Digital marketing has become the mainstay of businesses, both large and small, in recent times. Because of the relatively low investment required and the absence of entry barriers, online marketing has enabled a level playing field for all players. For the first time, marketers can design campaigns that are specifically targeted as per their choice and can be implemented quickly. The impact of the campaign can also be measured immediately and course corrections made. Most importantly, it is now far easier to measure the effectiveness of the marketing initiative and find out the ROI. However, despite the obvious advantages of online marketing, it is not as if it doesn’t have its challenges. If you are not able to predict the challenges and change quickly, it can have a disastrous impact on your business fortunes. Some significant issues that online marketing is likely to face in the future:
Creating Engaging and Valuable Content
Regardless of the online marketing channel, you are present on, among the most important challenges you will face is the need to keep on producing a continuous stream of content with which you can engage your target audience. The content must necessarily be valuable to your audience in some way or the other, which means that it has to be relevant to their needs, original and updated, informative not thin content, and entertaining. It is only when that the content is found to be useful by your target audience that it will attract them and generate the desired engagement in terms of likes and comments. The content production must be consistent so that you can follow a regular and consistent posting schedule. Depending on the nature of your business, you may even want to post several times a day, which means you need to produce and schedule a lot of content. Since entrepreneurs who are typically engrossed in business operations may not have the time to devote to content creation, it can be more viable for them to hire specialist content marketing agencies. However, to have better control, it may be worthwhile to have in-house personnel to create the content.
Content Distribution
Another big challenge that online marketers face is the distribution of the content. While the website is one obvious choice, the popularity of numerous social media channels makes it very hard to decide which ones to focus on and which to ignore. Even though you may be tempted to choose the social media platforms with the largest number of users, a better choice can be made by researching which platforms your target audience is more active on. It is also important to keep in mind that content in the same format and presentation cannot be used across multiple digital marketing channels. This is because not only do some networks have their specifications for the posts but also because the preference for content consumption across different social media channels also differs markedly. Regardless of the platforms, you distribute your content on, you need to promote your content in such a way that you build up a large base of loyal followers and can generate a high level of engagement by posting content that is relevant and interesting to your followers. Remember the main reasons why users will follow you are because they want to access insightful and value-added information that will resolve their concerns. Even though content distribution calls for a lot of effort and planning, you can make it easier by taking the help of automation tools for scheduling and posting your content as well as performing analytics so that you can also adjust your strategy simultaneously.
Blocking of Their-Party Cookies
With the use of new technology for blocking third-party cookies becoming more popular by users, experts predict that it will become tougher to track user browsing habits and serve target advertisements. Both content publishers and advertisers are predicted to be equally impacted by the cookie-blocking technology use by all major browsers, however, even though there are no simple solutions yet in sight, experts think that it will just be a matter of time till industry initiatives will kick in to resolve this problem. The main reason for the cookie-blocking initiatives coming into play is because of the increasing tendency of users to either ignore advertising or using ad-blockers. According to https://www.socialmediatoday.com, 30% of all internet users currently use ad-blockers. To be able to compete, digital marketers will need to spend on data-driven strategies for efficient integration of brands and products with the content. It is expected that this can be done at scale by employing artificial intelligence to scan through millions of potential opportunities to identify the best prospects for brand exposure and conversion and therefore beat the ad blocking.
Insensitive Messaging
The beauty of digital communication is that the lead time for ad or content publication is short, and businesses can turn on and off their messaging in an instant, unlike conventional media that had very long lead-up times to publication. In this context, ads by businesses that appear to be insensitive to the events happening in society can be very off-putting to customers. For example, it would hurt the sentiments of people to see an ad encouraging customers to have fun at a beach resort on the day after a tragic school shooting incident has taken place shocking the nation. Tone-deaf messaging at its worst can spark outrage among customers and damage the brand reputation that takes years of consistent effort to build. Marketers need not only be sensitive to the environment but also have contingency plans in place on how to react by pausing and pivoting ad releases after analyzing the impact of events around them.
Conclusion
With marketers having to deal with so much dynamism and uncertainty in their environments, there is a natural tendency to turn the marketing process into a series of tactics to counter market trends and happenings. As necessary as a metric-driven approach is for finding out the effectiveness of the marketing campaign, a short-term approach is likely to make marketers lose sight of the big picture and lose track of the real reason why customers like them and buy their products and services.
