By JUNTAE DELANE for digitalbrandinginstitute.com

Today marketers face many challenges within the digital marketing space. From working with bootstrapped budgets to creating buy-in with senior managers, the modern-day marketer must find creative ways to balance resources.

To be successful, marketers must overcome challenges and juggle many responsibilities within their departments.

Here are the top 5 problems marketers face today and how they solve these problems within their organizations.

1. Providing ROI

If you’re a small business, local organization, or Fortune 500 company, your marketing efforts must be measured. At the end of the day, campaign tracking is critical. Not only is tracking a necessary business practice, but it also provides more weight when negotiating a marketing budget increase.

The best advice I can give marketers is to track everything. Even if it is not required. This is critical because one day you will be asked to provide more insight on a metric you previously weren’t expected to track. If you are able to provide this insight to your senior managers, you will increase credibility for yourself and your campaign.

Overall, your ROI is in Your Data. Data collection is critical when executing your digital marketing campaign. As marketers, we all must measure the value of every dollar spent.

If you are focused on data then you are focused on ROI.

2. Working with Vendors & Agencies

Teamwork makes the dream work. Working with agencies and vendors poses a significant challenge if you let it.

Some say marketing is both an art and science. This is true when working with agencies as well. For this reason, in particular, I value staff members with agency experience as they are more familiar with the inner workings and agency business objectives. This experience helps to mitigate potential challenges with the client-agency relationships.

Overall, balancing campaign managers, PR agencies, sales teams, and content creators is a significant challenge to any marketer.

Here are three things needed to make this process run smoothly:

1) Communicate.
2) Communicate.
3) Communicate.

Communication is vital when working with any team or project. Think back to any project or campaign you’ve executed in the past. Do you think more communication would have elevated some of the stress or missteps? Probably so.

3. Developing the Right Content

Knowing the type of content that resonates with your target audience before launching a marketing campaign is the goal.

Understanding how your audience consumes your content and infusing it within the various stages for your marketing cycle is important.

Naturally, the right content will help move your target audience through your marketing funnel.

Consider content as oil to your marketing engine. With oil it runs smoothly. Without oil, it stalls.

Ask yourself, what type of content is best to create brand awareness or conversion? Does your target audience enjoy whitepapers or videos? Do they prefer infographics or Slideshare presentations?

Overall, these answers can make or break your campaign. Marketers can meet this challenge by developing the right content from the start .

4. Budget Management

Budget management has become increasingly important to social media campaigns.

Gone are the days of cracking Facebook’s algorithm by using savvy marketing techniques to increase engagement. No more posting with photos or during a certain time of the day to increase engagement and reach.

Now you have to pay to play.

Determine which platforms and ad products best suit your product or service. For instance, if you’re looking to advertise on Facebook, decide if a boosted post orFacebook ad is more effective for meeting your marketing objectives. On YouTube, is a display ad or Trueview in-stream better for your business?

As new ad products become available for various emerging media, consider allocating a percentage of your budget to leveraging these products. You might find an effective ad solution.

5. Speed & Agility

Let’s face it, social media campaigns don’t last as long as traditional marketing campaigns.

Meaning, social trends are short-lived. One way to increase your marketing reach is to piggyback on current social trends such as memes, selfies, and social challenges. To do this, you must have the speed and agility to incorporate your brand in the latest social trend.

At the end of the day, marketers should face these problems head on and not hold off until they have more resources?

The power is in the process. As marketers we are faced with our daily obstacles which can derail campaigns–and even careers.

Conclusion

In closing, the modern marketer should focus on enhancing marketing ROI, vendor management, content development, budget management, and marketing agility in the upcoming year. It will certainly pay off.