Here Are The Challenges Your Marketing Department is Facing Right Now

It's no secret that marketing has changed. Millennials and digital-savvy members of other generations have had an undeniable impact on the way marketers approach campaigns, interact with customers and record customer preferences.

To deal with today's complex market demands, marketers must be more than just creative; they must be tech and data-savvy as well. Marketers must be able to measure their success and use their budgets to work with tech solutions that render them the highest ROI.

If your company wants to be a serious competitor, here are six roadblocks that your marketing department must be able to circumnavigate:

1. Keeping Pace With Technology

Today, marketers must be more than just creative; they must be tech savvy too. Keeping up with the changes in tech in automation, mobile and social platforms can be very challenging for marketers as they deal with meeting the demands of the day to day activities of their job.

Fall behind on tech and a marketer can quickly lose ground to more tech-savvy competitors. The integration of technology and marketing is going full-force in 2016.

In order to keep pace, marketers need to constantly be learning about new tech and how it is affecting the marketplace. In addition to reading marketing content, I recommend finding some tech bloggers to follow. 

2. Lack of Time

Between social listening and responding, analyzing data, designing campaigns, managing vendor relationships and creating original content, marketers are faced with a time crunch every day.

Marketers need to know when it is appropriate to leverage automated tools. There are many useful applications and browser extensions that can automate tasks and help improve productivity.

Outsourcing certain tasks that are either too time-consuming or outside of the marketer's area of expertise is also a wise move.

3. Dirty Data

Many companies today are still faced with incomplete databases which creates all sorts of problems for marketers. A CRM is only as good as the data it contains.

As advancements have occurred in CRM systems in the past few years, there is more data available than ever before. Marketers must be able to properly decipher data and apply it correctly to their campaigns.

The businesses that have not invested well here will see even bigger constraints on growth compared to other organizations that have reliable data.

To convince their company to invest in better data, the CMO must accomplish two fundamental tasks. Effectively demonstrate to the CFO how the company is suffering financially by having dirty data and show a concise path towards profitability.

4. Marketing Is Still Viewed as a Company Expense

If a business views marketing as an expense rather than a revenue generator for the company, the marketing department is faced with the difficult task of changing a deeply ingrained perception problem within the company culture.

Marketers must go to great lengths to prove ROI for their campaigns. If they want their bosses (especially the CFO) to buy in, marketers need to be able to connect their activity to specific revenue streams of the company.

5. Alignment With Sales Team

I was always amazed at how disconnected the sales and marketing teams were in every organization I ever worked for in the corporate world. However, after years of disconnect, the alignment of sales and marketing has finally started within many companies.

The greater level of alignments is occurring in companies that have adopted social media in both their sales and marketing strategies. The commitment to social created a blur in who would handle certain activities. It forced these two distant cousins were to reunite.

It really comes down to communication and the alignment of activities and campaigns to have a direct impact on the revenue hitting goals of the company.

6. A Flooded Marketplace

It is no secret that the market is flooded with content. All one needs to do is take a quick look at their LinkedIn or Twitter feed to see how much content is created every second of every day.

To have a chance at cutting through the clutter, marketers need to focus on high-quality content that educates customers rather than solicits.

In the past, marketers focused on building and building online communities. There was a premium on the number of posts, followers, views, clicks, likes, shares, etc. They joined as many social networks as possible!

To be effective today, marketers must narrow their focus to the two or three networks that contain the largest percentage of their target audience.

Spreading themselves too thin by trying to be on all the networks just contributes to the noise in the marketplace.