Can marketing directors survive these challenges?

In the fluid and lightning fast world of business these days, challenges arise before you can even see them coming. For marketing directors and managers, some days it can seem like every time you turn around something new and unexpected shows up. There are some daunting challenges facing marketing directors these days but the solutions can be closer than you think.

• Perhaps the greatest challenge is lead generation and turning those leads into conversions. Without an effective system in place to do so, your company will continue to struggle. Time and resources are the keys to marketing success and few small business marketing directors and mangers have those key tools in place. There is so much ground to cover with too few resources much of the time. This plays right into the additional challenges many marketing directors and managers have and that is that they tend to wear far too many hats. Trying to multi task means you are getting less done and what you are doing is getting done in a rather less than efficient and stellar way.
• Your content production, both written and video based, as well as your social media marketing is the very heart and soul of your company’s marketing success. Is your content driving traffic and being shared? Do you have the resources and the skilled people in place that you need to generate engaging and rich content that produces consistent results? Does your target audience keep shifting and changing? Is your social media targeted to those platforms where your audience is? Just being out on social media means that your content must be shared and your efforts must drive traffic. It is all about making those personal connections.
• Further challenges include keeping up with the current and future trends happening in the online marketing world as well as having the time and the trained people to tend to your analytics and your data. These are time consuming and are, along with everything else, intimately tied to your current and future ROI.
• The answer to many of these marketing challenges, again, lies in having the time and the trained personnel to actually increase your business. Many small and mid sized businesses have been turning to experienced outside marketing firms who have all of the resources that many of them lack. Most small companies simply don’t have the time and the expertise to do what needs to be done to acquire new business, generate consistent sales and increase ROI. What many small companies don’t realize is an experienced outside team can cost as little as putting on another employee or two. And, what will that cost you? How do you know they will fit in with the company culture and actually have the skills to exceed your expectations? Too many small companies are just looking at these solutions as something they can’t afford. But, in the end, can you afford not to? Sometimes going with outside professionals isn’t a cost. It is an investment in your company’s future.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer