9 Modern Day Digital Marketing Challenges for E-commerce And How To Overcome Them (2023)

In today’s ever-changing and ever-expanding digital world, every marketer faces one challenge or the other while trying to establish a market for their brand.

While most brands aspire to achieve the same goals via similar channels, the challenges faced vary. One brand might have trouble driving enough traffic from social media to their website, and another one might have trouble measuring the ROI of the channel that brings the most traffic.

In simple words, every marketing strategy out there has room to improve – but the catch is to identify where you are facing a challenge and what you’re trying to achieve. So here’s taking a look at the 9 most common digital marketing challenges today and how you can overcome them:

The 9 most common digital marketing challenges for e-commerce:

1. Not getting lost in the volume

The digital world is booming, and almost every business out there has taken its products/services online to reach out to the masses. According to a report by Experian, most marketers are now facing the challenge of making their brand stand out in the volumes available on the internet. This eventually leads to the difficulty of running a brand awareness campaign or acquiring new customers.

What can you do?

While it is a fact that at least some of your products/services might be similar to what another business has to offer, there is a minor aspect that is unique to you. Discover the USP of your product/service and find ways to convey the same. Conduct surveys on your existing customers and your target audience to better understand what they are looking for and identify which needs your brand can fulfill.

2. Driving relevant traffic to the website

Continuing on the point above, marketers today are consistently facing a challenge in spreading brand awareness in the right target market. This also makes it harder for them to drive the ideal traffic to their business websites. Therefore, understanding which channel to tap into and driving the relevant audience to your website to turn them into customers is becoming an ongoing challenge for marketers.

What can you do?

Conduct an audit of your online activity. Identify what tactics you are opting to reach out to your audience. Consider the content you’re producing, the channels you’re presenting it on, your social presence, and the paid/unpaid campaigns you are running. Use robust analytics to know which of them work the best for you and optimize your efforts simultaneously. But it is essential to measure your analytics at modest intervals of time to give each of your efforts enough span to work over.

3. Targeting the right audience effectively

The first and foremost thing that an effective marketer would do is identify their target audience in the market. With the number of internet users increasing by the day and their needs changing almost every second, targeting the right audience has become one of the biggest challenges for marketers.

Keeping in mind what your business has to offer and what kind of problems it would solve when put to use, create your value proposition. This will help you identify who or what demographics would resonate with it the most when targeted.

What can you do?

Look at the general demographics of the market that you want to reach out to. Identify their needs and create customer personas taking into consideration their online behavior and possible future needs. In this case, companies like Wigzo equip you with machine learning and predictive analytics tools to enable better persona creation.

4. Lead generation using social media

When it comes to the various social channels, most businesses and marketers don’t know how to remain consistent. Most of them feel that it is all about the paid campaigns they are supposed to run for brand awareness and lead generation. Although, both of them is a constant challenge with the ever-increasing market competition.

Even though considerable marketing budgets are set aside by businesses, most marketers cannot run their engagement into revenue. But you mustn’t just build your social following – you need to get conversions that add up to the overall business goal.

What can you do?

The most effective way to leverage social media is to integrate your marketing and sales efforts. Sharing behavioral data and interaction levels with leads on social media can help the sales team define a custom, personalized customer journey for them – which they are more likely to convert on.

5. Optimizing marketing budgets and ROI

With the increase of digital channels and advanced analytics tools, marketers are now expected to optimize the marketing budgets and the ROI to best suit the business’s needs. He is expected to measure each effort and its value to achieve the end goal – the number of leads generated or the revenue raised.

What can you do?

Tap into the power of machine learning and robust analytics regularly. An effective marketer can gauge the value of every single lead generated from a marketing effort. Understand the impact of each digital campaign on lead generation, test different variants and approaches of reaching out to your target audience to optimize your campaigns for much better results.

While you measure the digital inbound results, ensure that you consider the outbound efforts being made by your business and what kind of results it is yielding.

6. Keeping up with the changing trends

The digital market and marketing techniques have changed drastically over the last few years. And it continues to change even today to cater to the modern-day addressable market needs. Hence, marketers need to stay up-to-date with all these changes.

Be it the launch of a new social media platform or a technology that would make a marketing effort more robust, marketers need to remain on top of things to ensure their business does not lose out on possible conversions.

What can you do?

Consistently engage with your target audience on platforms that they are most active on. The most effective way of doing so is to leverage social listening using tools like Hootsuite. They help you understand what people are saying about you and your product/service, what they expect – allowing you to become a part of their conversation.

7. A Check on Increased Security Risks

We have come across cases wherein online security has been compromised. The news and media keep it afresh. Since more information is shared online, hackers get more incentives to find ways to get through security. Shopping, bill payment, application submission, order copies, certificates, and other essential documents, and so much more are stored online for easy access – making these spaces a treasure trove for hackers and thieves. Venturing into digital marketing sure comes with its cost of security getting compromised as most of the work remains online. Security comes as a challenge.

What can you do?

You may already have a good firewall, HTTPS encryption, and maybe a good antivirus program. But that’s not enough. You will need more. Sit out and work with an authentic security team and identify your website’s weak spots and apps to create measures to reduce risk.

8. Lesser Focus on Keywords

Keywords were the bread and butter of SEO sometime in the immediate past. You just needed to find the right keywords and use them right, and your site could shoot up to the top in the search results—helping you with more exposure and traffic.

Now Google has changed algorithms making the keywords less critical. However, they are still to be used but are not the focus. Instead, it has become a topical approach rather than seeking and finding one, meaning that Google first gets an overall scope of your website.

What can you do?

First, you need to use search phrases instead of keywords and build content around topics rather than coming up with content for each keyword you want to target. Make your website a resource for the phase or question you need to target and see the changes. Furthermore, you can also run a website technical audit to evaluate how well your website is performing on search engines.

9. Effective Ad Copies for PPC Campaigns

Gone are the days when you could type in a ‘guess’ keyword in the PPC account, load some budget and enable a campaign. That used to be sufficient!

It is a different world now for the PPC ad campaigns. Your copy not only has to make sense but also has to stand out to be noticed by the coveted ‘clickers.’ Below are some tips to keep in mind when writing PPC ad copies (Google) for your e-commerce website and products;

• Make H1 catchy – Using trust-enforcing terms like Top, best, award-winning, etc., in the first headline is critical. This is what either captures the user’s attention in a split second. E.g., Most Awarded Cosmetic Store or Top Camping Vendor are some that will work well.

• Keep H2 and H3 for Solution & Benefit – Your H2 must convey the solution in one crisp sentence, and H3 should aim to highlight a critical benefit. E.g., for a phone accessories brand, H2 can be Latest iPhone Accessories, and H3 can be the Best Price Guarantee.
• Use Sitelink Extensions effectively – Many e-commerce brands, especially those just starting, do not use site link extensions in their PPC campaigns. Sitelink extensions are those clickable ad-links that direct the user to specific internal pages. E.g., Today’s Deals, Contact Us, Sign-Up, etc. The main benefit of using site links is that Google tracks its analytics separately. So, you’ll always know which extension link is getting more clicks and how do they compare to your overall ad’s performance. Then, you can tweak the copy & links accordingly.

You can read more about e-commerce content fixes in this blog to take your customer experience 4 notches higher!

Your Turn…

Marketing will continue changing, and there are many challenges headed up a digital marketer’s way. It is the choice of techniques and technology that will eventually determine the success of all digital efforts.

With the advent of Customer Data Platforms and marketing automation suites like Wigzo, most e-commerce conversion and growth challenges can be overcome.

You can take Wigzo for a free trial and see how it would add value to your e-tail brand!

Happy selling 🙂