A Business Consultant's Breakdown of the Top Global Marketing Challenges Faced in 2022

Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit back in 2020, most (if not all) businesses have had to find ways to pivot their marketing in response to a rapidly changing global market. This shift has caused the world of marketing to become even more fast-paced and unpredictable. It can be hard to keep up and know what to focus on to facilitate deeper growth in the remaining seven months of the year.

After a few months of researching and assessing global marketing trends, I’ve come to realize that marketers typically run into 7 challenges across the globe that can halt progress and lead to wasted time and money. In today’s blog post, I’m going to be breaking them down for you and giving you expert insight into how to overcome these issues within your own business and continue to expand your marketing efforts effectively.

Below are the top global marketing challenges in 2022 so far.

Training Marketing Teams

In a survey of over 500+ marketing professionals, the top overall challenge marketing departments are facing is team training. In the fast-paced world of marketing, it can be difficult for leaders to find the time to train new employees. These same staff members may not have the time or resources to access professional development outside of their daily tasks.

How to overcome this challenge:

You don’t always need to hire instructors or have leaders take time out of their busy days for training. Here are some alternative approaches.

• Encourage project managers or individual contributors looking for visibility to present experiments, strategies, or learnings at events, weekly meetings, or annual team conferences.
• Book an annual professional development day during a slow season and pack it with enriching activities.

• Create evergreen training videos, internal quizzes, or other resources that you can distribute to new employees.

• Have leaders develop strategic roadmaps for new hires which include training assignments, resources to read through, and a contact list of people to meet or schedule training with.  

Generating Leads & Traffic

This challenge may not surprise you. Generating leads and traffic is always top of mind with marketers, but that doesn’t mean it is always easy. And even when it is going well, this is a metric that marketing teams are always looking to improve.

How to overcome this challenge:

Traffic and leads are the result of strong content. If this is an area of concern for your business, think about your content strategy. Are you truly creating high-quality content — the type of content people would pay for? And do you know the type of content your audience actually wants? To make sure that your content is truly resonating with your audience, you’ll want to pay attention to analytics. Use effective tools to properly track the types of content that perform best with your audience to generate more leads in 2022.

Demonstrating ROI of Marketing Activities

To determine something's profitability, many marketers look at ROI -- or return on investment. At the most basic level, ROI compares the amount of money you spend on a project with the amount of revenue you gain from it. In the context of marketing, ROI is what demonstrates the effectiveness of each particular marketing campaign or piece of content. Demonstrating ROI can be a challenge because tracking the ROI of every single marketing activity isn't exactly easy, especially if you don't have two-way communication between your marketing activities and sales reports.

How to overcome this challenge:

Proving ROI comes down to using effective analytics measuring tools in regards to campaigns and content. Keeping track of this data should be a top priority. You should also look at ways to establish links between marketing activities and sales results. This could look like using both marketing software and a CRM solution and then integrating them to close the loop between your marketing and sales efforts so that you can directly see how many leads and customers are generated through your marketing activities.

Justifying Your Budget

It’s pretty hard to create a winning marketing campaign without some sort of budget or financial backing. And sometimes, even the best campaign ideas require budget approval from a higher-up before they can be executed. The problem here is a simple one: oftentimes, a higher budget is required to truly see a great ROI on marketing efforts. If a company feels that money is better spent in other areas, it can feel like an uphill battle securing the money you need to move forward.

How to overcome this challenge:

This all comes back to being able to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts, as we just discussed above. Use your whole budget to demonstrate that you need the money, but also ensure you're spending on things that will provide high performance, like high-traffic, lead-gen, or revenue-generating projects.

Managing a Website

The deceptively simple task of creating and managing a high-performing, high-converting website is actually something that a lot of marketers struggle to stay consistent with. This issue usually stems from the fact that a LOT can go into website upkeep. From web design to copywriting to content optimisation to SEO, there’s no question that building a solid website is hard work. Sometimes, there simply isn’t enough time for it to be a priority.

How to overcome this challenge:

The best way to overcome your website woes is to hire an independent contractor or freelancer to help you create and/or manage your website. You can find trustworthy freelancers through your personal and professional network (I suggest browsing Facebook groups, Instagram, and LinkedIn or asking around for referrals) or a simple Google search engine.
If outsourcing isn’t in the cards, a simple tweak you can make is switching to a website hosting platform that can integrate all of your marketing channels to make things slightly more convenient for yourself.

Keep your global visitors top-of-mind when creating content. This means being aware of seasonal references and language nuances, translating units of measure and monetary figures, and giving translators flexibility to customise content for a specific global audience when they need to.

Hiring Top Talent

Hiring talent with a great track record takes time, effort, and money -- which many marketing teams do not have. It can take months to find, interview, and assess who the perfect candidates for your marketing team will be. Plus, the search for top talent has led many companies to offer highly competitive benefits such as 4-day work weeks, remote work flexibility, and luxury office amenities. 
How to overcome this challenge: Showcase what makes your marketing team and company culture a stand-out opportunity for individuals looking to thrive in a growth-oriented environment. LinkedIn data shows that the number one reason candidates will consider or accept a job is career growth. This means that job listings and a company culture that offers employees a plan for growth will see the most interest from top talent.

While these challenges are certainly frustrating, know that you are not alone in facing them, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. If you’re truly at the end of your line and looking for a solution, seeking outside support is always the way to go. As a business consultant with a focus on digital marketing, I’ve helped dozens of brands overcome challenges like the ones outlined in this blog post and step into a new level of expansion and growth. that have led to massive, transformational results.