First World Problems: 4 Modern Global Marketing Challenges

4 min read

first_world_problems.jpgIn our modern lives, if you see one of the above icons, it likely causes you a lot of anxiety. We rely on technology in our daily lives so much that the thought of no Internet, or a stalled device,or no cell service, or no battery power, means we’re not digitally connected to the world around us.

As modern marketers, we make a living ensuring our companies are digitally connecting and engaging with our customers—ensuring each touchpoint is personalized and optimized to our audience’s preferences for delivery at the right time and for their device type.

While I can’t solve your daily device and digital connectivity issues, if you’re a global marketer and the following four modern global marketing challenges resonate with you, take a look at the Cloudwords platform and consider how our global marketing solution can considerably reduce your global marketing anxiety!

4 Challenges Leading to Modern Global Marketing Anxiety

1. Too much martech - what are the essentials?

With more than 3,800 marketing technology tools to choose from, it’s overwhelming to think about researching and selecting new solutions to help streamline your stack. Before you buy more, first take a look at what you have and ensure it all works together—who knows, it’s possible you’re not using one or two of the solutions to its full potential. Cloud-based solutions continue to add new capabilities to address customer needs. Chances are, your marketing automation platform can do a lot more for you than just email campaigns.

Second, make a martech blueprint and evaluate the processes associated with each tool. By ensuring three or four integrate and communicate, you’ll be much more efficient. Once you identify a need, be sure the solution you choose will work with your existing stack. With a strategic blueprint in place and using your tech to its fullest potential, you’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish with a limited amount of resources. Increased efficiency helps alleviate anxiety!

2. Too much noise - how to make my content relevant? 

Thanks to mobile devices and the explosion of apps making everything accessible and available at our fingertips, everything a company publishes online or posts on social media sites is accessible to everyone, everywhere—and that includes audiences around the world. Which is why mobile-friendly, smart, simple messaging is critical. Minimize the marketing jargon, and “humanize” your content so you can talk to your customers clearly and with meaning. Localizing content for target regions further increases engagement—so start with simple messaging that can be easily translated.

3. Running out of time - how to scale?

I’ll start with a recent product example to explain: hoverboards, those wacky two-wheeled riding gadgets, sold like crazy ahead of the holidays. The manufacturers capitalized on global demand and couldn’t sell them fast enough. Of course, we all know what happened next—malfunctioning devices blew up or caused fires, the media covered it extensively, and now sales have slowed or stopped altogether in some regions.

The modern marketing challenge here is that we often have only a small window of opportunity to take advantage of consumer demand. It’s essential to build into our strategy and plans a requirement of agility. Marketers need to be able to act on a dime, to pivot with agility, and implement tactics more quickly when necessary. In our modern economy, three months to get a campaign out the door is too long. The market and the demand will have changed, or worse, your competitor recognized the opportunity and entered the market first.

4. Running out of opportunities – where to launch next?

With the proliferation of mobile devices and increased access to the Internet worldwide, more customers are online in new regions than ever before. In fact, smartphone ownership in emerging and developing markets has increased from 21% in 2013 to 37% in 2015. Marketers are increasingly finding new ways to reach and engage audiences, but if you’re only communicating in English, you’re missing an opportunity to influence more than 80% of the online buying audience! Did you know Fortune 500 companies based in the U.S. generate more than 50% of their revenue from overseas markets? Clearly, the opportunity to generate demand and revenue exists—don’t limit your ability to grow by restricting your target markets to the U.S. and English-only audiences.

In today’s global economy, modern marketers have an opportunity unlike ever before—to connect globally in our customers’ preferred language, on their preferred device type, and at any time of the day. Why not maximize your technology to do it better, faster, and more efficiently? And with any luck, you won’t run out of battery power in the process!
Written by Richard Blatcher