The Biggest Challenges Marketers Face & How to Solve Them (Pt 1)

Now that we’ve reached the middle of the year, it’ll be common for businesses to begin looking back at the last six months to inform their plans for next year. As a part of this process, they’ll review any challenges that have arisen and how best to address them moving forward.

We recently came across an article from Hubspot that provided some very interesting findings. From their survey, they uncovered that the top challenges marketers are currently facing include:

1. Generating traffic & leads
2. Sales/marketing alignment

These are two things that are crucial to get right, as they directly impact the growth and overall success of your business. And you can’t have one without the other – if you don’t have a consistent flow of quality leads, then your sales & marketing teams won’t be able to bring in new customers and revenue. And if you do manage to get some leads coming in and your sales & marketing teams aren’t effectively working together, then you’ll most likely not get those leads across the finish line.

So what can you do to tackle these problems? We’ll talk about solutions to create a continuous flow of leads in this post, and then keep an eye out for our follow-up post where we will discuss solutions for sales/marketing enablement.

When it comes to generating leads, there are several things you can do. Here are five simple steps to get you started:

1. Have clear objectives for your business goals & target market. Once you do this, you can select the channels that are most relevant for you, i.e. LinkedIn or email, depending on where your audience is. Without objectives set, it’ll be much more difficult to focus your team’s efforts and prioritise resources to achieve tangible progress and results. For example, with an objective to generate quality, continuous leads, some of the action points to achieve this could be to explore hiring an agency that specialises in it, or investing in the proper team structure to do this in-house (i.e. analysts, project managers, creatives, etc..), or setting up a robust lead scoring system in order to accurately track where leads are in the funnel and tailor marketing to enable them to move them along.
2. Start with expert research, a bespoke database and engaging content. It’s important to enlist someone with knowledge and experience to set up your lead generation process. This is a complex process that if not done properly, you won’t get consistent, genuine results. Getting a fit-for-purpose CRM solution that’s suitable for your team’s specific needs will set them up to manage the entire lead nurturing process from start to finish. Also ensure you have somewhere to drive traffic to that you can measure, like a website or campaign landing page.
3. Regularly share thought leadership pieces that people actually want to read. Many people join LinkedIn to expand their knowledge, so share informative pieces that will inform and educate, establish yourself as an authority within your sector and you’ll soon build up a good network. And due to recent LinkedIn algorithm changes, it’s now easier than ever to get your content in front of a bigger, relevant audience (so long as your background matches the subject matter and the content is genuinely informative or helpful). This is a brilliant way to establish brand awareness in an organic way, and sow the seed for your services early on so that interested prospects will engage when they’re ready to take the next step.
4. Follow up prospects. This goes without saying, but if you don’t have a dedicated team or person whose primary job is to follow up on and nurture prospects, then it’s likely they’ll never turn into customers. The lead nurturing process is a delicate one and requires a lot of skill – too much too soon will alienate the prospect, while too little too late will lose you a potential sale. That’s why it’s important to have someone with experience continually monitoring this process.
5. Seek help from the experts. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we really do mean it when we say that expertise in this field is essential. So much can go wrong when there are this many moving parts, and when human behaviour is involved, it gets even trickier. That’s why you don’t want to leave this part of your business strategy revolving around growth to chance. As mentioned previously, whether that’s enlisting a specialised lead generation agency or a consultant to help you set up the comprehensive team you’d need in to do it correctly, you must seek out expert advice.

Ready to supercharge your business growth with a continuous flow of leads? Get in touch.

Keen to learn more about lead flow? Read our top tips blog post here.