The effectiveness of a strong inbound marketing strategy has been emphasized over and over again in the past. However, inbound marketing certainly deserves all the excitement and experts believe that 2017 will be another year of evolution for the various facets of inbound marketing.
Read on to find out the top challenges and areas of opportunities for marketers in 2017.
Challenges
1) Get Local:
Local listings and Google Maps are gaining importance by the day. While having a well-planned local listing program is the basic, removing duplicate listings and submitting listing information to some of the major data aggregators can be a bit challenging
2) Invest in Analytics:
Inbound marketing is NOT an expense but an investment. Implementing better analytics to measure your ROI ensures you are on the right path.
3) Effective Budgeting:
Inbound marketing will move from content to visuals and videos and companies must accommodate bigger budgets to meet the need. The increasing budget needs of inbound marketing will be a major challenge for upcoming businesses in the New Year.
Opportunities
While challenges lay on one side, a few opportunities put back the smile on the marketers’ face. These include:
1) Think Automation
– It is about time to take marketing automation more seriously. Marketing automation will gain more importance and tapping into its potential can be a big opportunity for marketers to achieve their target.
2) Think Visual:
– More and more individuals will be moving towards visual, interactive content and marketers will follow the trend. Blog content may not necessarily be the only concern as you set out to exploit the rage for visual content.
3) Think Content Marketing:
Content marketing and distribution will reach newer levels of maturity. Content marketing will involve social media elements, podcasts, messaging apps and so on. Embracing one or more of the latest techniques can increase customer engagement for the brand.