5 Digital Marketing Challenges when Taking your Small Business Online.
Here are Top 5 Digital Marketing challenges when taking your small business online
We are living difficult times with ongoing challenges. Hopefully, your business wasn’t one of the many that had to close doors for good due to the crisis started in 2020. Nowadays, it seems like a successful business strategy MUST include the digital factor. For some business owners, start advertising online, or opening an online shop has meant the survival of their jobs and the chance of mantaining a steady income for their homes. Here I’m going to tell you about the Top 5 Digital Marketing Challenges from least to most important. I hope you find it useful.
5. Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation has made Advertisers and Marketer’s lives easier, but at the same time complicated. Thanks to Automation it’s possible to set up a website or an online shop. But track record, integrate, or connect all of these platforms is not always easy.
One-stop-shop solutions tend to be expensive, and free (or more affordable) tools don’t always come with integrations to other platforms.
ADVICE: It will be worth of your time to research about the different options available, both free and paid, before making an investment in Digital Marketing tools. Free doesn’t always mean bad quality in the Digital Marketing world, and paid doesn’t always mean good performance.
4. LVC - Lifetime Value Cycle
Marketing is a long term game. Personalization is considered now one of the main drivers of incremental revenue because by delighting your best customers it’s easier to generate more conversions and sales. The idea behind all this is the LVC (Lifetime Value Cycle). The challenge resides in how to effectively identify and track those valuable customers.
ADVICE: The technologies to keep track of them are usually expensive but your best starting point will be to shop around for a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that’s best adapted to the needs of your business.
Ideally, you should focus your online presence on 3 digital platforms and have a consistent performance there, rather than having a poor performance everywhere."
3. An Always Changing Landscape
The book of Digital Marketing and Advertising will never be fully written. Constant new changes on Google algorithms and other digital platforms require business owners being up-to-date with those changes, being flexible, and think of strategies to adapt to those changes. This affects the ways in which society consumes content, on websites and on Social media.
ADVICE: The best thing to do, especially if you’re on a budget, is to not fall prey of the shiny object frenzy and pretend to have an online presence in every single platform. Ideally you should focus your online presence on 3 digital platforms, and have a consistent performance there, rather than having a poor performance everywhere.
2. Marketing Attribution
This Challenge has 2 components: Planning, and Follow-Up/Execution. Most things in Digital Marketing require analysis before, during, and after every execution. There will be some analysis to be done based on your first party data, online articles and studies, and experiences of other business owners, before deciding to start an activation.
But when the work is in progress and there is some significant budget involved it’s always better to run some sort of A/B Testing and then summarize results to compare Marketing actions or tactics against each other. This can’t always be done in 1 day. It sometimes requires discipline and long-term commitment.
ADVICE: The best thing to do is to focus on activations intended to bring more direct sales, or at least conversions. Focus on the top 3 most important metrics that impact sales. If you don’t have all the technology to do it, start by delegating someone with the task. If you are going solo, then schedule reminders on your calendar to check out your metrics and see how they impact your sales.
Focus on the top 3 most relevant metrics that impact sales. If you don’t have all the technology to do it, start by delegating someone with the task.
1. Your Competitors
Times of crisis drive creativity and innovation for survival in the marketplace. Nowadays everyone seems to realize the importance of going full on digital or at least having some online presence to remain relevant in the market.
ADVICE: Keep an eye on your closest competitors. It might not be possible to benchmark on everything the leader of your market is doing, since everyone has different budget and resources, but ideas are free, and sometimes it only takes one BIG idea to mark your position in the market and make you succeed.
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