The Biggest Marketing Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Marketing challenges are, unfortunately, part of everyday life for any business owner.

Here at Hotmart, we know that marketing is essential for any business that wants to succeed, but it can also be complex and challenging. That’s why it’s important to have a trusted source of information to help you navigate the ever-changing world of marketing.

Hotmart’s team of experts is constantly researching and monitoring the latest trends in marketing, and in this blog post, we share their insights, so you can face common marketing challenges head on and help your business grow.

What no one says about marketing challenges

Not long ago, marketing was seen as an expense for any business. You have probably heard this story somewhere, but it’s worth remembering.

When a company’s marketing department has created a piece, gotten price quotes and has installed a billboard on the main avenue of Seattle, it generated an expense. Obviously, the goal was to make sales.

But how could the company know the direct impact on sales? And what was the action’s ROI?

It’s practically impossible to say. Mapping out which sales were generated directly from this strategy was a challenge. And so marketing became an expense.

Up to the arrival of digital marketing, which revolutionized this process.

From a distance, it looks like it’s easy to make money in this market. But it actually requires a lot of dedication and practice.

And this is where I’m going to talk about what everyone tries to hide: without good planning, you’ll have a lot of marketing and sales problems.

So, if you’re starting with your digital marketing strategies now, the first step is to plan, study and put theory into practice.

And if you’ve already taken the first steps with digital marketing, making your first sales, our tips are:

• Assess all your processes;
• Find the flaws;
• Prioritize improvements and make adjustments.

So far, I’ve explained why digital marketing isn’t as easy as it seems and I’ve told you how to get started or how to adjust your strategy.

Another important point here is the number of possibilities to improve sales with marketing. So, focus on the strategy that generates the most results for your business.

And how do we know this?

Here are four topics for you to consider:

• Analysis of the market and competitors;
• Strategy tests in your reality;
• Measuring results;
• Deciding on which strategy to concentrate your efforts.

Here’s an example to make it clearer:

Let’s suppose that you’re an affiliate for a product in the health-food niche. Through an analysis of the competition, you realize that the big market players use Instagram to make sales.

Therefore, you decide to concentrate your initial efforts on Instagram. So, you prepare your content, take the first steps to attract an audience and transform it into customers.

It this clearer now? Well, this is an example of which channel you should prioritize. You can analyze a lot of things within the scope of digital marketing.

It is also from the analysis that you can identify your business’ marketing problems. And now comes the best part.

How to identify the main marketing challenges

Everything starts with your sales funnel. You need to understand each point, each sale you make within your funnel. This is the famous customer’s journey with your business.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about this here. To learn more about it, you can read our full post on the customer’s journey.

The issue is understanding where you’re going wrong or what you can do to improve your marketing during the sales funnel phases.

To help you answer this issue, I’ll introduce an analogy.

Imagine a linear industrial process in which there are four steps to get to the final product. In other words, step 4 depends on step 3, which depends on step 2, which in turn, depends on step 1.

In this process, a problem with any of the steps will interfere with the final product. It is up to the person in charge of production to identify the bottlenecks of the process and solve them.

You’re probably wondering, “What does this have to do with marketing?” Everything.

In the case of marketing, the final product is the sale. And in short, the steps are as follows: awareness of the problem, consideration of the solution, search for the solution and purchase.

Therefore, if at the top of your sales funnel, you are collecting an expressive number of leads and in the end, you aren’t converting them into customers, there’s a problem.

As we’ve said before, the advantage of digital marketing is that everything is measurable. Therefore, after identifying your funnel’s bottleneck, you need to analyze the data of your actions.

In addition, it is essential that you understand the conversion rates of the digital market and of the niche in which you operate. And thus, you can optimize your company’s marketing.

In a nutshell, if you aren’t selling, this means that there’s something in your process that can work better. To identify it, measure your results both quantitatively and qualitatively.

To help you with this analysis,  we will list the most common problems and how to solve them below.

The most common marketing challenges:

There’s a Chinese proverb that is quite popular on the internet, and that is relevant to this topic:

“The wise man learns from the mistakes of others, fools learn from their own mistakes and idiots never learn.”

This is why we need to value our mistakes and learn from them.

Better than this, is realizing where businesses or people like you have made mistakes, to understand how you can avoid them.

1. Focus on the wrong audience

This is the most common problem in digital marketing. And it is an important part of the process due to being the start of everything. After all, how are you going to connect with potential customers if you don’t know who they are?

The creation of a persona is a repetitive subject, given the frequency in which we talk about it. But many people still get this part wrong.

Developing a persona, especially in digital business, shouldn’t be such a big problem. Considering that during their purchase journey, users provide important information about them.

The mistake usually happens when it comes to analyzing the information and creating the persona.

And why does it compromise sales results?

Knowing your persona allows you to:

• Be more assertive when targeting your ads;
• Improve your copy;
• Target organic content that creates interest;
• Improve the nurturing of your leads in email marketing campaigns.

