Marketers Continue to Struggle with Organic Search and Social Media Obstacles

Marketers continue to turn to organic search and social media to achieve their top objectives. However, it’s not without obstacles along the way.

Ascend2 recently conducted the “Organic Search and Social Media Survey” and discovered that the 49 percent of the best-in-class marketers have been “very successful” at achieving their organic search and social media strategy objectives. However, the remainder of marketers (48 percent) have only been “somewhat successful,” and three percent have been “unsuccessful.”

When it comes to the most critical challenges to the success of an organic search and social media strategy, increasing traffic to website and/or blog (47 percent) tops the list. This is followed by increasing leads generated/converted (46 percent), and improving prospect/customer engagement (44 percent).

The Struggles Surrounding Content Marketing

Organic search and social media aren’t the only marketing tactics posing problems for marketers – content marketing remains challenging as well, according to previous research.

Altimeter published its “State of Digital Content” report and statistic found that aligning multiple teams around a unified strategy (24 percent) remains the largest challenge for marketers when it comes to creating and implementing a content strategy.

Other challenges include hitting the right skills/people (17 percent), producing relevant content based on customer data (16 percent), and getting investment/support from executive leadership (13 percent).

“As it becomes easier for anyone—not just a creative department—to become a content creator, coordinating the efforts of multiple departments, or even multiple teams within a single department, becomes more difficult,” wrote the authors of the report. “We’ve found that the most effective way to align teams is to show them a holistic set of data that provides insights into customer needs, behaviors, and preferences.”