When its recent research revealed that just 61 percent of 6,399 global professionals surveyed believe their marketing strategy is effective, online marketing and SEO firm Reboot sought to investigate how companies feel about marketing in 2018—establishing the top priorities, challenges and trends.
Reboot extracted data from the report State of Inbound by HubSpot, which revealed it is likely marketers will focus first on converting leads into customers (70 percent) and growing traffic to their website (55 percent.)
To achieve this, global professionals said will observe the following digital marketing priorities in 2018:
The most over-rated marketing tactics, and therefore the least priority, were defined as: paid advertising (print, outdoor, broadcast)—32 percent, social media organic—13 percent, and online paid advertising (social media ads, PPC)—11 percent.
However, with change comes challenge
Echoing their priorities, marketers today have expressed they feel “generating traffic and leads” (63 percent) to be their biggest challenge, followed by proving ROI (return on investment) – at 40 percent, and securing budget (28 percent) for marketing programs.
Here are the full five 2018 digital marketing challenges:
- Generating traffic and leads (63 percent)
- Proving the ROI of marketing activities (40 percent)
- Securing budget (28 percent)
- Identifying the “right technologies” (26 percent)
- Managing the company website (26 percent)
Alongside this, global professionals identified the main disruptors in marketing moving into 2018 to be: Artificial intelligence, Virtual Reality and social platforms.
