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Every marketer faces different challenges. Although we typically share similar goals, some teams are stuck on hiring top talent, while others are having trouble finding the right technology for their needs.

Whatever the case may be, there’s always at least one area that you can stand to improve. In other words, there’s always room to optimize the various components of your strategy and turn your marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.

Curious about what kinds of obstacles other marketers are up against?

We polled thousands of marketers on the challenges they face, as well as the tactics they’ve used to meet those challenges head-on. Here are some of the most common challenges marketers reported struggling with … and their solutions.

The Most Common Marketing Problems We Face, According to the 2016 State of Inbound Report

According to our report, generating traffic and leads and proving ROI are the leading challenges marketers face. Here’s a look at this year’s data:

Image Credit: The 2016 State of Inbound Report

Let’s go through each of these top challenges and how marketers can address them.

1) Generating Traffic and Leads

Why It’s a Challenge

Generating enough traffic and leads was the top marketing challenge, according to the 2016 State of Inbound report. While we ask marketers about their challenges every year, this time we added this answer as a new option — and we’re glad we did.

Clearly, marketers are struggling with producing enough demand for their content. And as the years progress and competition stiffens, this will only become more true. With so many options of platforms for marketers to publish their content and even more ways to promote it, it’s hard to know where to focus your efforts.

What Can You Do?

When it comes to creating content that produces enough traffic and leads, marketers should ask themselves two questions: Are you truly creating high-quality content — the type of content people would pay for? And, do you know the type of content your audience actually wants?

For example, HubSpot Research has found that 43% of consumers want to see more video from marketers in the future, while only 29% want to see more blog posts. To learn more about how the way people are reading and interacting with content is changing, check out this HubSpot Research report.

Once you know you’re creating the type of content your audience wants, the focus shifts to promoting it in a way that makes your audience take notice. More than ever before, people are being flooded with content. Consumers don’t have to use a search engine to find answers. Instead, articles fill their news feed or buzz in their pocket via mobile notification.

Needless to say, the content promotion playbook is not the same as it was five years ago. To make sure your traffic and lead numbers continue to rise, check out this comprehensive guide to content promotion.

2) Providing the ROI of Your Marketing Activities

Why It’s a Challenge

Measuring the ROI (return on investment) of your marketing activities has remained a top marketing challenge year-over-year. But, it also continues to be a vital way for marketers to understand the effectiveness of each particular marketing campaign, piece of content, etc.

Plus, proving ROI often goes hand-in-hand with making an argument to increase budget: No ROI tracking, no demonstrable ROI. No ROI, no budget.

But tracking the ROI of every single marketing activity isn’t always easy, especially if you don’t have two-way communication between your marketing activities and sales reports.

What Can You Do?

When it comes to providing ROI, there’s a strong case to be made for dedicating time and resources to establishing links between marketing activities and sales results. This means using both marketing software (like HubSpot) and a CRM solution (like HubSpot’s free CRM), and then tying them together to close the loop between your marketing and sales efforts with a service-level agreement (SLA). That way, you can directly see how many leads and customers are generated through your marketing activities.

We’ve found there’s no better combination than having an SLA and doing inbound marketing. According to this year’s report, inbound organizations with SLAs are over 5 times as likely to rate their marketing strategy as effective compared to outbound organizations with misaligned marketing and sales teams.

(Use this ROI calculator to simulate the potential ROI you could realize by conducting inbound marketing.)

3) Securing Enough Budget

Why It’s a Challenge

Securing more budget is a pressing challenge for marketing globally. And often, getting more budget is easier said than done — especially for smaller organizations that aren’t working with sizable nor flexible marketing spend.

But the key to securing more money for your team might not be that complex. Here’s what you can do.

What Can You Do?

The key to unlocking budget lies in being able to prove the ROI of your marketing efforts. According to our report, organizations that can calculate ROI are 1.6 times as likely to receive higher budgets.

Again, success with inbound marketing also plays a large role in driving higher budgets. Effective strategies obviously produce results, and our data shows those who feel confident in their marketing strategy are over 2 times as likely to get higher budgets for their marketing teams. But remember, inbound marketing is a long game. If you get off to a slow start, you shouldn’t back off — in fact, you might consider doubling down.

4) Managing Your Website

Why It’s a Challenge

Managing a website was the fourth biggest challenge for marketers in 2016. And chances are, your website’s performance is high on your list of priorities. It’s an asset that works around the clock to draw in visitors, convert them, and help you hit your goals, after all.

Issues with website management includes a variety of different factors, from writing and optimizing the content to designing beautiful webpages. Here are a few things marketers can do to deal with this challenge.

What Can You Do?

First, read this report to see how your website stacks up against over 1 million other websites. It also includes a deep analysis on the four most critical elements of website performance and design, from average load time and website security, to mobile friendliness and SEO.

If your primary challenge with managing a website has to do with the skills and resources you have available, you aren’t alone. This is especially true for small companies who don’t have all the talent in-house required to cover content, optimization, design, and back-end website management.

One solution? Hire freelancers and agency partners. This year, our data showed an increase in the number of respondents who indicated they use freelancers and agency partners for content creation. To find freelancers, we recommend:

• Tapping into your personal and professional network by posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social networks with a description of what you’re looking for.
• Browsing freelance writers and designers based on their portfolios and areas of interest. For writers, check out Zerys and Contently. For designers, check out Behance & Elance.
• Browsing HubSpot’s Services Marketplace, which lists a wide variety of designers from partner companies and agencies we’ve deemed credible.

