Addressing Today's Top Marketing Challenges With D365

Every marketing team faces different challenges with many having to rapidly adjust in light of recent market challenges including the global pandemic, supply chain issues and rising costs. As marketers look to drive business growth in the aftermath of these unforeseen challenges, one thing remains constant, change is inevitable. Marketing is so fast-paced that marketers can find it difficult to identify priority areas to develop while trying to keep up to date with emerging trends.

A tool familiar to marketers everywhere, marketing automation software is no longer a nice to have but more of a business necessity. A solution designed to help turn many repetitive and complex marketing processes into automatic and easy steps with the click of a button, marketing automation software such as D365 Marketing has come a long way since its inception. Helping marketers easily manage end-to-end campaigns and keep on top of tasks, marketing automation has become an essential technology in the daily lives of marketers.

With many contenders on the market, it can be difficult to identify the best-fit solution. From our experience, it is best to first understand the top challenges you are trying to address. Below we have compiled some of today’s top marketing challenges that marketing automation software can help your team address.

Limited Time and Resources

A notable impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on marketing teams has been an overall tightening or even reduction in budgets. Recent research by Gartner noted that the average marketing budget reduced to 6.4% of overall company revenue in 2021. Despite increased competition across the board, pre-pandemic budgets are no longer on the cards putting increased pressure on marketing teams to make the most of each euro spent. Further, tighter budgets can mean hiring freezes meaning that marketing teams need to find efficiencies where they can do more with less.

As the shift from traditional to digital marketing continues to happen, marketing teams are constantly trying to upskill and keep pace with emerging digital trends and shifting audience behaviours adding further time pressures to already busy teams. Marketing automation software can help marketers by automating the repetitive and manual tasks associated with campaigns allowing marketers to scale marketing efforts more easily.

Personalisation

Personalisation is key in marketing, helping marketers target the right audiences with content relevant to their needs and interests. Higher levels of personalisation in targeting can lead to higher quality leads and therefore higher levels of conversation. A 2021 McKinsey report revealed that over three-quarters of consumers noted that personalised communications were a key determining factor in their consideration of a brand and decision to repurchase.

Yet despite the potential, a study by Ruler Analytics showed that 30% of marketers believed that reaching the right audiences was one of our biggest challenges, one set to become even more complex thanks to evolving data legislation and Google’s upcoming changes to cookie management. Marketing automation software can help teams simplify the personalisation process, providing greater transparency across all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Measuring Return on Investment

Another common challenge faced by marketers is measuring return on investment. A recent CMI survey by eConsultancy group revealed that nearly two-thirds of CMOs are feeling pressure from their CEOs and brands to prove the value of marketing initiatives. This pressure is of course compounded by the previous challenge of tighter budgets and resource constraints.

Understanding the full impact of marketing campaigns can help marketers understand which activities are performing well and which are failing to deliver, helping teams hone in on those activities that deliver the greatest business impact. However, a lack of visibility like this can lead to wasted ROI. It can be difficult to get the full picture of customer touchpoints without a central space to track them, yet many marketers still use fragmented systems to manage individual components of campaigns. This is where marketing automation software can help through the centralisation of campaign data and easier overall reporting against objectives

Managing Multiple Marketing Channels

Almost every organisation has some sort of online presence in today’s digital-first working environment. Consumers are using multiple devices, websites, and apps daily meaning there are more channels for marketers to reach their audiences. In fact, 92% of today’s marketers use more than one channel while 81% manage more than 3.

However, managing multiple channels can prove challenging for many reasons from time constraints to difficulty tracking. Marketers face the challenge of what way to use limited resources across multiple challenges for maximum impact. A central marketing automation solution can help support this by allowing marketers to manage different channels from a single space.

Sales & Marketing Alignment

Listed by many marketers as a critical priority for 2022, sales and marketing alignment is viewed as an essential strategy for long-term business growth. Despite sharing a common goal, to attract prospects and leads and convert them into customers, misalignment between sales and marketing is common. Each function tends to interact differently with the customer and in many cases, both departments can hold very different information on the same contact.

The rise of social and always-on connectivity has altered the buying journey dramatically. Content now drives business and sales, with 70% of the buyer's journey completed before a salesperson is even aware of the prospect's interest. This reliance on content and messaging before the first sales interaction means sales and marketing must be more aligned sharing insights to ensure marketing can generate the right messaging to drive the prospect through the sales funnel. Alignment between both can be made easier with a shared central system such as a marketing automation solution, for all lead and contact information and touchpoints. If you would like to read some more tips to help sales and marketing alignment, check out our recent blog.

These are just some of the top challenges facing marketers today that can be helped with the introduction of a marketing automation solution. Discover how D365 Marketing can help address these challenges in our recent webinar now available on-demand.

Brianna Bracken, Marketing Executive Aug 11, 2022