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The face of marketing has changed drastically since the introduction of social media. Today, marketers understand that social media is the best way to reach a larger audience, connect with them, and ultimately expand your business.

But the dynamicity of this channel makes it difficult to keep pace, and with new updates being launched on different social media platforms every now and then, businesses face serious challenges with social media marketing. 

Let’s take a look at the biggest challenges that await marketers on social media channels -

Lesser Organic Reach

With the widespread use of the internet, more and more companies are leveraging on social media channels to increase reach and widen their audience base. This means that marketers have to face a decline in their organic reach. A lesser organic return can force marketers to become selective in their social media approach, turn specific about what and where they post and also capitalize more on paid advertising to maintain their numbers.

Social Video Saturation

There has been a consistent growth in the field of social video advertising. However, this development has shown no signs of stopping and has now reached a point where the market for social videos has become highly saturated. This poses a big challenge for marketers as they have to produce extremely relevant video content and distribute it appropriately if they want to get noticed.

New Algorithms

When social media was newly introduced, everything was quite straightforward. But as the number of users grew, social media platforms started incorporating new algorithms that made it difficult for marketers to reach so many people like they used to before. Today, users see posts that are relevant to them which mean marketers need to find the right followers and post engaging content instead of generic marketing messages.

Time Management

Of all the challenges that marketers will have to face, the biggest one is time management. It is really difficult to update social media as well as stay updated on the latest trends. Social media, as helpful as it may be, has the ability to consume all of your time if you don’t stay focused.  If you don’t manage your time properly, all your attempts and efforts might go in vain.

These are some of the challenges that marketers are likely to face in the upcoming period. Stay observant and make sure that you don’t get caught up!

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Facebook which was a revolutionary social media platform that galvanized the social media world and set benchmarks is not so cool anymore amongst youngsters, says a recent study. A new study by New York based e-Marketer suggests that a lot of youngsters are moving away from the social media giant and checking out new age apps like Snapchat and Instagram.

This report is the latest among many which reveal the growing disconnect between young people and Facebook. There have been many reports that Facebook has been unable to retain young people and has lost out a big user base to new age apps.

The report also suggests that it expects a 5.8 per cent drop in the 18-24 year age segment in US only. Furthermore it suggests that the world’s largest social media platform will see a 5.6 percent drop in the 12-17 year old segment as well.

However the biggest loss comes in the under-12 age group where it is expected to lose out around 9.3 per cent. The decline is expected to continue for 2019 and 2020 as well. The total loss of under-25 age group users is expected to be around 2 million.

The main apps that will benefit from this decline would be new age apps such as Instagram and Snapchat. Snapchat allows disappearing content and is very popular amongst teens and young adults. Instagram has seen a sharp growth in this phase and with features like filters and stories, it has been able to attract new users. Snapchat is expected to add around 1.9 million users in 2018 and Instagram is expected to add some 1.6 million users between the age of 12-24.

What does this decline mean for digital marketers? It suggests that marketers will have to rework their marketing strategies targeted at young people and engage new platforms in order to reach them. Facebook’s decline will mean the targeting of content will need a changed approach.

Digital marketers will have to find out ways to reach out to the younger audience on Snapchat and Instagram. Though it is too early to write off Facebook, digital marketers will certainly have to find ways to reach out to people that Facebook has lost to other social media channels.

Social Media is a volatile and rapidly changing environment. A digital marketer has to keep analyzing trends with a long-sighted vision, and be ready to change strategies in order to be future ready.

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If you own a small business, you must have asked this question - is blogging necessary? This is a question asked commonly by small business owners who don’t have the time or skills to create quality content. However, successful business owners have experienced the various benefits of blogging and understand the transformation it can bring when it comes to search visibility, leads, and sales.

A blog is a tool that helps businesses in reaching new and prospective customers. Businesses use blogs to build dynamic communities where audience can exchange information, reviews, the solution to various issues and share opinions about a product or service. If you still wondering whether or not you should start blogging for your business, here are some reasons that will address all your queries about blogging -

Improve Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are driven by fresh content and blogs are the best way to provide frequent content. By writing creative blogs with popular search keywords plugged in, you give major search engines like Google new content to index thus enhancing your visibility on search engine results pages.

Humanize Your Business

An ongoing trend in business success is building relationships with potential as well as existing customers. People are curious to know who you are, how you operate, your vision, your values, and more. Blogging provides a platform where you can build your brands personality and bond with your customers. You can entertain your audience and inspire them. The more they know about you, the more they will trust you

Build Opportunities for Sharing

Every time you publish a blog, you provide your audience with an opportunity to share the blog with others. If your content is good and interesting, people will link to it, post it, tweet it, and email it to others. Not only is this free marketing but it also gives your business credibility and validates you.

Backs Up your Social Media Presence

When you have an innovative and attention-grabbing blog, you can endorse it on all your social media channels with intriguing teasers and catchy headlines. You can drive traffic to your blog via your social media platforms. You can add call-to-action buttons and provide readers the chance to share your post with their groups.

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E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses e-mail as the delivery medium for communicating a marketing message to a group of people. E-mail marketing can have many different styles or levels of personalization, but any e-mail sent to existing or prospective customers can be regarded as e-mail marketing.

Specifically e-mail marketing is used to support customer loyalty and encourage repeat business with existing customers, as well as to deliver information and offer promotions to both customers and prospects via newsletters and other forms of communication

Good e-mail marketing software is a key component of a successful e-mail marketing system. The software should enable the company to manage its e-mail subscription lists, allowing recipients to easily subscribe and unsubscribe; send e-mails to subscribers or to recipients on a purchased list successfully with minimal delivery issues; provide predefined templates to enable streamlined e-mail creation; and, provide an auto-responder to manage recipient replies.

The software should also track the effectiveness of e-mail marketing campaigns and provide regular reporting to measure various performance criteria including messages delivered, click rates, and bounce rates.

Companies that have the in-house technical expertise and resources may prefer to develop their own system rather than rely on a third-party provider for this service.

If a company chooses a hosted service provider, it should perform due diligence to ensure the provider has the right expertise and a good track record with its customers.

When choosing a service provider, it is important to consider many factors: a successful deliverability rate, features and tracking capabilities, available support, and the overall cost of service.

Reputable e-mail marketing service providers try to ensure that customers’ e-mails are not blocked by major ISPs. However, it is sometimes difficult to control whether or not the e-mails arrive in the recipient’s inbox or the spam box.

Although most e-mail marketing service providers designate a quality score to help indicate the likelihood of the e-mail being delivered, getting whitelisted is the most effective way to ensure that e-mails get delivered properly.

Whitelisting specifically allows e-mails from a certain source or sender to be delivered into an e-mail inbox. Adding trusted e-mail addresses to a personal whitelist lets the e-mails from that source pass spam and junk mail filters. Different e-mail client and Internet security platforms have a variety of methods that allow users to create whitelists.

A company needs to collect the e-mail addresses of its customers to enable the company to run e-mail campaigns. A list developed in this way is commonly referred to as a “house list” and is derived from the company’s own database of current customers, previous customers, inquirers, responders, contest entrants, and so on.

One of the most effective ways of collecting prospective customers’ e-mail addresses is by having an opt-in subscription form on a landing page on the company website. Visitors to the site provide their e-mail addresses and agree to accept offers or information. Most e-mail marketing services provide functionality to integrate subscription forms on a website.

Growing the size of an e-mail list is important, but it is only valuable if there are engaged customers on the list. Companies need to build strong, trusted relationships with their subscribers. Repeated e-mail messaging that does not engage customers will be ignored and customers will eventually unsubscribe from the list. Sending high quality, relevant content is extremely important.

If a company always sends advertisements or promotional e-mails, subscribers may feel like they are being too “marketed to” and tune out the messages or unsubscribe.

When designing e-mail content, it is important to identify the key messages that the e-mail should communicate and the specific information that will move the recipient from his or her current perception to the desired perception, overcoming any barriers to conversion.

E-mail marketing has proven to be one of the most effective digital marketing channels. When well executed, e-mail marketing can benefit many types of businesses for many different purposes. Through e-mail marketing, a company is able to keep in touch with customers and prospective customers easily and efficiently. It is a cost-effective way to transmit valuable information relevant to a customer’s interests.

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Big data and analytics become an integral part of marketing since the inception of internet in the late 1990’s and the introduction of smart phone and other internet enabled smart devices in recent times. Big data usually refers to the data sets with sizes beyond the scope of commonly used software tools to collect, clean, manage and process data within an acceptable time frame. With the rapid advancement in technology and increasing use of smart phones and other internet enabled devices, organizations today face overwhelming volume of data through multiple channels and devices. The main roadblocks while using big data are:

• Capture high volume of data from multiple sources and consolidate the data
• Data cleaning (i.e. removing redundant or unnecessary data – internal data, data generated due to testing, deletion/ blocking of cookies)
• Data storage
• Data sharing/ transfer
• Data visualization
• Data analysis

Now the important question is why should organizations use big data and analytics. The answer lies in decision making. Organizations cannot afford to make any decision just by guess or gut feeling. The use of predictive analytics and certain other advanced statistical methods to extract value from data leads to more confident decision making which in turn results is greater operational efficiency, cost reduction and reduced risk.     

Big data enables marketers to increase the size and range of information sources while speeding up reporting, enabling real-time forecasting and more informed and accurate decision-making.

marketers benefit from a large volume targeting options when it comes to online advertising. The growth of cookies and information-rich social media, means that the data is there to go beyond simple demographic, geographic, psychographic and time-based targeting options. 

Big data analytics helps optimizing campaigns and improve results in a scalable, real-time manner.

Big data transformed the last-click conversion attribution model to the multifaceted attribution model which takes into account all touch points across consumer purchase life-cycle. It was complicated earlier to capture these different, interrelated factors and their relative weights. But big data makes it easy to track, analyze and evaluate activities to see what is actually driving customers to engage.   

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[Suman Ghosh, VMEdu staff writer, contributed to the article.]

Sources:

https://econsultancy.com/blog/65260-the-top-four-applications-of-big-data-in-marketing/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mckinsey/2013/07/22/big-data-analytics-and-the-future-of-marketing-sales/#6f0ec1ee344d