As the marketing field continues to change and develop, keeping up with the times can be a difficult task. Marketing managers are faced with the challenge of managing and organizing their marketing teams and strategies to perform successfully on every available marketing front — and there are a lot.
With so many facets to think about and so many steps involved, there is an ever-increasing number of areas in which things begin to crumble and marketing strategies go from potential success to obvious failure.
Below are 5 Common Problems that Marketing Managers Face, along with 5 solutions to combat these nagging issues.
Before you dig into this blog, you might be looking for some of this information.
- How to Hire a Marketing Agency
- A guide to building a marketing plan
- How to create a marketing budget
- A brand building system everyone can use
- Building buyer personas through customer segmentation
- Sales funnel basics to increase conversion
- B2B Sales and Marketing Playbook
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Problem 1: Inexperience or Understaffed
As the marketing field grows and becomes more complex, there is more to know, more to do, and more to track.
While you may start out with what looks like the perfect marketing team, holes can begin to appear where there is a lack of knowledge or capability. This results in sub-par marketing strategies and poor performance. Thoroughly consider the possibility that your team may need to see some changes before valuable marketing results can start to appear.
Fixing the Experience Gap
Take a close look at your current team and see what improvements can be made. A general lack of understanding regarding inbound marketing practices might be indicative of a need to partner with an inbound marketing agency.
There are specialized teams that partner with marketing managers to create content, track results, and generate traffic, leads, and sales, such as our team here at Fannit.
Problem 2: New Marketing Trends
As new trends appear on the market, it can be difficult for marketing managers to keep track of the changes and implement them in their own strategies. While embracing these changes would be to their benefit, keeping up with all things new regarding social media, web design, user interface, and much more can be quite overwhelming.
Staying Ahead of Inbound Marketing Trends
Inbound marketing agencies exist to do the research and detailed work involved in deciding which new inbound marketing trends to embrace, as well as how to go about implementing a complete inbound marketing strategy into business’ marketing.
The process of figuring out which target audience matches the social media and target audience you should focus on can be left in an inbound marketing agency’s hands. They will produce the information for you, saving you a whole lot of energy and time.
Problem 3: Interpreting Marketing Report Data
Some marketing managers lack the knowledge necessary to interpret marketing report data. Without this information, they are not able to know which marketing strategies to pursue.
This can decrease their ROI as they continue to utilize too many strategies, not knowing which one is performing best, or can drastically damage their campaign if they are not using the correct strategies to their full potential.
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Use Marketing Data to Improve Campaigns
An inbound marketing agency’s role is to help interpret and translate the data received back from marketing happenings for marketing managers.
Utilizing analytic software, they are able to configure reports and provide advice to managers on how to modify their marketing strategies to get the best results.
Problem 4: Lack of Communication
While there is a swirl of things going on (blogs are posted, websites are updated and the marketing strategy progresses) it is important that all results and happenings are communicated to the rest of the team. Marketing managers that do not have a working system for collecting, organizing, interpreting, and communicating their campaign data to the rest of the team are ill-equipped to analyze and improve their marketing strategy.
In addition to this, poorly collected data or a lack of data can cause poor and uncomfortable communication between marketing managers and their superiors.
Marketing Managers Focus on Three Areas of Strategy
When searching for better communication between team members, many have found that the best results have been achieved by looking at 3 specific areas of a marketing strategy.
- First, consider how your marketing strategy is driving traffic and if it is working.
- Second, see how well your strategy is converting that traffic into leads.
- Finally, analyze how effective your sales funnel is at turning leads into customers and generating sales revenue.
To have better communication with management, work to gather and translate site data, implement call tracking software, report on successful content, and provide reports on marketing results.
Don’t be afraid to show where problems are most likely occurring, and build a strategy to solve those problems.
Problem 5: Closing the Sales Loop
Putting in the effort without seeing results can be one of the most discouraging things a marketing team will experience. You could have laid out a strategy that seems to be working well, and your traffic and the lead count has gone up, but your customer count will not budge. Here are two possible areas where things are slipping through.
Disconnect in Handing Leads to Sales Team
It could be that your marketing team and sales team are not quite in sync.
Your sales team may not have access to the leads your marketing team is creating, or they may not have an understanding as to how to best approach the leads they are getting.
Inadequate Use of CRM
It may be that there is no system in place for approaching potential customers, or the system that your sales team has for contacting and encouraging leads isn’t working.
Sync with Sales Regularly
Some investigation into these possibilities can help managers know whether to increase more communication between the teams, seek advice on approaching leads, or restructure their entire sales strategy.
This will help you to close the sales loop and enjoy the increased revenue you have been working for.
Need Assistance Addressing Your Marketing Problems? Fannit Is Here to Help
If you would like the assistance of an inbound marketing agency to help your business embrace modern-day marketing strategies and reach its greatest marketing potential, our team at Fannit would be excited to help you reach your marketing goals.
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