Now, do you understand the importance of mapping out your persona? At the end of the list of marketing challenges, you’ll see my proposal to solve them.

2. Lack of process definition

Within the entrepreneurial world, defining processes is important in any area. But first of all, what is a process in this context?

I checked the dictionary and found the following definition: a series of actions or steps taken to achieve a particular end.

From this, we can infer that without the continuous activity processes of your business, you’ll find it more difficult to reach your goals.

As mentioned earlier, digital marketing allows the use of various strategies on various communication channels. And we also mentioned that you have to focus on what generates the most results.

This is where I explain the importance of the process. By defining processes, you optimize your work and know exactly where to act.

If during your work routine you start tasks and don’t finish them, this is a sign that you need to define your processes.

The path is defining where you are and where you want to go. The gap between these two points in the process, which we can also call the how.

3. Lack of knowledge about the activities in each funnel step

Visitors go to your blog for the first time after being impacted by a blog post on social media. And as soon as they enter, you immediately offer them your product.

Visitors will probably ignore the possibility of a purchase because they aren’t prepared to buy yet. They are still considering and understanding the problem they have, without knowing that your business can help.

Obviously, there are different realities in various niche and entrepreneurship possibilities.

So, I need to emphasize this with you: It is essential that you understand your customers’ journey until they reach the point of making a purchase.

Digital marketing, from the many tracking and data analysis tools, allows you to know each action of potential customers until their conversion. The conversion, in this case, is the purchase.

When you know the overall behavior of a considerable sample of your buyers, it becomes easier to define the activities in each step of your sales funnel.

In addition, it is yet another way of optimizing the processes of your digital marketing strategies.

Business expert Adam Lyons sat down with Hotmart to give insights on how to build your sales ladders right. Check it out:

4. Error in data analysis

The volume of data on the internet is huge. Certain experts affirm that data must be considered as company assets.

This is why giants such as Google and Facebook are always trying to take the utmost care of this valuable asset.

Being able to capture a lot of data in digital marketing is magical. But collecting data isn’t enough. It is necessary to extract information to help you make decisions.

This is also one of the reasons that corroborates with what I said earlier in this text, digital marketing isn’t as easy as it seems.

Making decisions based on guesswork hasn’t been accepted for a while now. However, deciding on the direction of your marketing campaigns with poor data analysis for example, also doesn’t work.

You should know that as the owner of a digital business, you are the person who understands it the most. Combining your tasks with good data analysis will be a market differential and avoid marketing challenges.

5. Lack of alignment with the sales team

This is a very common problem in medium and large companies. Because they are the ones that have marketing and sales departments.

But if you dream of becoming an entrepreneur and are taking your first steps, you need to keep this problem on your radar.

Most companies find certain difficulties in establishing a valuable connection between the two teams.

If digital marketing, by means of inbound marketing, is collecting too many leads, the role of the sales team is to convert them into customers.

It sounds easy, but in order for it to work well, sales strategies and marketing strategies need to be aligned.

And what is the consequence of this?

Your business loses many sales opportunities.

6. Lack of attention to detail

An idiom that I really like, and that applies to several everyday situations is, “The devil is in the details”.

What I mean to say is that in certain situations you need to look closely to your business and also at a specific point. I’ll give you an example to make this clearer.

In terms of digital marketing challenges, the user’s experience with your business’ points of contact is very important nowadays. In fact, it’s one of the factors that Google uses to rank it on a search page.

So, the layout of graphic elements on your capture page can be an important detail when capturing leads. Details such as:

• Page colors;
• CTA positioning;
• Scrolling.

You should worry about the details after your basic strategy is working correctly and performing well.

7. Lack of time to implement initiatives

Who doesn’t suffer from not having enough time?

Days seem to be too short for all of the activities that we need or want to do, whether for work or leisure.

For those who undertake, this increases tenfold. Therefore, optimizing your time and being productive is a huge differential for a successful entrepreneur.

If time seems to go by faster, certain technologies are ready to help you. Currently, in the area of digital marketing, the automation of activities is convenient and everyone can have access to it.

I’ve already provided a solution to this problem: marketing automation. I’ll explain in detail how this works in a daily routine when I’ll talk about the solutions.

The best solutions for marketing challenges

Now that the 7 problems have been listed, it’s time to talk about the solutions. After all, your energy needs to be always focused on overcoming obstacles along your path to success.

This being said, I want to tell you about my main goal with the solutions I propose below.

I want the solutions I propose to help you expand your awareness of the business.

In other words, I won’t propose magic formulas that will make you improve your entire digital marketing and make money. What I wish to convey are insights that are useful for the analysis of your business.

1. Perform a search to define your persona

The trending term nowadays is “data-driven persona”. Do you know what this means?

It’s the definition of the persona based on data. This means that you set up the target of your ideal customers based on the information you already have of those who have already purchased your product or service.

