There are two reasons why marketing is considered the most challenging activity. Firstly, there are always challenges that you have to face when planning, managing and executing such activity. Secondly, it is tied to a trend that constantly changes from year to year. Every new year brings new challenges that you may never face before. In 2019, there are at least 5 new marketing challenges that you have to deal with. Check them out below.
Influencers Get Greedier.
Admit it, the role of influences in a marketing activity is so significant that it may determine how much success you can achieve from the campaign. TV commercials have long been hiring celebrities as their influences. In this digital era, online marketing campaign also requires its performers to hire influencers to encourage their customers to buy their products or services. Influencers are not necessarily people with a lot of followers on their social media. As long as they can reach the customers, are trusted by those customers, and have salesmanship skill, they can be considered worthy influences.
The problem today is that many influencers get greedier. It is true that to effectively use influencers, you have to pay them. This trend, however, leads to big businesses offering a large sum of money to them. For small businesses with a limited budget, hiring a worthy influencer gets more and more difficult nowadays. There are many ways to deal with this challenge. You can check your followers, subscribers, and people giving likes to your posts. Because they have a certain degree of interest in your business, they are more likely to be hired as influencers with a reasonable payment. You can also use hashtags or Instagram’s discovery tool to find potential influencers.
Digital Ads Get Costlier and More Diversified.
Because you will conduct your marketing campaign mostly digitally, you have to rely on digital ads very extensively. The bad news is that the price of digital ads is on the rise today. In fact, researches show that the increase in digital ads price is actually five times faster than inflation. You will have to make a big investment if you want to use digital ads seriously.
Another challenge related to digital ads is that they get more diversified. Remember that people are not using not only desktop computers to enter the digital world. They also use mobile devices and even their gaming consoles to gain access to such a world. You are now dealing not only with search ads that are based on PPC strategy. You will be dealing display ads and even commercials broadcasted on gaming console-based television like PlayStation Vue.
There are several strategies to tackle this challenge. If you have limited resources, you can focus only on the trendiest channel. In 2019, mobile marketing and display advertising are considered the trendiest, so pick this channel and abandon the rest. If you have enough resources, you can use all of the available channels but not in a multi-channel scenario, which is costly and not efficient. You should use an omnichannel scenario in which all of those channels are connected with each other and can be managed from one central hub.
Voice Gets More Prominent.
In the past, you mostly had to focus only on the visual aspect of your brand. Today, as voice technologies allow customers to order a product or service, to recognize certain brands, and to do their commercial activities through voice, you should now find out how to establish a unique voice representation of your brand.
With smart speakers, customers can trigger many smart actions without touching or typing anything. With voice shopping, they can buy anything they want also without touching or typing anything. It’s time for you to know how to implement this technology and to appease your customers with a powerful voice-based system.
The implementation of this technology has assured the survival of major digital marketplaces like Amazon and Alibaba and the demise of traditional retailers like Toy R Us. If you want to gain the momentum and avoid the calamity, always know how to keep your customers’ loyalty by incorporating voice-based technology in your marketing campaign.
Customer Experience Becomes the Focal Point.
As a marketer, your focus today should not be on how to sell your products and get them sold out as fast as possible, but on the customer experience and on how to meet their expectations. This is the core of customer experience marketing and this will ensure the loyalty of your customers and potentially create new influencers that will bring tremendous benefits to your business.