Overcoming Marketers’ 5 Toughest Challenges

- What we're seeing is companies aren't focusing
on what channels, what key words,
what audience type, et cetera, are driving the conversions,
and they're not focusing on getting more of those.
(bright music)
- Today, we're joined by Neil Patel
and we're going to discover Neil's solutions
to marketers' five biggest challenges.
Welcome, Neil.
- Anytime, thanks for having me.
- For some context, we surveyed 1,000 marketers
and asked them about their five biggest challenges
that they struggled with in 2022.
So I'm going to read each challenge to you
and I would love your answer
as to why it's such a big challenge for marketers
and one tip you have for overcoming that challenge.
- That works, let's do this.
- Challenge number one,
62% of marketers say that growing a global audience
was their biggest challenge this year.
Why do you think it's such a problem for marketers
and how would you combat that challenge?
- You know, what's funny is I've created,
A, a global audience, and what I've also found
is once you create a global audience,
it's also even harder to monetize that global audience.
But the biggest reason that we see marketers
struggle to grow a global audience
is they typically focus on one language, believe it or not.
People either start off in English or Spanish or Portuguese
or they pick a popular language like Hindi or Mandarin.
But keep in mind, the majority of the world
doesn't just speak English or Spanish or Mandarin.
They're speaking tons of different languages.
And the real strategy
and way to not only create a global audience
but be able to monetize it
is you got to translate and transcribe.
So here's what I mean by that.
You can go find people on places like Upwork
or whatever forums you can within that region
or even within your local community,
but you need to find people
who are experts within your industry or know it enough
but live in that country and you got to pay them
to translate and transcribe because adjusting the words
from English to the other language doesn't always work.
Sometimes you got to adjust it for cultural differences.
And then the reason you also want someone
within that local region is they need to help market
that content, the website, the product, the service,
whatever you're trying to build community-wise
within that region,
head up other sites to get back links,
head up other social profiles and connect with them
and set up interviews for you.
You got to actually have feet on the ground,
and again, you got to translate and transcribe
and that solves it.
But without doing that,
sure, you can still build a global audience
even if you stick to one language, like let's say English,
but they're not going to be as engaged
because not everyone within those regions speaks English.
- Challenge number two, 56% of marketers
say that updates to privacy regulations
is their biggest challenge right now.
Why do you think it's a challenge for marketers
and what's one tip for overcoming that challenge?
- The reason marketers have issues with privacy changes
isn't because they don't like them or they like them,
it's more so every country has their own rules
so you got to adapt to them from a legal perspective.
And sure, lawyers can work on terms of service
and privacy policies,
but you got to actually adapt your marketing.
So for example, in California,
at least during recording of this interview,
you have to have a Do Not Track option
for specifically California.
Some of the other states may require it, may not require it.
But as marketers, you got to adjust what you show people
based on their regions that they're coming from.
The solution to this is personalization.
Think about personalizing experience.
If someone has dogs,
you don't really show them products for cats, right?
Because you know they have a dog.
The same goes when someone comes to your website
from a specific region, using the GoIP,
you can, you know, if it's country-based or state-based
if you're in the United States,
you can end up adjusting the marketing messages
a little bit here and there.
But you will need to connect with a legal team
or outsourced law firm just to make sure
that the marketing campaigns you're running
are compliant for those regions or countries.
- Challenge number three,
53% of marketers say that pivoting their marketing strategy
due to major global events like the pandemic, recession,
or political turmoil is their biggest challenge.
What's one tip you have for overcoming that challenge
and why do you think that pivoting a marketing strategy
in the first place is so difficult for marketers?
- It is very hard to adapt when it comes to major events
like COVID or pandemic or one country going into war
with another country and it affecting the global economy.
What I recommend companies do is most of them try to say,
"All right, all hands on deck, what can we do?"
And that's great and you should end up doing that.
But think of the Facebook rule.
If they're trying to build a product,
the amount of engineers that they have
should be able to be fed off of one large pizza.
So when you have too many cooks in the kitchen,
in other words, things actually move slower.
So what you want to do is figure out who on your team
is agile, can move fast, and have a small circle.
It doesn't mean that you don't update everyone else
on what's happening and the changes they may need to make,
but you need a few people
who can just focus on executing and adapting and changing.
Because if you have everyone trying to focus
at the same time, yeah, it's great
and there's nothing wrong with that,
but it just tends to move slower
because you find a lot of people go into meetings
and discussions about it versus actually doing.
It's really hard to get 1,000 people to all adjust at once.
But you can get the leaders on board
and a few people underneath them
who are really quick at executing.
It doesn't have to be that they'd be managers,
it could be lower-level people,
but just people that you know that can move fast.
Once you get a lot of the systems processes change
or some of the steps or any improvements you need to make,
then you just need to distill the information
to the rest of the team and have them follow suit.
- And just as a quick follow up,
what can marketers do to stay up to date
with trends that are happening in the industry
and knowing when to pivot on those?
- People will have a lot of statements saying like,
"Personalization is dead," or, "SEO's dead,"
or, "Paid advertising is too expensive."
The way I look at it is keep up with the news.
There's a lot of marketing sites that have a ton of news.
You guys do at HubSpot, we do at neilpatel.com,
and there's a lot of other sites that have news
like Search Engine Land.
Keep up with that.
But the bigger thing is just because you read something
doesn't mean it won't work anymore.
