In an excellent e27 article last year, writer Alfonso Manalastas shared his take on the 5 common challenges marketing professionals face today. Manalastas focused on how AI has transformed marketing and advertising in recent years. However, the rate of change has been so rapid that many marketing professionals are struggling to catch their breath.
So, how can you overcome these issues and unlock the transformation benefits of marketing technology?
Let’s examine the five most common challenges facing marketing professionals today and discuss how you can solve them with the right approach and technologies.
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Challenge #1. Adapting to the ever-changing market
Marketing is one of the fastest-evolving disciplines in the world of work. In the last decade, MarTech has exploded in sophistication. For example, AI and ML-powered technology have increased marketing personalization, predictive analytic tools have driven data-driven decisions, and automation has allowed teams to outsource tasks to machines.
Additionally, data privacy regulations have changed dramatically over time, meaning precision targeting and marketing attribution have become more complicated, necessitating a wide range of new tools.
As Manalastas states, these technological advancements create knowledge gaps among employees. Closing these gulfs is a priority if you want to drive greater efficiency and understanding of cutting-edge tools. On a more fundamental level, keeping up with your competitors is essential.
Solution: Taking advantage of new marketing tools requires training. However, the old training methods don’t work like they used to. This new generation of employees prefers to learn more actively.
In the past, employees grappled with software through training days and manuals. While these methods effectively share information, software users increasingly prefer different learning experiences, as detailed in Using Learning By Doing Methodology For Teaching Multi-Agent Systems (Palanca, 2021)
Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) have emerged as a novel way to drive both employee and customer onboarding. These tools are built to maximize time to value (TTV), a metric that measures how quickly a customer or user can start gaining benefits from a product or service after they have purchased or started using it.
Through a mix of interactive product demos, walkthroughs, tooltips, and other onboarding content that is overlaid on your product, your business can embrace this “learn by doing” philosophy. What’s more, DAPs like Usetiful are no-code, meaning anyone can prepare onboarding content.
Challenge #2: Creating a personalized experience in engaging customers
With so many marketing messages flying around, cutting through the noise is increasingly difficult. Generic, one-size-fits-all approaches just don’t resonate anymore. As the saying goes, when you try to be everything to everyone, you accomplish being nothing to anyone. Personalized, tailored experiences are the antidote to this issue.
We know that personalization works. A McKinsey report from 2019, The Future of Personalization—and How to get ready for it, showed that the right approach could boost the effectiveness of a single marketing channel by between 10-30%. But the challenge comes from actually delivering these experiences.
If you want to demonstrate that you understand user needs and preferences, you need to collect and understand this essential information.
Solution: Personalization is not just about effective initial messaging. It’s important across the entire user journey. However, many brands still struggle to implement personalization in any meaningful way.
One of the best places that you can start is with your SaaS demos. Adding a level of personalization to product demonstrations means that you can focus on the benefits of your solution based on particular audience segments. Read this article for more about taking your product demos to the next level.
Of course, making the most of user data comes with some complexities. User privacy and data protection have become major talking points over the last few years. Most users are fine with sharing their data if that act translates into tangible benefits for them; however, depending on where you operate, you also need to comply with GDPR.
Challenge #3. Nurturing and retaining customers through the use of new technologies
The explosion of innovative technologies like AI has put a lot of power into the hands of everyday citizens and businesses of all sizes. If you’re not using these tools to provide highly personalized and coherent marketing experiences for your users, someone else will.
So, in effect, the bar has been raised. If you don’t manage to wow your users with the assistance of innovative tech, there’s every chance that they will leave. Considering how expensive customer acquisition is right now, holding on to customers is where revenue generation is at right now.
Solution: There are lots of contemporary tools that help nurture and retain users. Some of the most commonplace include the use of chatbots, self-service customer service tools, and advanced onboarding applications.
Customer self-service is not just about giving users what they want. It can also make a significant impact on the bottom line. For example, let’s take a look at a case study by the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) company Nice. They implicated their technology across customer service centers for Aberdeen Research, and the results were remarkable, including:
A 2.2X decrease in customer effort
A 39% greater y-o-y increase in customer satisfaction
A 9.3% better y-o-y growth in annual revenue, more than twice the average of 4.3%
In-app assistants, searchable knowledge bases, and great onboard can help businesses achieve the above benefits. If you’re wondering what percentage of your user base wants self-service options, HubSpot puts the number at around two for every three users.
Challenge #4. Harnessing the power of data in understanding consumer insights
Everyone has user and product data in their hands. However, possessing that information and using it effectively are dramatically different things. Many marketing teams have been effectively using data for more precise targeting via PPC ads and understanding the customer journey. Yet, too many teams ignore the richest and most impactful data: user feedback.
User feedback has so many benefits for SaaS products. For starters, you can use it to drive product development and validate product-market fit. However, just as importantly, it’s a great way to enhance user experience and build the sort of trust and loyalty that translates into product advocacy.
Solution: Collecting the customer information you need to make data-driven decisions is something that many businesses struggle to achieve. While marketing attribution has become more complex in recent times, tracking user journey metrics is essential if you want a smooth-running machine.
However, the best and most relevant data comes from customer feedback. Of course, creating surveys and asking questions is just one part of the process. Getting your users to respond is another matter altogether.
In-app surveys significantly outperform both email and mobile surveys. Research from Refiner suggests that in-app surveys have almost double the rate of responses when compared to email surveys (13% vs 7%). That effect is even more pronounced when evaluated against mobile surveys, which may be as low as 1-3%.
Tools like Usetiful offer user onboarding and self-service options for your app. They also allow you to post in-app surveys. If you collect this data, you can use it for a variety of purposes, such as improving your product, proactively reducing customer churn, and showing your users that you’re listening to their concerns and ideas and, perhaps most importantly, that you value their opinions.
Challenge #5. Automating end-to-end processes
Marketing is one of the many areas where automation has had the most significant impact in recent years. Whether it’s automated marketing campaigns, AI-powered PPC ads, customer support chatbots, or predictive analytics, it’s clear that automation has been a real difference maker.
Additionally, RPA tools have really taken off because they allow teams to build bespoke workflows to replace mundane manual tasks.
Automation is essential for businesses that want to scale or grow. The sales pipeline is one of the most impactful end-to-end processes that SaaS providers can mechanize. Once consumers find your product, you can give them an interactive product demo that gives them a powerful insight into how your solution can solve their pain points. But the big question is, how can you set this up and take a hands-off approach?
Solution: An interactive product demo is essential if you want to automate your sales process from end to end. However, many businesses don’t pursue this path because they are worried it would be complex and expensive to engineer. Thankfully, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Building an interactive product demo is simple—provided you have the right tools. Our advice is to seek out a no-code tool that allows you to create interactive demos that can sell while you sleep. Furthermore, if you need help on how to create a product demo that converts, read this article.
Of course, some of the processes we mentioned above— such as onboarding or customer service— are also open to end-to-end automation.
Final thoughts
These are challenging times for marketing teams. However, with the right approach and the right tech at your disposal, you can overcome the big problems. From there, you can focus on what you do best.
While challenges abound for marketing teams, these are also exciting times. Even bootstrapped businesses have access to incredibly powerful tools that enable them to compete with and even outmuscle their rivals.