Your digital evolution: Top 7 digital marketing challenges and how to solve them
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Optimize existing content for SEO By focusing on UX, you can tailor your design to help guide your customer through the right journey for them. The most effective way to manage brand and message consistency is by centralizing all content in one platform – a single source of truth. Centralizing your assets with an automated digital asset management system is critical to digital evolution. To get content in front of the right audiences, you need to leverage data.
AI Summary
The digital transformation dream
Of the annual $1.3 trillion spent on digital transformation before the pandemic, $900 billion was wasted.
Which begs the question…should organizations still be chasing the digital transformation dream?
Digital Evolution
Integrating large-scale, comprehensive new systems was never going to be straight-forward.
And although technology can help resolve so many of your problems, we understand that trying to tackle it all at once can seem like an impossible task.
When you think about upgrading your tech stack, it is helpful to think of the process as an evolution instead of a transformation. Technology isn’t a one-time investment - it’s a series of iterative steps to improvement.
These are the Top 7 challenges we frequently hear from marketers, along with our recommendations and guidance to help you solve them.
#1 Intense competition for audience attention and engagement
Competition is fierce and your audience is fickle. As competition increases, so does the effort required to stand out from the crowd and reach your ideal customer
What you can do
Emphasize experimentation
Test, test, and test again. It’s ok to try things out. It’s ok for them to fail. The more you learn and the more data you collect, the better informed you can be about your target audience.
Change one thing at a time, A/B test, and watch to see what happens. You’d be surprised how quickly you can gain important insights.
Create a helpful, convenient, and personal customer experience
Customer expectations have skyrocketed in recent years. And whilst curating the optimum customer experience requires time and effort, it pays off in spades.
Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.
Customer data is the key to understanding what your audience wants. Look to see where they’re dropping off in their journey, read reviews (especially the bad ones), and assess honestly what your competitors are offering that you aren’t. These insights and metrics into the problems that your customers are truly trying to solve can help you make customer-centric adjustments to your business model and roadmap that create a better experience overall.
How Sitecore can help
Sitecore Personalize can help you run A/B tests and incrementally adjust the customer experience based on the actions of your visitors. It can also help you personalize across channels and pages, ensuring that you are offering the best content to your visitors at every moment of their journey.
#2 Creating relevancy for target audiences
Creating relevant content is the best way to connect with your customers. When you can demonstrate an understanding of who they are, what problems they’re facing, and what they want, they’ll start to believe you have the solution.
As your teams know, content creation is time-consuming and resource intensive. It’s essential to know your audience to create content that resonates with them.
What you can do
Identify the real questions your audience are asking
Don’t make assumptions about what your audience needs. And don’t rely on feedback and data that was collected three years ago. Invest in market research, collect voice of customer data, and read customer feedback – especially the reviews that don’t give 5 stars!
Optimize existing content for SEO
If you have existing content that you think meets the needs of your target audience but isn’t performing, it may just need some SEO tweaks. This will improve your visibility and drive inbound traffic to your site.
Optimizing existing content is also much more cost-effective that creating something from scratch, saving time and resources.
Focus on UX
No one decides to make a purchase without doing their research first, and this is where your relevant content comes in. By focusing on UX, you can tailor your design to help guide your customer through the right journey for them.
When that journey is smooth, seamless, and enjoyable, they’ll want to keep coming back.
How Sitecore can help
Making sure that our UX and your customer experience (CX) are in alignment is essential; weeding out dark patterns and avoiding choice overload are as essential as keeping track of your visitors previous preferences and interactions. As we outline in our UX4CX guide, improving design and UX through micro-interactions and strategic micro-conversions can benefit your digital evolution.
#3 Maintaining brand and messaging consistency across channels
Brand and messaging consistency leads to recognition, higher sales, and builds customer loyalty.
Maintaining consistency across channels is largely due to poor content management.
What you can do
Create defined and easy-to-follow brand guidelines
Start with the basics. If you know there’s content being put out there that doesn’t quite hit the mark, it’s time to review.
Identify where the brand messaging is becoming muddled. Does everyone who needs it have access to the brand guidelines? Are people reading them? Are they being misunderstood?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, then this is where your focus should be.
Facilitate cross-team communication and collaboration
Producing content can be complicated. The number of people involved can be significant and there are often multiple stages to creating, finalizing, approving, and publishing content. When this process is inefficient, it can be time-consuming and arduous, impacting both quality and quantity of content.
Ensure everyone is using the same tools, such as shared dashboards, calendars, and a content management platform. This will give team members the ability to review, annotate, and approve content in real-time, and optimize workflow.
Have a single source of truth
When content is created using siloed systems, things get complicated. Various images, copy, icons, and logos end up scattered across multiple locations. This leads to workflows and version control becoming confused – particularly when external teams are involved.
The most effective way to manage brand and message consistency is by centralizing all content in one platform – a single source of truth. This minimizes errors, duplicated work, and the risk of using outdated assets.
How Sitecore can help
Centralizing your assets with an automated digital asset management system is critical to digital evolution. Content Hub DAM provides a single repository for digital assets configured to match the specific needs of your business. Content Hub Operations allows for collaboration across teams, streamlined workflows, and effective resource and time management throughout your content ecosystem, facilitating the communication and collaboration that are essential to digital evolution.
