More companies are shifting their focus to the digital space and advertising on different platforms. 2022 is going to be a year with more challenges to marketers than ever before. Over my time in the digital marketing industry, I’ve seen a lot of challenges and trends come and go. The best advice I can give you is that a good offense is the best defense when it comes to facing obstacles head-on. In this article, I’ll walk you through these 16 major challenges marketers face this year and how you can overcome them.

1. Tracking
2. Data Visualization
3. Marketing Mix Modeling 
4. Forecasting 
5. Multichannel Synergy
6. High-Performing Creative
7. Using Analytics
8. Database Management
9. Lack of Targeting
10. Legal Changes
11. Competition
12. Fast Systems
13. Strategy
14. Offer Development
15. Channel Complexity
16. Benchmark Marketing

Let’s get into it and learn more about how to overcome marketing challenges.

1. Tracking

Challenge

Tracking is important to figure out where your most valuable leads are coming from. By setting up proper tracking for your key performance indicators (KPIs), you’ll be able to analyze how your campaigns are performing. More importantly, you can adjust them based on how your audiences are responding. For successful tracking, follow these steps as needed:

• Define your metrics.
• Figure out what tools you need to keep track of those metrics.
• Make sure there’s a set employee or team to take on the tracking.
• They will need to communicate their results to maximize impact.
• Then, marketing strategists can tweak or change the campaigns based on the results.

For example, you may track ecommerce conversions with Google Analytics or digital to brick-and-mortar conversions with Facebook pixels. For goals such as return on marketing investment (ROMI), keep track of your incremental revenue, cost of goods sold and marketing spending. But with so many different communication mediums, how do you create an easy-to-use and up-to-date system that works for your business?

Solution

You can overcome this marketing challenge by staying on top of your tracking. The best way to do that is to set it up before you start utilizing any channel. More channels and platforms are also building integrations and lead trackers directly into their platforms, which will also make tracking multiple platforms easier. Not sure where to start? Dive into this video to help you start tracking your return on marketing investment!  

2. Data Visualization

Challenge

How are you actually visualizing the multi-tier of your business? Do you understand how to comprehend and analyze the data you’re collecting? Data visualization is one of the ways that you can make analyzing and understanding your marketing data easier. When you have maps or graphs, it’ll give you a clear picture of what the information is and how it’s working. But can you produce these visualizations?

Solution

This one is fairly easy to solve. If you feed your data into Google ad platforms, you can utilize tools like Google Data Studio to create these reports for you. Whether you’re looking for a Gantt chart or a time plot, Google Data Studio can create these reports quickly and accurately for you.  

3. Marketing Mix Modeling

Challenge

Ever heard of too much of a good thing? That can be the problem you’re facing when it comes to using a marketing mix model. There are so many different ways to market — organic marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing — that it can be overwhelming. How can you figure out which market is worth your time and which markets can fall to the wayside?

Solution

The best way to know which markets are most important is to analyze your usage of them and develop a system to test your cost-per-acquisition, develop campaigns that improve the metric, and scale accordingly. Of course, the right channel depends on performance—but it also depends on budget. Some platforms (like commercials or native ads) may be pricier than more affordable alternatives (like sponsored Facebook posts). Keep in mind, it may be more valuable to your business to spend a decent chunk of your budget on a platform with proven results. For example, LinkedIn is notoriously more expensive than its social counterparts like Facebook. But if it’s the platform that reaches your target audience most effectively and proves a higher ROI, it’s worth it to make the investment. Don’t discount any platforms until you’ve tested them. Find what works best for you and puzzle out your budget so that you’re allocating the right amount to the right platforms. Of course, we don’t even know the full extent of the ad options that will emerge over time, which is why it’s always important to leave a little room in your budget for experimentation. Creating a diversified portfolio will only lead to positive things for your business.

4. Forecasting

Challenge

Marketing budgets and strategies are planned way in advance. Accurate forecasting will allow you to create a budget and strategy that will increase your bottom line. This data-driven approach to predicting how a marketing campaign will perform based on different scenarios is the best way to set your marketing strategy up for the future.

Solution

The most important aspect of forecasting is your past and current data. Make sure that you have systems in place to capture previous campaigns’ performance data properly. When you have the correct data, you can then use it to perform a linear analysis and insert different scenarios or seasonalities to see how your campaign may be affected by things you know could happen to your business in the future. You should also tie forecasting into your final sale. How long did it take to get from lead to final sale? What steps were taken during that process? This information can then be used to prepare future marketing campaigns that will perform just as well, if not better, than previous ones.  

5. Multichannel Synergy

Challenge

All of these different channels present a lot of excellent opportunities to reach different audiences. The person you reach on Twitter is probably not going to be the same person you reach through influencer marketing. But how do you tie all of these channels together to ensure that one platform picks up where the other leaves off? When they are working together towards your common goal, you’re more likely to see success.

Solution

When it comes to multichannel synergy, you want to think about the big picture and then narrow it down to each individual channel. If a lead comes in through social media, where does it go next? Does it flow into an email marketing campaign? If so, what does the email marketing campaign look like? To ensure that you are truly capturing the leads coming in, make sure all of your channels are working together to continue engaging until that lead converts into a sale. You can also utilize remarketing. This is when your ad campaigns are shown to people who have previously visited your website, read an email, or engaged with your brand at some point. Doing this reminds them that your company has the product or service they were looking for and increases their odds of buying from you. Prepare to implement the perfect multichannel digital marketing strategy to promote synergy now!  

6. High-Performing Creative

Challenge

Working in marketing can be an exciting job because things are constantly changing. But this means that your creative materials also need to constantly be evolving. If your brand voice and messaging looks like all of your competitors, it’s going to get lost in the shuffle.

Solution

In order to find your place in the marketplace, you’ll need to create a consistent brand voice and messaging. You need a solid creative look and feel across all ad platforms, including your website. Your company should have a thought-out style guide for content, copy and design. This means selecting your brand colors, logo styles, visual media specifications, platform preferences and writing do’s and don’ts. Even if you think you can wing it, do yourself a favor and develop a real voice and presence. Make sure it resonates with your true buyer’s personas—in all their nuance. Focus on a few key things to set a solid brand voice and messaging foundation:

• Dissect your audience
• Communicate any changes across your teams
• Give your voice an authentic personality by featuring real users and team members

You should also test your creative assets, landing pages, etc.) on a monthly basis and refresh them as needed, usually every quarter or at least every 6 months. The key to attracting people to your brand is to always be improving — and that includes social media and your creative assets!  

7. Using Analytics

Challenge

Collecting data on how your marketing is a great way to show you what is and isn’t working. But using analytics can be a marketing challenge, rather than a tool, if you input improper data.

Solution

The only way to overcome this challenge is to put systems in place to ensure your data collection is correct. You’ll also want to make sure that you understand which metrics to analyze. Things like Sales Revenue, Conversion Rate, Social Media Reach, Most Viewed Pages, Bounce Rate, and Frequency will all tell you different things about your campaign’s performance.  

8. Database Management

Challenge

Now that you have all of this valuable data from various sources, keeping it well organized in a proper database is key. In order to use this data to properly map out your marketing plans and use your data to target the correct audiences, you’ll need to be able to access it quickly and easily.

Solution

A well-organized database will help you keep track of your data while allowing you to analyze it quickly. It is important that this database integrates with your ad system so that the information can feed directly from the database to the system, eliminating human error.

9. Lack of Targeting

Challenge

As we move into a cookieless world, it is going to get more difficult to obtain the information you need to granularly target your customers. While the announcement of cookies being phased out was great for user security, it’s not so great for marketers. The problems are compounded when you start to consider all of the issues Facebook has integrating with iOS.

Solution

Since so many of our ad systems are dependent on cookies and consumer tracking, we’re going to have to get creative with how we obtain this data. Relying on real-time data and addressing the shifting regulatory landscape by relying more on first-party data is going to become more important in the coming months. Google has also announced the Privacy Sandbox. This idea works to protect consumer data while also giving advertisers tools they need to excavate ad targeting and ad delivery ideas. It seems like the best of both worlds and a possible solution to explore in 2022. As more information becomes available, you’ll want to pay close attention to things like Server Side Tagging through Google Tag Manager and Conversion Measurement APIs.  

10. Legal Changes

Challenge

Just like the rules and norms for opt-ins will shift, so too will government regulations on marketing and tracking. Now, we have truth-in-advertising laws which are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Within the last few years, influencer laws have become more mainstream thanks to Instagram moguls like Kim Kardashian and innumerable micro-and macro-influencers. While we’ve always had to comply with things like the ADA, CCPA, GDPR, and other governmental regulations, these institutions are starting to crack down more on Big Tech. And in turn, Big Tech is cracking down on ad management abilities.  

