A new Salesforce report has highlighted the challenges that marketers are facing on a global basis. The report is based upon the responses of 5,000 marketing professionals from all over the world who were asked about their budgets, priorities and strategies for the year.
It showed that the number one challenge that marketers are facing is the development of new businesses, with the quality of leads and remaining up to date with marketing technology also tying in at first place. It is apparent that the ever-growing world of technology with more and more platforms and trends appearing, is having the largest effect upon the industry.
Indeed, when it comes to growth and ROI, digital channels can have the most long-lasting effects. Customer acquisition is the second biggest challenge facing marketers this year and actually being able to quantify ROI on marketing efforts as well as customer retention rates and acquisition came in joint the third. With technology playing a big part within these top challenges, it is important that marketers look at the tools they use and decide on which are the most effective. In fact, being able to understand all of the different platforms and how to stay updated is itself a challenge facing many within the marketing industry. Part of tackling such issues involves the marketing professionals spending more money on their efforts this year. When it comes to budgets, marketers will have to spend more on social and mobile channels, including social media advertising, social media marketing, social media engagement and mobile applications and location-based tracking.
Of course these two areas (social and mobile) can be combined to an extent, so that budgets can be focused towards the two to bring in more traffic to websites. It is these opportunities that really must not be missed as the ROI can be great for both mobile and social efforts. Email marketing is also important with 73 per cent of those used for the report stating that they believe this is the focal point to their marketing campaigns.
However, 23 per cent don’t actually know what devices emails are read on, so there is clearly scope for marketers to learn a bit more about where their marketing efforts are being made effective.
