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Nov 1, 20226 min read

The Opportunities and Challenges in Marketing


When marketing your product or service, you will experience some major pitfalls. This is something that happens to every business, whether they like it or not. It doesn’t even matter whether your business is large or small--no one is immune to experiencing marketing challenges. In this article, however, we will focus on the difficulties of marketing a growing business, what you can do about them, and some tactics you can use to generate new opportunities.

Challenge: Recruiting, training, and retaining employees


These three challenges go hand-in-hand. For starters, experienced marketers are in high demand. You are going to be competing with a lot of different businesses to find a good match for your team. Next, training is costly and time-ineffective, especially for a growing business. It takes precious time away from marketing because your experts will be juggling training new employees on top of their regular jobs. Retention can be especially difficult in a competitive market where others may be offering more tantalizing offers than you. When you fail to retain employees, you start the cycle over again. And we don’t want that.

That said, retention should be your first goal. If you keep your current team, then you are less likely to have to spend money on recruiting and training. Offer your employees incentives to make them stay, whether they are benefits or discounts on products or services. You want your employees to know that you care about them and value their time. You also want to make sure that they have the proper tools to do their jobs. Not having the proper tools can lead to the loss of employees due to decreased efficiency and increased frustration. Finally, make sure you trust your people! Trust goes a long way in a work environment; if there is no trust, people are not going to feel comfortable working for your business.

For training, use a Learning Management System (LMS), a software program dedicated to helping people learn all aspects of their training. These programs will help to streamline the employee training process. Make sure to use something cost-effective! And make sure you never fully stop training. 74% of workers are willing to learn more skills or re-train to remain employable. Continuous training is also something that leads to retention!

Lastly, recruitment is oftentimes a struggle. But it doesn’t have to be. Figure out which job recruitment sites match your business needs, a store that sells high-end headphones is going to look for talent in a different place than, let’s say, a business hiring computer programmers. Think about where you’re advertising your jobs as well. 39% of applicants find job openings through a social media site. Also, for a growing business, you may want to consider hiring through an agency. It is difficult to find the time and resources to go through the entire hiring process with fewer hands-on deck, why not streamline that process with outside help? These are just some things to consider. 

Opportunity: Influencer Marketing


Influencers are an important part of marketing in 2022. You can no longer scroll through your social media feed without seeing an influencer or two. That is what makes influencers so useful for marketing. Essentially, influencer marketing is when you pay someone to represent your brand on a social media platform. 60% of marketers said that influencer-generated content performs better and drives higher engagement than branded posts, making them a fairly viable option for growing businesses. 

You may think that your best shot is going for someone who has a lot of followers, but this is not exactly true. It is more effective to contract with an influencer who has high community engagement, regardless of their follower count. Higher engagement leads to more customers for you. The fewer followers an influencer has, the higher their engagement rate. This also serves to give your brand a human touch, meaning people will trust your brand more through the influencer’s recommendation. After all, humans tend to trust other humans’ words over a corporation’s. 80% of consumers will make a purchase based on the recommendation of an influencer. That’s a lot!

When choosing an influencer to sponsor, make sure you get someone relevant to your business’s product or service. If you, for instance, are looking to market your VPN service, you might want to choose someone who builds computers on YouTube. It doesn’t have to be an exact match, but someone who will draw in a crowd that may be interested in your product is ideal.

Challenge: Standing out on a budget


For a growing business, standing out when you have little to work with may seem like a daunting task. Competition in the business world can be fierce, and you must make your business shine, or else you will not succeed. This is a lot of pressure to put on the business and its employees. So how can you maximize your potential in this dog-eat-dog world?

Well, the best solution to this problem is growth hacking. Growth hacking is a field of marketing based on the principle of rapid growth. Usually, this is achieved through smaller-scale, continual A/B testing. Growth hackers focus on the entire customer journey and have a vast knowledge of the technical side of marketing (without necessarily being a programmer), as well as the psychological side. While you may want to hire a growth hacking expert to draw upon, this technique is generally low-cost, low-resource, and high-reward. If you’re looking to differentiate yourself from your competition, this is the solution.

Opportunity: Podcast interviews


One wonderful way to build opportunities is through podcast interviews. Podcast interviews are going on someone else’s podcast to talk about your product or service, as well as your business. Podcasts are popular, 26% of Americans will have listened to a podcast in the last week. So, the biggest plus of a podcast interview is the reach it gives you. Usually, a podcast serves a specific niche. Appealing to a niche, one related to your product or service, will help to narrow down your audience to the likeliest of customers. 

Additionally, you get to borrow the authority of the podcast host. Much like influencer marketing, people trust other people’s experiences and opinions. The podcast host already has a loyal audience; by bringing you onto the podcast, they are telling their audience they trust you and your business. This effectively leads to more customer acquisition. 

Challenge: Lead generation


For a growing business, lead generation can be especially difficult. But what is lead generation? According to HubSpot, lead generation is “the process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, all with the end goal of converting them into a customer.” A growing business is on a budget and has limited resources. So how can you produce more leads?

Well, to start, you want to find ways to drive more traffic toward your business’s website. One of the main ways to do this is by trading free, quality content for customers’ personal information. Usually, this entails customers giving a business their email or phone number. Social media posting and paid advertising are also effective ways to generate more leads. This will lead potential customers back to your landing page, the page you create to capture people’s information. Overall, you want to make sure you are consistently putting out content that calls people back to your website, whether the content is virtual or physical.

Opportunity: Email marketing


Email marketing may seem outdated, but it is just as relevant today as other forms of marketing. Currently, almost everyone has an email address. This makes email marketing one of the most far-reaching, accessible types of marketing as it can get to people wherever they are--if they have an internet connection. 

One of the best things about emails is they cannot be left alone. Whoever receives the email must do something about it unless they want their inbox to become bogged down. But the catch, here, is that you don’t want to be just another annoying spammer to this person. That is why it is incredibly important to send out emails that are engaging, informative, and enticing. Make sure to send out information about your products and any discounts or offers you may have for them. Additionally, you do not want to send out emails too often, or at inopportune times. Customers don’t like pushy marketers. Overall, email marketing is a cost-effective way to generate more leads and buzz about your product or service.

Final thoughts


There are many challenges in marketing today, and many opportunities as well--these are just some of them. As a growing business, how you get and keep your employees, stand out on a budget, and generate leads are three of the biggest challenges you may face. As for generating opportunities, keep in mind the suggestions in this article as they are all efficient, cost-effective solutions for generating more traffic to your website. Marketing is often trial and error, so do not be afraid to fail. If you keep trying, you will succeed.

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