In such a fast-paced evolving digital landscape, marketing agencies face both challenges and opportunities. As technology advances and consumer behaviors change, marketers need to make sure they remain competitive and effectively adapt their strategies.
Small and medium-sized businesses are often the ones that may face the challenge of limited resources when it comes to allocating their budgets. Resisting to make the necessary changes to your marketing strategy can make you inferior to your competitors.
In this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about the challenges marketing agencies face and the opportunities they can take advantage of.
3 Challenges marketing agencies face in the online world
The number of users sharing their information and interacting with different brands is growing year by year, so this is creating a few challenges that marketing agencies need to face. Here are the most common ones:
1.  Complying with data privacy regulators
Agencies are continuously collecting data from their customers, and what does this mean? It means that you are more prone to having to comply with data privacy regulators like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Some reasons many agencies daily to comply with data privacy regulators is due to the following:
- Growing amounts of data
- Introduction of new technologies that agencies can’t use
- Human error
- Not updated on changing regulations
- Malicious attacks
Balancing personalization with consumer privacy requires careful attention and enough trust from the customer’s side. Therefore, it’s always important to inform the customer of the data you are gathering from them, how it’s processed, why, and give them options to modify, or delete the data if needed.
2.  Complying with Google Ads consent alerts
Users are becoming more aware of data privacy, and large companies like Google are taking the necessary steps to ensure that its third-party business consumers also comply with privacy compliance requirements.
Google has implemented new requirements for verifiable user consent, enabling continued access to Google ad personalization features. The Google Ads Consent alert helps advertisers comply with data privacy regulators and government regulations without losing their progress in achieving their goals.
The consent alert for Google Ads personalization just came into play in March 2024, and all campaigns that weren’t complying with it received a message that they needed to take the required action for ad personalization features before March, or else their ad performance would be impacted.
Google has introduced these new requirements to make sure that ad tech customers align with user privacy regulations and maintain trust with their users. This was mostly implemented due to the increased restrictions set by data privacy regulators like the GDPR and CCPA.
3.  Limited resources
The biggest issue many small and medium-sized agencies have is limited resources. A volatile economy has impacted businesses in all fields and industries. Startups have an even harder time managing this since they are just entering the market and the competition is at a high level.
Here are the most common challenges small and mid-sized businesses with limited resources face:
- Prioritization: Limited resources cause businesses to have trouble determining which projects or tasks need to be completed first, deciding when the deadline should be, and how much time it’ll take to complete each task. Making mistakes in this phase leads to delays.
- Communication: 9 in 10 businesses claim poor communication impacts their growth and productivity. Limited resources can seriously impact miscommunication and this leads to delays and many misunderstandings.
- Budget issues: This is quite common amongst many businesses, and the problem is that having budgetary problems can leave you behind competitors since you won’t be able to afford the newest technological advancements and take advantage of other opportunities.
- Delegation: Limited resources can affect how you delegate tasks. Larger corporations with more team members can delegate tasks much easier since they can hire more people, but many agencies face problems with this, and task delegation becomes challenging.
Limited resources can seriously affect how much freedom and flexibility you have, and this is a common problem many agencies go through.
3 Opportunities marketing agencies should take to advance
Even if you are suffering from limited resources, or having a hard time complying with data privacy regulators, there are many ways you can still make your customers happy. Here are three opportunities you shouldn’t miss:
1.  Personalizing services
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71% of customers want businesses to provide personalized experiences. Personalization is becoming a must to integrate into your everyday marketing strategy and a great opportunity to attract new customers and retain current ones.
The goal of personalization is to make the customer feel like you are directly speaking to them. For example, addressing them by their first name, sending out an email that their favorite product is on discount, giving them a limited-time discount, or something else that you can imagine. Companies can use personalization in numerous ways which include:
- Content: A content marketing agency can segment and determine how to personalize content for their customers based on their age range, job title, gender, industry, and location. Marketers will tend to know more about interests and preferences to find out what kind of content they can give to their audience.
- Email: Emails can be personalized in many ways. You can send educational emails to your customers, discounts, similar recommendations to what they search for on your site, and offer limited-time offers.
- Product recommendations: This includes using purchase histories to determine product recommendations. If customers see an ad or email that shows a similar product to the one they’ve recently purchased, it’s more likely that they’ll make another purchase. You can ask your audience to share their interests with you, so you can better know what kind of product recommendations to send out.
Personalization is an opportunity to allow your customers to know that you care about them and sending irrelevant ads or marketing messages is never something you want to do.
2.  Usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools
AI tools are on the rise and while many may be thinking about how it may benefit them and their business, the truth is that AI can help marketers get work done much faster by getting rid of repetitive tasks and allowing team members to focus on more important tasks.
AI tools can be used for a different number of reasons, but as of now, many marketers are using them for:
- Customer personalization: AI is assisting marketers in producing personalized content. While we mentioned how important personalization is, you now have someone who gives you a hand in doing so.
- Content creation: Many marketers are now using AI for creating content. Even if they write the content on their own, they’re going to use AI to generate outlines, edit content, and discover new content ideas.
- Data analytics: AI marketing tools are great for analyzing large amounts of data and drawing insights from them. Compared to any human, AI can analyze data much quicker and give you a better understanding of market trends, target audience interests, and real-time brand sentiments.
More than 50% of global companies are planning to incorporate AI into their services this year, while 35% have already reported using it.
3.  Engaging with customers on social mediaÂ
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Social media channels are becoming so common nowadays to the point where marketers are using them to directly communicate with their customers. Long gone are the days when everyone only communicated by email.
There are many ways you can reach new customers only by engaging with your current customers through your social media strategy. Here are a few tips:
- Educate your customers: Create posts that talk directly to your customers about your product or service. Discuss the features and what kind of problem it’s solving. Create tutorials, respond to any questions customers may have, share education resources, organize webinars, and do anything creative you can think of.
- Share interesting content: By sharing interesting content, you’re creating opportunities for your audience to interact with. Interesting content includes sharing news, live updates, events, facts, customer testimonials, partnerships with other brands, or even creating questionnaires to interact with your audience.
- Differentiate your social media channels: Each social media channel is unique, and you need to see where your target audience is most active, and where your brand voice stands. Facebook and Instagram are great for directly engaging with your customers and are used mostly for sharing events, product images, videos, reels, and more. Twitter is great for sharing news, and if you’re an agency that loves to promote your product and service through videos, TikTok is going to be the right choice for you.
Recent studies showed that social media has impacted revenue growth by 61%, so it’s an excellent opportunity to grow your sales through social media channels.
Take advantage of opportunities and don’t let challenges stop you
The business world will always have challenges to face. However, with challenges, there’s also many opportunities that you can use to skyrocket your business growth. Keep up with data privacy trends, and don’t allow your limited resources to stop you from growing your business.
Personalizing services with your customers is becoming more important than ever if you want to connect on a deeper level. Also, don’t forget about using AI tools to help save time, and engage directly with your customers through social media platforms. No matter how many challenges there are, you can’t ever substitute the way you market your product or service to your customer.
With over a decade in the tech field, Bogdan blends technical expertise with insights on business innovation in technology.
A regular contributor to TMS Outsource's blog, where you'll find sharp analyses on software development, tech business strategies, and global tech dynamics.
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