#4 Efficiently distributing content to the right audience
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: content is the customer experience. Getting the right content, in front of the right people, at the right time is crucial to getting customers to take the next step.
Unfortunately, distributing the right content to the right person is not as straight-forward as simply pressing “publish”. Particularly when you’re targeting specific audiences with personalized content.
What you can do
Connect your platforms for seamless content sharing
Again, disconnected systems are not your friend. When there are any number of locations that content can be saved, how can you be sure you know what content is available? This can lead to wasted time or the creation of duplicative content.
When all assets are centralized in one location, such as a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, they are much easier to find and use. It can help you streamline workflows, gain efficiency, and manage the ever-growing amount of content your brand produces.
Personalization
To get content in front of the right audiences, you need to leverage data. You need to understand your customers and what their unique needs are. Audiences expect the companies they interact with to remember and acknowledge them, to understand their current needs and anticipate what those needs might be in the future. Personalized content is an unmissable signal that they are heard, seen, and understood.
Effective personalization means going beyond what specific algorithms can tell you and incorporating real-time data into your personalization ecosystems. Real-time data can allow you to make effective decisions more quickly and enhance the customer experience with relevant content.
How Sitecore can help
Content is the engine that powers personalization. Content Hub DAM uses AI to make it easier for your team to find and use assets, reducing the risk of duplication and increasing time savings across teams, while Sitecore Personalize uses live data to respond to customer needs in the moment, every moment.
#5 Insufficient or overworked resources
When marketing is done effectively, it can help drive growth, increase market share, and build customer loyalty. When you have a small team that is stretched thin, output suffers, deadlines are missed, and your team can burn out.
What you can do
Focus on customer value and business outcomes, not output
Quality over quantity. Work with your team to identify the key business objectives and then prioritize them. You can’t do everything and please everyone, but you might be surprised what you can achieve with less.
Streamline workflows and processes
How much of your team’s time is wasted wrestling with complex and outdated processes? That time might be better spent strategizing, innovating, and working towards your newly prioritized business objectives.
Automation is set to become an even larger part of the digital world than it already is, and for good reason. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other digital technologies can improve functionality and identify and target optimization opportunities while freeing resources for other initiatives, including new technologies and robust digital strategy. They can also help to align content, experience, data, and technology - four key strategic areas identified by Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, in our “Four smart-mover strategies for dominating digital moments” guide.
How Sitecore can help
Strategically bringing content, data and technology together can create incredible opportunities for brands looking to evolve their digital presence. Content Hub Operations breaks down content silos by enabling easy reuse of content and assets while simultaneously creating transparency across the content lifecycle and efficiently managing team resources.
#6 No single source of truth for customer data
In a perfect world, all marketers would have a single source of truth for customer data. It ensures accuracy, saves time, and enhances personalization.
This can be complicated by siloed systems due to an acquisition or merger, legacy technology, budget constraints, or data privacy and compliance regulations.
What you can do
Bridge data gaps to create an omnichannel experience
Bridging the data gaps with software such as a customer data platform (CDP) can be an excellent solution. A CDP allows you to listen to your customers – gathering, segmenting, and identifying data from multiple online and offline data sources. It can give you the ability to recognize individuals in real-time, allowing you to formulate a personalized response based on relevant data.
How Sitecore can help
Sitecore CDP unlocks the power of first-party data and real-time context by capturing buying signals, searches, and clicks across every channel, and combining them into an intelligent data stream optimized for visual insights and AI model training. Content Hub One can help teams action on those valuable insights with an intuitive interface and an effortless content authoring experience.
#7 Understanding how, when, and where target individuals want to consume valuable content
You may have the right message, but if you deliver it at the wrong time and place, it won’t resonate.
Consumers access content across a wide range of platforms and channels with new formats emerging constantly. It can be tricky to determine where your audience are and where you should focus your marketing efforts.
What you can do
Centralize, understand, and use data
Data is key, but not all data is created equal. Not only do you need to be able to collect it, you need also to be able to understand it and use it.
Look to see when and where people are dropping off from your website. Which emails they do and don’t open. Which social media channels garner the most engagement from the same content.
Importance of device-specific experiences
It’s important to not just consider the platforms and channels available to your customers, but also the multiple devices they’re using. The customer experience that you have so carefully curated on your website will likely look very different on a mobile device. You can’t expect what works on one to work on the other. And when you try to force it, the experience can become difficult to navigate.
Instead, by creating device-specific experiences, you can ensure an improved user experience with content and messaging designed to suit the features of each device, which will help increase engagement and boost conversion rates.
How Sitecore can help
Understanding the context of individual interactions can help your create experience that resonate. Sitecore CDP can help your teams segment customers into specific audiences that make sense for your business in the digital age.
How composable architecture can help
Composable architecture enables you to assemble various martech building blocks quickly and easily.
The goal is to create a flexible, agile infrastructure that can adapt to new challenges and opportunities without requiring a complete overhaul of the underlying martech systems.
Choosing a composable solution means that you don’t have to go all-in straight away. If existing components of your marketing stack are working well for you and fit within your strategy, then keep them! You only need to implement what you require to fill the gaps, allowing you to focus on your digital evolution.