have to go out of their way in order to keep them engaged. Otherwise, they’ll be confronted with another challenge – customer churn. 

Nowadays customers expect that you know what they need and want, and this applies to marketing efforts too. That’s why combining new technologies such as AI-powered chatbots as well as some old-school methods such as quizzes and social media contests can do wonders for customer engagement and loyalty. 

Another important factor for establishing meaningful connections with your customers and engaging them is personalization. In other words, implementing smart recommendations, tailored to their previous behaviors and similar strategies that will serve only the relevant content and offers, is a must. 

4. Information Overload  

While technology advancement is highly beneficial for the marketing industry, as it is now possible to collect huge volumes of data, marketers usually have a problem when it comes to obtaining actionable insights from them. 

Moreover, unstructured information can only additionally confuse marketers and complicate their job. 

Luckily, the development of artificial intelligence and big data, and predictive analytics it’s now possible to crunch all numbers, process all the information, and get valuable insights into customers’ minds and their behavioral patterns. 

Naturally, this requires constant professional development and learning a new skill, which is why understanding the importance of growth and change, in general, is crucial for every marketer. 

5. Converting Prospects Into Buyers

This is one of the biggest and most important issues that marketers face. 

Although converting prospects into buyers isn’t only their responsibility – other departments are heavily involved in the process too, poor conversion rates can be significantly improved with the help of conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies. 

For example, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is pretty high and recent research from 2020 suggests that cart abandonment rate is on the rise from 59.80% in 2006 to 88.05% in 2020. Different factors that contribute to it include a long and complicated checkout process or the lack of payment options.  

In other words, marketers should analyze at what stage of the customer journey prospects leave and fix these issues. So, in the case of shopping cart abandonment, introducing a simple form, with several payment options and safety badges can get prospects to complete their purchase. 

Another way to address this problem is, for instance, by creating email campaigns which would remind the fickle prospects that their item is still in the shopping cart. A discount or free shipping can be a nice touch which will seal the deal and get them to return to the checkout and buy the product in question. 

All these challenges have a common denominator and that’s staying relevant in an ever-evolving industry and standing out from all the others who are also trying to compete for the same market share. 

Michael Deane is one of the editors of Qeedle, a small business magazine. When not blogging (or working), he can usually be spotted on the track, doing his laps, or with his nose deep in the latest John Grisham.