It means using the data, the most precious asset in the digital world, in your favor from the top of your sales funnel.

It’s by knowing your audience that you will set up the best strategies to overcome marketing challenges.

And what does this mean?

It’s very simple. If you are sending your message to profiles that are likely to buy your product, you will greatly increase your conversions.

2. Understand how to define your processes

First of all, I’m going to list the advantages of having well-defined processes in digital marketing:

• Greater business organization;
• More productivity in your routine;
• History of activities for the analysis of possible gaps;
• Well-defined workflow.

Remember to prioritize which campaign goals will make you achieve your best results in less time.

3. List the activities of each funnel step

To avoid problems with conversions, make a list of the tasks you will fulfill at each step of the funnel. In order to be accurate, carefully consider your users’ purchasing journey.

It is here that you will define, for example:

• Which free materials to offer;
• Which information you’ll request in the filling out of the form;
• To which leads you will offer the product.

These are a few examples. What I need you to understand is that all of your sales funnel strategies need to be aligned with your user’s actions.

The main advantage of this is that you’ll have more engaged leads, i.e., more likely to purchase your product or service.

4. Invest time in data analysis

It’s common to see businesses neglecting the analysis of certain data. As well as it is common to take certain general market data as irrefutable truth.

Understanding the context and numbers of the market, in general, is important. However, they should only serve as a guideline for your actions.

When the time comes to make decisions, you should essentially focus on your business’ data.

If you have planned and defined your business’ major goals, it is time to define the indicators of success.

Your question here should be, “Which metrics do I need to analyze to know if I’m on the right path?”

After defining them, it’s time to understand which tools will be necessary to measure everything.

I must tell you that if you have a digital business, Hotmart offers many possibilities for the analysis of your performance.

Hotmart Analytics, for example, can help you understand all of your buyers’ actions up to the moment that the purchase is made. It’s great to understand the journey of those who buy from your business.

The main thing is to gather the most relevant data for your analysis on spreadsheets and observe them at least once a week.

You will notice how much easier it will be to make strategic business decisions.

5. Bring marketing closer to the sales team

I venture to say that harmony between your marketing and sales team is essential in the current market scenario. Marketing is responsible for transferring qualified leads to the sales team.

On the other hand, the sales team needs to convert the leads into customers. Well, nothing new so far, right?

So, now I’ll provide you with insight. The first step to integrating the marketing and sales teams is to align expectations.

In your business, you need to understand which leads are qualified (MQLs), i.e., those that have a better chance of being converted by the sales team. This is the way to optimize and increase conversion productivity.

The solution is to set up the ideal customer profile (ICP) on the sales side and understand which leads are closer to doing so. This is where the sales team will increase the company’s sales.

And with marketing directly involved.

As I mentioned earlier, you have to understand in which context your business is inserted. There’s no one better than the business owner to understand who the ideal consumer is.

On the subject of leads, take a look at this video with insights from expert Dan Fleyshman:

6. Make the necessary adjustments

If your business’ sales machine is already operating well, the best path is to make adjustments. Always optimize to be able to increase your sales even more.

The adjustments lie in the details. Changing the color of a CTA may increase the conversions of the capture page, for example.

The motto for this solution is to test all possibilities, measure each one and choose the one that delivered the best results.

The famous A/B tests are accurate when adjusting details of the majority of activities in your sales funnel.

Would you like a detail that may help you really stand out from the competition?

Special care with after-sales. After buyers purchase your product and start using it, they need to receive the best service possible. And this goes beyond good support service.

This is the moment that we call captivation in the sales funnel table at the beginning of the text. This is the opportunity to engage buyers to purchase another product from your business or recommend it so a friend can buy it.

If well executed, it will probably help you increase sales.

7. Automate your actions

Among the dozens of advantages of digital marketing, automating the actions is one of the main ones. If you’re already outlining your strategies, you need to automate.

Your email marketing campaigns to warm up your list of leads can be 100% automated. This is the channel that allows you to set up flows from the engagement of the lead with your content.

There are several providers that allow you to set up an email stream that converts well with your list. Ideally, you should research the options carefully and choose the one that makes more sense to your reality.

At Hotmart, we have the Automatic Lead Management (Listboss) that, when integrated to your inbound marketing strategy, automates purchase recovery campaigns, for example.

Why is digital marketing so important for sales?

After all the content that I’ve presented, answering this question is easy, right?

Do you remember that funnel with the problems? Now we present it with the solutions:

In practically all areas of businesses, digital marketing contributes to sales.

It’s with digital marketing that you increase the number of commercial opportunities for your business.

The sales machines that perform better on the market are the ones that work well with digital marketing.

You can generate sales with the following:

• Instagram;
• Email marketing;
• Paid media;
• WhatsApp, etc.

Now that you know how to work efficiently to overcome common marketing challenges, the next step is building an even more robust marketing plan for your business. Learn the ultimate marketing strategies to attract customers in this post.