What Are Marketers' Biggest Fears? Expert Insights, Plus Overcoming Them

What are the biggest marketing challenges spooking you out this Halloween? We spoke to CMOs for some expert insight into what’s giving marketers nightmares. We also uncovered four marketing challenges and strategies that can help you overcome them. Let’s find out.

This Halloween, we decided to understand what’s creeping marketers out and help them overcome their marketing fears. We also zeroed in on four of the most frightful marketing categories with tips to help you ward them off.

What’s Giving Marketers Nightmares?

We reached out to CMOs and industry experts to talk about their deepest, darkest fears and nightmares. Let’s step into their shoes and understand more about the world of a CMO.

‘Armchair marketers’ can be pretty terrifying. If you give people a chance to voice their opinion on marketing, they will―and plenty of it will be uninformed and totally subjective. One great thing about leading marketing at SurveyMonkey is that we are immersed in data that grounds the conversation in market research and real customer feedback. If we’re curious about which brand color will resonate most on our billboard, we can run a concept test before we launch (answer: green trumps blue). Coming to a review meeting armed with data helps people get to the why behind our marketing initiatives.

~ Leela Srinivasan, CMO, SurveyMonkeyOpens a new window
 

Organizing Marketing-Sales internal processes: Assigning leads to sales representatives and developing practices for nurturing lower priority leads is a great challenge for every CMO. It requires the synchronization of resources and assets between sales and marketing departments. You need to tune up the communication process to effectively connect both teams as well as find the best tools that consolidate available data to determine each lead’s customer journey.

~ Irina Kovalenko, CMO, SmartyAdsOpens a new window
 

My greatest fear is marketers continuing to approach personalization in the wrong way. We need to adapt our mindset and consider what a person’s intent is on the site, instead of just who the person is. Marketers need to step back and ask, “What problem are we solving for our customers? What will the consumer want to do next? And, how can we make it easier for them?” For effective personalization, we need to start thinking beyond what the consumer is on the site to do right now, and consider what they plan to do in the future. The more marketers understand user intent and use data to predict intent, we will start to see relevant content finding its way to the right audience at the right time.

~ Carl Tsukahara, Chief Marketing Officer, OptimizelyOpens a new window
 

Many marketers today are so focused on tactical optimizations designed to drive ‘quick wins’ for their business that they’ve lost sight of the importance of brand building. While modern measurement approaches have helped marketers meet the demands for greater accountability and transparency, I fear it’s led them to place too much emphasis on short-term outcomes. To find long-term success, marketers must strike a balance between top-of-funnel awareness efforts and bottom-funnel direct response tactics. After all, you can’t expect to convert new customers if you’re not even part of their consideration set. And being overlooked is the worst nightmare for any marketer. By embracing a comprehensive, full-funnel approach, marketers can sleep better knowing they’re building stronger connections with consumers that can optimize returns in the short run and improve brand health in the long run.

~ Lana Busignani, EVP, US-Analytics, NielsenOpens a new window
 

The top challenge that is (and should be) keeping marketers up at night is quality management. Consumers are evaluating quality every minute, and when those evaluations don’t meet their expectations, it can seriously damage brand image, sales, etc. In fact, a Yotpo study found that poor product quality is the number one reason why a brand would lose a loyal customer. There are countless factors that influence quality throughout the product lifecycle, and while much of that is out of the marketers’ hands, that doesn’t mean it’s not their concern. Quality assurance is essential for marketers to be able to confidently promote their product and use “quality” as a key differentiator (like Subway, Levi’s and In-and-Out do, for example). To avoid quality nightmares—like a product recall—marketers must ensure their organizations are using the best quality management solutions across all processes, from product design and manufacturing to supplier quality and logistics, and even customer service.

~ Nina McIntyre, CMO, ETQOpens a new window
 

Lions: A customer has a quick question about a potential online purchase but you have no one available on live chat! Tigers: Your agent doesn’t recognize the customer they’re chatting with because your chat system isn’t integrated with your CRM, so you miss an easy opportunity to give personalized service. Bears, oh my!: You run a campaign that spans email, advertising, syndication, field events, and other channels, and realize too late that you haven’t built-in proper attribution tracking to measure success, so all you’re left with are silly vanity metrics.

~ Jeff Epstein, VP of Marketing, Comm100Opens a new window
 

Marketers’ frequently rely on surface-level metrics, which are often red herrings. Data points such as open and clickthrough rates are important, but they require a more granular lens. Companies must balance snapshot metrics with a more detailed analysis to ensure long-term results. Without understanding your audience — for instance, when someone subscribed, which acquisition source brought her in — marketers draw incorrect conclusions.

~ Cassie Young, Chief Customer Officer, Campaign MonitorOpens a new window
 

Marketers are spooked when they lack a cohesive strategy to drive conversions and revenue. A marketer’s main priority is to increase conversion rates across the web, mobile and app, however, when they don’t understand how visitors are interacting with their digital properties, digital marketers and their UX designers are operating in the dark. The lack of visibility leads to lower conversion rates, less spend per order and less frequent visits (if any at all). To make the nightmares disappear, marketers need real-time intelligence that empowers them to know when an experience is going off-track. Equipped with these insights, marketers can adjust their strategies and turn the experience around, positively improving conversion, revenue, and customer loyalty.

