If you’re trying to improve your marketing, then you need to be able to identify the pain points that are holding you back. To identify your marketing pain points, ask yourself: Where am I struggling? What am I doing wrong? What could be improved?

Identifying these pain points helps you move from “here’s what we think” to “here’s what we’re seeing.” Pain points are opportunities for improvement that can make a big difference in the results of your marketing efforts, so it’s important to pay attention to what they are.

A pain point is any place where your company feels it’s struggling. Maybe you’re not getting enough traffic, or maybe customers aren’t converting at the rate that they should be. Pain points are opportunities for improvement, and they’re also places where you’re not getting the results you want.

Knowing your pain points means you can work to solve them. Pain points are opportunities for improvement, and you can start to identify them by looking at the data. For example, if you’re getting a lot of customer complaints about your website being slow or having poor navigation, those are likely areas where there is room for improvement. You can also look at how many people are visiting each page on your site, what they’re doing after they visit that page (are they leaving immediately?), which pages get the most views overall–and so on. This information will give you insight into how customers use and interact with your product/service offerings and allow you to make informed decisions about where to put resources into improving things like website speed or customer service training programs so that customers have better experiences overall when using them!

Marketing is about connecting with people; identifying your marketing pain points helps you do so. Pain points are opportunities for improvement that can make a big difference in the way your business is perceived. If you want to build trust and brand loyalty with your audience, then it’s important to understand what they need from your services or products.

Here are some common Marketing Pain Points that we have identified.

Pain Point #1: Balancing Print and Digital Marketing – Digital marketing is becoming more and more integral to the success of your business. But, that doesn’t mean you should ignore print marketing. We’re all being asked to justify our digital marketing efforts by proving a return on investment (ROI). It’s a tough sell, especially when you’re working with tight budgets. But the reality is that print marketing is still an effective way to reach your audience and build brand recognition.

So how can you quantify the value of print? We’ve rounded up some statistics to demonstrate just how important print is in today’s marketing landscape:

From MarketReach, www.warc.com:

• Direct mail has an average engagement rate of 95% and is interacted with at least 4 times at home.
• Direct mail case studies grouped by WARC showed 70% of people were driven toward an online activity by direct mail, and 35% of consumers purchased because of direct mail.

According to AllBusiness.com:

• 7 out of 10 Americans feel that printed direct mail is more personal than online ads.
• 56% of consumers trust print marketing more than other means of advertising.
• More than 3 out of 4 small businesses use both print marketing and online efforts combined. This strategy usually offers the best return on investment and gets the best response rates.

SOLUTION:

Combine your direct mail promotion with digital marketing reinforcements, like Mail360, to increase your results by double digits or more. Think Patented offers a marketing omnichannel program, called Mail360, that works in unison with direct mail to produce superior response rates. This advanced marketing-based solution enhances the results of your direct mail campaigns through the integration of digital platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram while seamlessly tracking the effectiveness.

Shrewd marketers have studied the results and can responsibly choose a proper balance between digital and print marketing opportunities. Those that cannot effectively achieve a balance that will produce results, will realize a pain point when explaining results versus costs to upper management.

Pain Point #2: Reaching Buyers – Instead of trying to reach customers everywhere, most marketers today are changing their focus toward meeting their customers in their preferred channels. Erica Schultz, CMO at RAIN Group, a global sales training and consulting organization, told CMSWire that with the challenges 2023 presents related to changing buyer behavior, economic uncertainty, and shifting budgets, the solution is to get more focused. “Our motto used to be: ‘be everywhere.’ We’ve changed that to ‘be only where our buyers are.’ We’re more focused on defining our ideal customer profile and understanding what these buyers read, where they go for information, the conferences they attend, etc.,” Schultz said,

This is a definite pain point for many marketers who are experienced with targeting large audiences through the same channel and waiting for the leads to come in from interested prospects. Those days are gone.