Solution

The best solution to this marketing challenge is to be sure you have your legal ducks in a row before you start doing business online. Before you launch your company or make changes to an existing one, get a legal checklist or consult with a business attorney to be sure that you’re doing business online correctly.

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11. Competition

Challenge

Thanks in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift to relying mostly on digital marketing is only accelerating. Every day more and more businesses are moving into the digital space. Even though there are a ton of opportunities in this space, catching the attention of your audience is only going to get harder.

Solution

In order to grab your audiences’ attention, you need to stand out. Incredible creative assets and a great branding strategy can do this for you. If you’re feeling stuck, enlist the help of an expert.

12. Fast Systems

Challenge

Digital marketing is a fast-paced environment and you need fast-paced systems to keep up with everything that is going on. In order to be successful in this industry, you need to crank out consistently awesome content at almost rapid speed. You have to be agile with your content creation and decisions. This can be hard to do in-house, especially for big businesses and well-established companies.

Solution

If you’re struggling to keep up with this pace in-house, call in an expert. A creative agency, like Ignite Visibility, has the knowledge of upcoming trends, as well as the time and ability to test new content and landing pages and ways to reach new audiences.

13. Strategy

Challenge

You can’t just throw anything against the wall and see what sticks if you want to see success in the digital marketing space. You need a strategy behind what you’re doing.

Solution

When it comes to establishing your content strategy, start by thinking about how you are going to be tapping into the channel or multi-channel approach. Consider who you will be targeting and why:

• How are you going to find them?
• How are you going to approach them?

These questions are a great way to start working out your marketing strategy and giving your marketing campaigns a way to really grow your business and bottom line.

14. Offer Development

Challenge

A huge problem I see with a lot of digital marketers is that they have a million different offers with no clear way to navigate down to the 3-5 offers that are going to resonate with their audiences. In order to make it easier for your customers, you’ll want to eliminate any confusion and nail down all of the details of your offer while you’re still actively developing it.

Solution

Start by thinking about 20 different offers that your business could start to market right now. Now tap into your customer’s mindset and use that to create offers that will not only grab their attention but also allow you to convert them into paying customers over and over again. By narrowing down and getting really clear on your offer, you’re eliminating confusion amongst your audience. If they are confused, they won’t buy.

15. Channel Complexity

Challenge

One of the biggest marketing challenges facing digital marketers today is the number of different channels and platforms available to us. While this is good in the idea that it provides us with a lot of opportunities, it can also be overwhelming. Each platform has different rules and operating systems. It can be hard to understand all of them at a level that is really beneficial for your company.

Solution

The best solution to this problem is to call in an expert. Digital strategy agencies live and breathe these platforms. In fact, they probably have someone who focuses just on Facebook ads and someone else who focuses just on email marketing. It is up to these individuals to know the platforms in and out and to keep up with any changes or improvements. Knowing a channel really well will only increase your ability to use it to your advantage.

16. Benchmark Marketing

Challenge

More and more people are joining different online spaces as they come. That means more advertising online, which makes it harder to cut through the clutter. All the while, consumers will eventually become numb to the ads we know today. Ad fatigue leads to a reduction in action by users, and it’s one of the biggest challenges faced by marketers.

Solution

One way to keep yourself ahead of the competition is through benchmark marketing. Competitive benchmarking in particular lets you know where your competitors are at—which means you can figure out how to beat them. It’s important to know how good your competition is doing on the channels you’re interested in. Knowing this information can make it easier for you to determine if your campaigns are succeeding as well as they could be. Utilizing social media benchmarking tactics will help you to recognize the saturation point of each channel. Knowing the saturation point is important because it helps make your expectations more realistic. You can’t expect to achieve 12,000 clicks from Google if the keywords you’re optimizing for on Google are only bringing in 1,000 people.  

The Bottom Line: There Are Ways to Get Through All Marketing Challenges

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that the digital landscape will continue to change. As you review this list and start to process the information I’ve presented to you, I want you to think about these points as opportunities, not as challenges. Now that you know what is predicted to interfere with your digital marketing plans this year, you have the ability to brush up on the tools you need to succeed. Anything is possible if you have the expertise to execute the presented solutions properly. Keep your company’s marketing strategy in good shape by keeping a keen eye for regulation changes, new norms, and increased competition. After all, knowing how to overcome marketing challenges will keep you relevant for the long haul.   About the author: John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, \"The Forecaster Method\" and \"Digital Influencer.\" Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.