2020 is almost about to end and with it the year has brought about several marketing trends – a few good ones and a few bad ones. As a whole, the year was full of Easter eggs for every digital marketer, and the biggest brands did not leave any stone unturned to tap the potential of what the year had in offer. What had started with seemingly insurmountable marketing challenges turned out to be a great year for small startups as the year unravelled. As 2021 marches forward to announce its arrival, digital marketers must get ready to face the new marketing challenges that the year has in store.

Like every year, the most significant concerns of marketers will be traffic and lead generation along with achieving inbound marketing ROI. Moreover, with the rise of artificial intelligence and personalised preferences, 2021 is going to witness a disruptive increase in predictive marketing. Another major trend that brands will have to work with would be Sales Marketing or what is being referred to as marketing. Are you ready to usher in 2021 yet? Then let us take a look at the digital marketing challenges that await you!

8 Digital Marketing Challenges for the Year 2021

Here’s what you need to look out for in 2021!

1. Achieving Marketing ROI

Achieving the desired marketing ROI is no joke, and in 2021, the issue is going to persist. Unless you direct your resources in the right direction, arriving at the business ROI can be a tricky part, and nothing other than constant efforts to increase traffic can be of help. However, with artificial intelligence taking over, ensuring that you target the right leads will become easy.

To counter this challenge, marketers are looking forward to using programmatic advertising that is employing tools of AI to automate advertisements so that brands can target more specific audiences. Such automation will result in higher conversions and lower advertisement costs. Digital marketing agencies will also be giving their marketing workforce formal training related to marketing analytics. Hence,they can use the various tools and metrics effectively and use it to their advantage. Analysing the leads before implementing them will be given much importance so that the leads yield quality contacts.

2. Dealing with a budget constraint

While 2020 was a fruitful year for big brands, the smaller startups ended up investing a lot on some of the digital marketing trends. Although the efforts did bear fruit, entrepreneurs took a lot of time to recover the costs incurred. In 2021, spending wisely is going to pose as a challenge too. Why? Because with marketing trends like video marketing and chatbots on the rise, the solutions are not going to come easy financially. Therefore, it will be entirely on a company to be able to allocate the budget in a way that ensures all the arenas get equal attention.

Moreover, with digital marketing branching into several sections, keeping within the budget will become all the more difficult. One way to spend wisely would be to calculate the ROI for each marketing activity to make sure that the investment is going to be worthwhile. Adopting the “SMART” way of investing may help too. According to the approach, you need to be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timed.

3. Global Marketing Challenges

Every brand – small or big – is working towards an international presence and if you do not want to fall behind, you need to operate on a global level too. However, when you cross boundaries, then you will need to figure out the preferences of your customers from each country to adopt the appropriate marketing efforts. Since the choices and needs of your global customers are going to differ from your domestic consumers, you will have to come up with a marketing strategy keeping geography in mind.

The solution to counter this challenge would be to create different versions of your website with alternative language options so that customers can read and use what you have to offer. Using hreflang attributes and implementing them in the native codes of your website will help you show the version of web pages in the language of the country the IP address is from. You must also consider monetary values and size charts of the countries that you ship to. Keeping in mind the seasons and holidays of the place would be a great way out too.

4. Maintaining the streak of consistency

Throughout 2018, marketers have realised that however compelling may the marketing efforts be, if a brand is regular,it will fall flat in the race after some time. With the workload increasing, maintaining consistency will become a lingering problem. Hence, you need to make it a point to be visible to your users regularly to stay in their minds. And for that, you need to have fresh ideas ready. If you are using influence marketing, then you can’t be absent for too long.

“There should be constant activity on your social media handles and your website to show that you are always around”, says Anna Stevens, the marketing head of EssayAssignmenthelp. If you think that it is going to be a taxing job, then 2021 may be the year to outsource members to your digital marketing team whose sole responsibility would be to maintain the social media calendar every day. If you think coming with fresh content is becoming quite a load, explore the “Stories” option on networks like Facebook and Instagram.

5. Exceeding customer expectations

Long gone are the days when you could satisfy your customers with free samples or discount offers. Standing almost on the brink of 2021, you need to understand that the majority of your target customers are millennials. The young generation is not easily satiated and continuously looking for a brand that they can resonate with. Keeping that in mind, you need to come up with personalised content to deal with this challenge.

You first need to understand your crowd and then make efforts accordingly. Continuing with trends from 2020 can make you fall behind. Your users want authenticity and originality, so give them content that strikes the right chord within them. Let the bygones be and start anew in the coming year. Create your content framed around the causes that need attention and call for action to improve the society. Embrace the technological trends like including chatbots for better customer interaction.

6. How to increase conversions?

Brands thrive on lead conversions and more the conversions, the better the sales figures. When it comes to churning conversions out of customer engagement, the two major problems that marketers will have to deal are lead generation and lead nurturing. With every passing minute, newer brands enter the scenario thus making the competition more fierce and the chances of survival bleaker. In your way to make a stronger influence, you can end up being a jack of all trades and a master of none.

In the coming year, your team needs to understand where to concentrate their efforts. Content is still going to rule, and you must break free from the mould of 2020 and try other things. Whatever be the channel used – video or infographic – only authentic and high-quality content can help you grab the attention of your customers and shift to lead conversion.

7. Tech Challenges

Technology is advancing in leaps and bounds, and it is becoming tough on the marketers’ part to be able to keep up with the tech trends. Moreover, with so many tools already in practice for digital marketing efforts and many more in transit, marketers are finding it hard to decide which tools to use and which ones not.

The best way to resolve the problem is to get a tech team with specialised knowledge on marketing automation software. This team can help you find the tools that are easier to use thus increasing the productivity of your employees. Moreover, every company needs to invest in tech training so that the entire team understands how to use the tools of technology to their advantage to achieve the optimum.

8. Maintaining transparency

For years the biggest digital marketing stigma has been maintaining transparency in the marketing approaches brands they adopt and 2021 isn’t going to be any different. To deal with the problem, brands will be giving a lot of importance to areas like negative feedback and will address them explicitly.

Another way would be to encourage an open and two-way communication channel that will help them maintain better relationships with their consumers. Keeping a section of reviews and testimonials on the website can also help maintain transparency with the users.

2021 is going to be a big year! Irrespective of the above challenges, you will be able to score when you ascertain goals that are pragmatic enough to benefit your business in 2021 and beyond. Here’s to the hope that your company achieves its heights in the coming year!

Author Bio: Kefaya Hassan is a school teacher by profession, but she is also part essay writer at Allessaywriter. Kefaya has a PhD in Sociology and loves to spend time with her pet.