6 Marketing Challenges in 2024 and How to Solve Them

If you think your marketing team is facing a few hurdles, you are not alone. Marketing teams, big and small, face different challenges. They have to adapt to changes in their industry, their customer’s behavior, and even marketing trends.

This blog post is a roundup of marketing challenges in 2024 and the solutions to these problems.

P.S. Want more marketing tips? Download our free marketing guides.

6 marketing challenges and solutions

Here are the most common marketing challenges in 2024 and how to address them:

1. Training marketing team members
2. Understanding your customers’ evolving needs
3. Generating leads
4. Retaining customers
5. Entering a new market
6. Measuring your marketing activities’ return-on-investment (ROI)

Let’s go through each one:

1. Training marketing team members

Marketing is a fast-paced world. One moment, your strategy nails it and delivers results. Another moment, a competitor is eating your share of the segment. New tools and marketing trends pop up, too, so your team must catch up.

Onboarding new team members also poses a challenge, as your other team members’ efforts are diverted to training them.

The solution

Businesses need to reframe training and professional development among their employees. Because of the constantly changing business environment, team members — whether they’re managers or individual contributors — should continue learning while on the job.

Businesses and their management team should think of training as an investment. By investing in learning, employees are growing and becoming more competitive. As a result, they feel empowered, more satisfied, and are more likely to stay with the company longer.

Consider some cost-effective professional development strategies:

• Encourage team members to experiment and present their learnings during meetings or company-wide learning events.
• Schedule company “learning days” spread throughout the year. Employees take a free online course one day, and then share their key takeaways on the next learning day, so they learn from one another!
• Develop training videos and documentation that new team members can review during their own time.
• Develop a three-month plan for new team members. It can include your training videos and documentation, resources to review, and a list of people they’ll have training sessions with.

2. Understanding your customers’ evolving needs

Have you ever been a loyal customer of, let’s say, a coffee shop?

For example, let’s pretend you decided to live a more sustainable lifestyle, so you stopped using single-use cups at take-outs. You then started having coffee from another café that lets you use your reusable mug.

Customers change. Their needs and attitudes towards brands evolve. The challenge for marketers is to know their customers and catch up to their evolving needs.

The solution

There are several ways to go about this challenge, but one thing is clear: Marketers must always strive to understand their customers and their needs. How? Here are some suggestions:

• Ask your customers through surveys: Send out a two-minute survey to your customers. Make sure answering them is easy and quick!
• Get to know them through social media listening: Find out your customers’ and prospects’ sentiments on social media. Are they raving about your product in social media groups or talking about how you can improve your service or product?
• Look at the content they’re consuming: Your website’s analytics can tell you which content your customers are looking at, giving you a hint of what they’re interested in. You can also discover your site visitors’ demographics and location!
• Segment your buyer personas: Once you know a bit more about your customers, create buyer personas and segment them. Craft messages around the different persona segments, and make sure you update them as their needs evolve.

3. Generating leads

Generating leads is always a challenge for marketers. A Google algorithm update or a Facebook advertising update are some of the online marketing challenges that can affect your lead generation efforts.

New platforms arise. Privacy updates are rolled out.

And when no changes are rolling out, you’re looking at ways to improve your lead generation campaigns: better cost-per-lead, higher quality of leads, and higher conversions.

The solution

If you’re looking at improving your lead generation campaigns or addressing digital marketing industry updates, here are some suggested solutions:

• Create high-quality content that converts prospects: Make sure your copy is compelling enough for customers to sign up for your newsletter or to request a quote.
• Identify the content type that resonates with your audience: Check your analytics to find out which content types are drawing in your audience and turning them into leads.
• Mind your landing page’s speed: Once your prospect expresses interest and attempts to visit your page, deliver a page that doesn’t keep them waiting. Make sure your landing page loads fast!

4. Retaining customers

Customer retention is an important task for marketing teams. It makes sense because acquiring new customers is more costly than retaining existing ones. In addition, a 5% increase in customer retention can double your business’s revenue.

The solution

Reduce your customer churn by investing in retention strategies:

• Consider giving special offers to current customers
• Respond to customer questions and
• Have a customer loyalty program

5. Entering a new market

Businesses need to introduce new offerings to adapt to changes and grow. Sometimes these new products and services are targeted at a different audience. For example, a bakery shop specializing in cookies may start selling brookies when social listening findings show a growing demand for brookies.

The solution

New products and services present opportunities for business growth, but they also bring new challenges for the marketing team. Once your team has overcome the challenges, though, you’ll be rewarded with increased revenue!

Here are some suggested solutions to this marketing challenge:

• Conduct market research to get customer insights
• Use language that’s familiar to your new audience
• Optimize your website and social media pages to prep your audience for your new offering

6. Measuring your marketing activities’ ROI

Tracking every marketing effort’s ROI can be a challenging task. However, marketers need to know how effective their campaigns are and if these are translating into profits.

Ultimately, ROI is one of the metrics that matters the most to business owners and their management teams.

The solution

Once a marketing team has proven that its marketing activities delivered a positive ROI, it’s likely to gain support from management and an additional budget. So here are some ideas for marketers to overcome this challenge:

• Use marketing software tools: Tools like MarketingCloudFX can track all the details of your campaigns, so you can track leads and sales conversion. You can identify the first touchpoint of a customer with your brand.
• Collaborate with the sales team: Marketing and sales teams need to work together, even with software tools in place. The collaboration will not only make ROI reporting accurate, but it will also help create a more seamless customer experience: from their first touchpoint to making the purchase.

Overcome these marketing challenges with WebFX

Marketing teams need to constantly keep up with industry changes and online marketing trends. If you have a lean marketing team and are looking for a reliable digital marketing partner, look no further than WebFX.

We’re a full-service digital marketing agency that stays up-to-date on the latest marketing tactics, so we can help our clients hurdle any marketing challenge. Our team members have read over 9,000+ books, and have delivered over $6 billion in revenue for our clients.

Contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist, so we can help address your online marketing challenges!