In the same way that customers can have pain points – specific, recurring problems without an obvious solution – businesses also have to deal with pain points of their own. In marketing, pain points are areas where your marketing plan isn’t coming together. Often, pain points are the sign of a stale marketing plan – and without an update, these paint points will likely cause serious issues down the line.
Solving these pain points is a great way to revitalize your marketing strategy and ensure your team is working towards the same goal.
These are 5 of the most common pain points that appear in business marketing and communications. Solving these problems can help you avoid some common marketing pitfalls and better identify customer needs.
1. Data Errors
Data can be one of the most valuable assets that a modern marketer has – especially if you rely heavily on digital channels, which are well-suited to mass data collection.
When that data isn’t high-quality, however, you can start to run into issues. Analysis of the information you collect may be misleading. You may under-represent key audience segments. Noise in the data may throw you completely off track, or just make the work of analyzing your data much more difficult.
To start, you should ensure that all members of your team understand the importance of data cleaning — and the risks that “dirty data” can pose.
Next, you can start to implement best practices for data hygiene and standardization. Starting with a data audit and moving on to more intensive practices — like automated data cleaning and data gathering standards — will help make sure that you can trust the data you collect.
2. No Measure of ROI
Ideally, your marketing team knows what works and what doesn’t. They have a strong sense of what the customer base responds to and the steps they’ll need to take to capture a new audience.
In many cases, however, a marketing team may not really be sure if their marketing is working. Maybe sales numbers or conversions are improving over time, but the marketing team doesn’t have data or metrics to know which ad channel or marketing technique is driving that growth.
This can quickly become a problem — with your team designing new marketing campaigns based solely on what seemed to work in the past.
Data helps you assume less. By measuring the ROI of specific campaigns and ad channels, you and your team can quickly get a sense of what works and how to optimize future campaigns for maximum engagement or conversions.
Depending on the channels you use, picking the right metrics or getting good data can be difficult — but looking for ways to calculate ROI will be essential if you want the best information possible for future marketing decisions.
3. In-Store Products Get Overlooked
Some businesses that do well selling online may run into challenges when trying to sell through physical channels. While their products may do well in a digital storefront, they may be struggling to sell them in a physical storefront.
Typically, this is a sign that there’s room for improvement in product packaging and display design.
If you want your products to stand out in-store, you’ll need the right marketing philosophy. Marketers and retail display experts often recommend that you use packaging to emphasize product strengths, be willing to experiment with a unique approach and really try to build a human connection with potential customers.
These strategies can both help you design packaging that better communicates your values and stands out on a store shelf.
4. Struggles With New Technology
New marketing technology is becoming available all the time. Major recent advances — like big data analysis and AI-powered sentiment analysis, for example — are becoming more and more common. It’s not unusual to see features that rely on cutting-edge tech make their way into platforms and tools intended for general users.
Falling behind on tech adoption is an increasingly common problem, but it’s one that can have serious consequences.
At the same time, adopting a new tool or platform can be risky. You may find that, after a few months of working with a new bit of tech, your team is slowing down or running into problems they never had with the old tools.
Finding a balance between adopting new technology and sticking with the tools you know will be essential for building a marketing strategy that works.
Being willing to trial new tech is essential if you want to keep ahead of the marketing tech curve. It can also be a good idea to dedicate some time and energy to looking for new solutions that can help you find new insights in the data you collect. Researching potential tools as much as possible before adopting them can help ensure that they’ll be a good fit for your team.
5. Inconsistent Vision
Marketing works best when a business’s marketing team is working towards the same goal — that they all have the same vision of what company stands for, and what it’s striving to achieve.
An inconsistent vision at any level can have a serious impact on your overall marketing efforts. It may mean that individual campaigns, even if they’re successful, don’t really reflect the brand’s ethos, or the tone you want people to associate with your company.
This may both make your branding less effective, and can also make it harder to coordinating marketing efforts across your company
You want to ensure that everyone involved in marketing is on the same page — that they know the company’s brand and the value you’re promising to deliver. This will help ensure that everyone is working with the same overarching business goals in mind.
Boost Your Marketing Strategy By Addressing Pain Points
Every marketing team deals with areas of friction — difficult workflows or conditions that make their jobs a lot harder. Identifying and resolving these pain points is a great way to make marketing work easier — and, in many cases, revitalize an out-of-date marketing strategy.
Simple changes — like measuring ROI when you have no data, or adopting new technology — can often have a major impact on the effectiveness of your company’s marketing and branding.
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