So constantly experiment within your organization
and use it for the best it is.
And here's an example of that.
"Oh, people have been saying for years
Facebook reach is dying."
Just because Facebook reach is dying
doesn't mean that there's no revenue
to be made from Facebook Organic.
Maybe not as much as before,
maybe you don't put as many resources behind it,
maybe you repurpose content so it's not as expensive,
but that doesn't mean Facebook Organic doesn't work.
Doesn't mean that you should stop.
It just means, "Hey, it's winding down
on how much ROI you can actually generate organic,
but use it for the most you can."
And whatever it is, as long as it's profitable,
keep doing more of it, right?
Maybe it's not as good as it used to be,
but something's better than nothing.
- Challenge number four, 51% of marketers
say that measuring their marketing efforts
and their marketing ROI is their biggest challenge.
Why do you think that is
and what's one tip for better measuring your ROI in 2023?
- The reason 51% of marketers
say they struggle to measure marketing's ROI
is they focus on vanity metrics.
So everyone knows there's Google Analytics,
you can pay a consultant to set it up for you.
You know, at NP Digital, we help companies with that.
But that's not really the issue.
There's actually a bigger issue on hand.
Look, at HubSpot, you can send out emails
and it converts, the money's in the list.
You know, people call it the digital ATM.
But what people do
is they focus on things like visitor accounts
and "Oh yeah, we're going to set up conversions
and Google Analytics, we're going to look at first-touch,
last-touch attribution."
But what they're doing is they're like,
"Oh, did our traffic increase?
Great, yeah, that's awesome."
But if your traffic increased and your revenue didn't,
who cares?
What we're seeing is companies aren't focusing
on what channels, what key words,
what audience type, et cetera, are driving the conversions
and they're not focusing on getting more of those.
So when you set up your marketing campaigns
and your analytics correctly,
you actually need to pinpoint what's driving the most ROI
and double down on that.
And it's okay if your revenue doubles
and your traffic goes down by half.
It's not a big deal if your traffic goes down by half
or even 5X if a lot of that traffic was irrelevant.
Your revenue went up.
So people start focusing on these vanity metrics
and want them to increase when they don't matter as much.
Like we see so many companies be like,
"Aw, my bounce rate is going in a worse direction,"
but your revenue and EBITDA went up by 20%,
so who really cares?
- Finally, challenge number five.
47% of marketers reported that generating traffic and leads
was their biggest problem this year.
Why is generating traffic and leads
such an issue for so many marketers
and what's one tip you have
for generating better traffic and leads in the future?
- Yeah, so Andrew Chen once said,
"All marketing channels eventually go to shit,"
to at least all good ones, why?
Because they become competitive, saturated,
and more expensive.
It's harder to squeeze a ROI out of them.
There is a great advantage from being an early adopter,
but sometimes if you're an early adopter on channels,
I wasn't an early adopter to Clubhouse
and I didn't believe in it 'cause I was like,
"Well, you only get value from it if you're on there
and if you're not on there on the right time, it's useless."
I'm like, "This isn't time efficient."
I'm like, "This isn't going to last, this is not,
people don't have these kind of attention spans
to be on this for like hours a day."
The real solution for marketers, it's always going to be hard,
but the real solution, and this is really the only solution,
is to take a omnichannel approach.
So what I mean by omnichannel approach
is you got to do paid advertising,
not just Facebook and Google,
but Bing, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok,
you got to try them all out, Snapchat.
You got to do SEO, not just SEO on Google,
but there's also Bing.
If you're in the hospitality space,
getting your listing for your home higher on Airbnb
it's considered SEO as well.
These are all examples of SEO.
When you're capturing someone on your website,
you got to do phone number, you got to do push notifications,
you got to do chat, you got to do email.
You actually offered a lot of these products,
which is great and it works.
And people always say, "Oh, no one opens up email.
Email is dead."
It's not dead.
Emails sent and received per day
was 319 billion emails per day.
Like just think about it.
If it's dead, why are that many people sending emails still?
So in essence, you got to take an omnichannel approach
with all those channels, including social media,
repurposing content,
and you got to do it long enough and be consistent at it.
Don't expect results in two, three months or six months.
You got to do it for a long time.
There is no silver bullet, there is no one channel.
Facebook grew with the invite flow.
Dropbox grew through Twitter.
Tweet and get more space.
Just using one channel isn't effective anymore
because they're all crowded.
You got to test, adapt, be consistent,
do it in the long run, and use multiple channels.
- Awesome, well, those are all my questions,
but I do want to leave it open
if there's anything you want to add
when it comes to marketing challenges in 2022
and as we segue into the new year.
- Last thing I would say is just stick at it
and be consistent, continually experiment,
and learn from your mistakes and adapt.
There is no silver bullet.
It takes a lot of time.
No good big company was built overnight.
If you look at organizations like HubSpot,
Dharmesh once had a post, I believe,
I could be wrong on this,
I don't know if you guys were a unicorn
before you went public,
but for all the years you were public,
your market cap increased by at least a billion dollars.
In essence, the point he was trying to make
is slow and steady, guys have done well,
it just takes a very, very long time.
Anything that's worthwhile, right?
Like if you want to build something amazing,
it takes time to recruit amazing people,
build up amazing products and services.
Good things don't happen overnight.
You look at Elon Musk and how well he's done,
SpaceX and Tesla are roughly 20-year-old companies.