~ Tim de Paris, CTO and co-founder, DecibelOpens a new window
 

Marketing Challenges That Marketers Fear the Most

Being a marketer is a no mean feat and most marketers are on their toes to design the right campaigns, evaluate their performance, and tweak them accordingly. Marketers have a demanding job where they need to:

• Understand and deliver exceptional customer experiences
• Dive into deep ocean(s) of data to glean actionable insights
• Identify where their target audience is and devise omnichannel strategy to capture customer attention
• Stay abreast with the marketing and technology trends
• Balance budget and experiment with new ideas
• Justify the return on investment (ROI)

Amidst all this what are the thoughts running in a marketer’s mind? We decided to ask marketers about their marketing fearsOpens a new window , problems, and ghastly nightmares, and uncovered the following marketing challenges:

1. Balancing Privacy and Personalization
 

The Privacy-Personalization Paradox is all-encompassing. To stay relevant, marketers must craft hyper-personalized messages at the right time and place. For which they need specific and precise customer information like location, product preferences, buying patterns, online behavior and conversations, personality traits, and much more.

Although customers understand the value of personalizationOpens a new window , they are increasingly anxious about sharing their data, because of a string of data scandals, abandonment messages, and retargeting ads.

TREAT: Marketers need to learn the art of balancing personalization and privacyOpens a new window . Transparency is the key here. Costumers’ trust can be achieved by:

• Being transparent about how their data is being used
• Dispelling their fears by proactively protecting their data
• Strict compliance with regional laws and regulations like GDPR
   

Learn More: In the Age of 5G, Is Privacy Just A Myth?Opens a new window
 

2. Technology
 

Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), chatbots and robotics, data analytics and analytic platforms, customer management platforms and tools, automation tools, immersive technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality, etc. all have contributed to simplifying marketers’ lives.

But diverse technological options confuse them. For example, whether a marketing strategy should include AR/VR or keep it simple?

TRICK: To dispel these legitimate fears marketers must first understand that technology is only as good as a mind that tackles it. If you’re confused about the kind of technologies you should use to get your marketing message across, follow these simple steps:

• Invest in and create the right content
• Identify the appropriate technology, tool, or feature for your campaign. For example, if a how-to video for your product can deliver product usage, do not bring in heavy technologies like AR/VR because everyone else is doing it.
• Don’t go overboard with technology as customers may get overwhelmed and your marketing message will be lost.

Another significant fear is whether over-simplification is making jobs redundant or even more complicated? Marketers fear that eventually, technology might take over their jobs and hence they worry about their career progression.

TRICK & TREAT: As digital transformation takes the lead and customer experiences become more important than ever, marketers will need the right technology to handle enormous data as well as time-consuming monotonous tasks. Your career path along with technology can include:

• Staying abreast of trends and learning new tools, solutions, and platforms
• Identifying and mastering your skillset and specialization
• Contributing and making an impact across verticals

Learn More: What are the Best Career Paths for Marketers with the CMO Position Under Threat?Opens a new window
 

3. Creating a Customer-Centric Culture
 

Bring truly customer-centric is essential not only as a competitive differentiator but also for a business’s survival. Many marketers struggle to create a customer-centric environment in their organization because of legacy issues or outdated processes, and lack of awareness among employees. Lack of leadership intent and resources are also other factors that can hamper the overall customer experience.

TREAT: Although creating a customer-centric culture is not an individual’s responsibility but team effort of an entire organization, marketers can pitch in their efforts too by:

• Creating an employee-centric culture
• Empowering employees to go beyond their call of duty and appreciating them
• Organizing customer experience awareness campaigns and training sessions, and hiring those skilled with customer-centric values

Learn More: 10 Tips to Build a Customer-Centric Work CultureOpens a new window
 

4. Social Media Marketing Strategy
 

Devising a full-proof marketing strategy for social media is another major marketing challenge. By the time marketers get it right with a trend, users seem to get hooked to another (‘latest’) sensation.

For example, Instagram and Snapchat were hot favorites and while marketers figured it out TikTok took over. It can be difficult to ‘chose’ between what is known to work or becoming an early adopter to tap into the latest trend.

Moreover, going viral on social media is another marketing challenge. And going viral for negative reasons (like customer negative feedback or poor experience) is what marketers fear the most.

TREAT: We suggest sticking with the social media strategy you have mastered because you know how to reach your audience, how much time they spend on the platform, and when they log in. But ensure your marketing mix contains some percentage of your budget where you can experiment with the latest trends. You can always scale up when your campaigns start to do well. Here are our few social media marketing tricks to go viral (or not go viral in some cases).

• Research and use the right keywords
• Segment your audience, research when your audience is on social media, and target them on the right platforms at the right timeOpens a new window .
• Use social listening tools to track negative user sentiments.
• Have a dedicated social media team that can use Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysisOpens a new window to understand what customers are saying about your brand on social media.

Marketing Strategy to Tackle Your Marketing Challenges

Halloween is all about warding off the ghosts. This year we have identified some fears marketers get anxious about. Here is what your marketing strategy should look like to tackle marketing challenges:

1. Balance privacy and personalization by being transparent about using customer data and being committed to protecting user data
2. Embrace technology to assist you in improving your customer experiences
3. Create a customer-centric culture by empowering your employees
4. Devise an effective social media marketing strategy with a healthy mix of existing and latest trends
5. Tweak your career path by upgrading your skills and being attuned to the business requirements

Now that you’ve heard it straight from the CMOs and industry experts, we hope you’re feeling less anxious about those fears. And while we enter the festive, holiday season we hope this helps you tackle and overcome the nightmares.

Happy Halloween!

What are your biggest marketing fears and challenges? Tell us your marketing strategy to overcome them on TwitterOpens a new window or LinkedInOpens a new window or FacebookOpens a new window .