SOLUTION:

It’s time to stop spray-and-pray marketing and start geo-targeting marketing.

Targeted marketing is a better approach than spray-and-pray marketing because it saves you money. It allows you to target only the people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service, so you don’t waste money targeting people who aren’t going to buy from you.

Targeted marketing allows you to reach your customers when and where they’re most likely to be interested in your product, leading to better results for your business. It’s also more effective than traditional marketing strategies—you can target specific locations at a much lower cost than traditional advertising methods. Geo-targeted marketing can be used to limit advertising to users who are within a specific radius of your business, or it can be used to target users based on behaviors and demographics. This form of targeted marketing allows brands to reach customers based on a set of criteria, including where they live and their behaviors.

There are many different ways that Targeted marketing and Geo-targeting can be used. For example, if you are selling products in specific areas of the country, you can use geo-targeting to make sure your ads appear only in those areas. You can also target users who have visited your website before or those who have purchased from you in the past. Geo-targeting allows advertisers to narrow down their audience based on location and other factors so that they can reach their ideal customers at scale.

Pain Point #3: Privacy vs. Personalization – According to Salesforce’s recent State of Marketing report, “In spite of the postponement of deadlines to phase out third-party cookies, marketers are still transitioning to zero- and first-party data. In fact, 75% of marketers polled said that they rely at least in part on third-party data, however, 68% indicated that they have a fully defined strategy to shift toward first-party data. Most concerning to marketers, the changes in data privacy policies and regulations over the past few years have greatly impacted digital analytics”. With the increased use of personalization and targeting in marketing, both businesses and consumers share concerns about data privacy and the ethical consequences of using consumer data.

But… customers want to be recognized as individuals and they want to know they have been heard. It has been proven that personalized marketing improves customer engagement and increases brand loyalty. When a company adds a personalized touch, like just a first name, to a marketing effort, it can increase customer engagement. Today, personalized print products provide an easy way to connect your brand with a customer and communicate to the customer as an individual. Personalized marketing creates a connection with customers to help them feel recognized as individuals. Customers today have high expectations for an exceptional omnichannel experience when they interact with brands, and their experiences should align with their perception of brand value.

SOLUTION:

Retargeting can be a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal. It’s all about being strategic with your retargeting efforts and making sure you don’t appear as a stalker when you’re retargeting your website visitors. So how do you balance a personalized experience and respect privacy?

First of all, make sure you’re only retargeting people who have already shown interest in your product or service.

Secondly, make sure that your retargeting ads or direct mail are relevant to the specific interests of each visitor. If someone has gone to your website because they were interested in a product or service, don’t show them an ad for something else unless it ties into their search and makes sense.

Thirdly, make sure that your retargeting ads or direct mail are not overly aggressive or pushy. It’s always better to let people choose what they want instead of forcing them into buying something they don’t want at all just because they visited one time before leaving.

Another important thing to remember is that retargeting works best if you have a clear call to action. This is where most people get hung up—they don’t know what they’re supposed to do next! So make sure your site is easy to navigate and has clear instructions on what steps are needed to complete a purchase or sign up for a newsletter/email list/etcetera.

This is all achievable through a Direct Mail Retargeting campaign.

According to Scott Clark, a seasoned journalist who has made a name for himself covering the ever-evolving landscape of customer experience, marketing, and technology, “The marketing industry is influenced by many factors, such as developments in technology, economic trends, and societal changes. To be a successful marketer, you must learn how to adapt your strategy in response to the industry’s evolving landscape”. The evolving landscape is certain.

In this dynamic environment, your marketing strategy needs to be dynamic too. A sound marketing strategy requires flexibility, and it must be built around the needs of your business. You need to address your specific pain points, your changing market landscape, and the ever-evolving tools and tactics available to you. Then, you need to stay on top of those evolving tools and tactics—they are changing fast . . .

For answers on how to resolve your marketing pain points, contact your Think Patented account executive or call 937.353.2299.