Overall, you can make website management easier on your team by hosting your website on a platform that integrates all your marketing channels like HubSpot’s COS.

Finally, for the projects you want to keep in-house, here is a list of blog posts that might be helpful to your team:

• Blog post: 15 of the Best Website Homepage Design Examples
• Blog post: Lead Gen 101: How to Create an Intuitive Website Conversion Path
• Blog post: Web Design 101: How HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Work
• Blog post: The 8 Elements of Modern Web Design (And Web Design Trends to Watch)
• Blog post: The Beginner’s Guide to SSL: What It Is & Why It Makes Your Website More Secure
• Blog post: Designing a Website Blueprint: How to Create Your XML Sitemap
• Ebook: The Ultimate Workbook for Redesigning Your Website

5) Identifying the Right Technologies for Your Needs

Why It’s a Challenge

Finding the right technologies was the fifth biggest concern for marketers this year. Oftentimes, this is because feedback on technology is scattered. Marketers might turn to colleagues, friends in the industry, and/or analyst reports to figure out which technologies best fit their needs — only to find that feedback is spread across emails, social media, and so on from people of varied reputability.

When you’re looking for a tool, software, or piece of technology to solve a specific marketing problem, where do you go to find it?

What Can You Do?

For those of you looking for a tool, software, or piece of technology to solve a specific marketing problem, we recommend taking a look at Growthverse: a free, interactive, online visualization of the marketing technology landscape that focuses on the business problems marketers are trying to solve, and leads them to specific pieces of marketing technology that aim to solve those problems. We’ve found it to be a really well visualized map of carefully curated marketing technology resources. (Click here to read a blog post about how Growthverse works.)

It’s worth noting that the main tool in top marketers’ arsenals is a platform for automating their team’s marketing efforts. We found that although our respondents indicated using an array of specific products, the larger trend was telling: The top marketers use marketing automation software in some form or another. Meanwhile, 44% of marketers cite marketing automation as a top priority for the next year.

6) Targeting Content for an International Audience

Why It’s a Challenge

Targeting is a key component of all aspects of marketing. To be more effective at targeting, one of the first things any marketer needs do is identify their buyer personas to determine who it is they should be marketing to. If you’re expanding internationally, it can be a big challenge not only to figure out the best ways to market to an international audience, but also to organize and optimize your site for different countries.

What Can You Do?

Start by reading this blog post on 22 global marketing hacks and resources. There are some really helpful tips in there that’ll help give you some direction on global marketing, including how to identify your top three growth markets, how to explore local trends, and tips on choosing the best localization providers. (For a more in-depth guide, download our free ebook, The Global Marketing Playbook.)

Remember, your website visitors might speak a plethora of different languages and live in totally different time zones. To make your content appealing to a wide audience, you’ll need to keep your global visitors top-of-mind when creating all your content. This means being aware of seasonal references, translating units of measure and monetary references, and giving translators the tools and permissions to customize and adapt content for a specific audience when they need to.

Finally, be sure you’re optimizing your website for international visitors, too. One of the first and most important decisions you’ll need to make is determining which domain structure should be used for additional languages and countries. (For more tips and resources on global marketing expansion, browse our international inbound marketing hub.)

7) Training Your Team

Why It’s a Challenge

As companies scale and technologies continue to evolve, training your team will become a greater challenge for marketers. Whether it’s training them on the concepts and tools they’ll be using every day or making sure they’re achieving their full potential, the struggle is real across the board.

To combat this, I’ll share some tips I’ve used during my trainings to make sure the concepts and tool tips stick and have a lasting effect on your team and your marketing.

What Can You Do?

To get an overall idea of where your team stands, take a few minutes to assess each of your team members’ marketing strengths and weaknesses, levels of expertise, and passion/commitment to your company. Then, objectively rate the priority (or level of importance) of their expertise and their contribution to bottom line objectives (ROI) to date. Here’s a simple assessment tool from Lean Labs to help you evaluate your team so you can figure out who needs recognition and who needs coaching.

Next, check out this awesome resource from HubSpot Academy, The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Training. It’s a guide that’ll help you navigate all the marketing training options you have, from quick daily habits to more rigorous, career-launching investments.

You also might consider requiring your team members to rack up some online marketing certification. HubSpot Academy, for example, offers certifications, documentation, and training programs to help people master the basics of inbound marketing. Google also offers training and certifications on analytics with their online Analytics Academy.

What about new hire training, specifically? We recommend creating a training plan for new team members. Here at HubSpot, each new marketer is given a 100-day plan like this one to lay out specific goals and help new hires demonstrate their effectiveness.

8) Hiring Top Talent

Why It’s a Challenge

Hiring top talent was the eighth biggest challenge marketers reported experiencing this year. Why? Many companies are shifting more resources to inbound marketing, which means higher and higher demand for top marketing talent. But supply simply isn’t keeping up. From sourcing the right candidates to evaluating for the right skills, finding the perfect person could take months … or more.

What’s more, the type of marketing talent companies are looking for is changing, too. In Moz and Fractl’s analysis of thousands of job postings on Indeed.com, they concluded that employers are seeking marketers with technical and creative skill sets. And the quick rate at which the demand for these jobs are rising has caused a marketing skills gap, “making it difficult to find candidates with the technical, creative, and business proficiencies needed to succeed in digital marketing.”

What Can You Do?

Employers are looking for marketers with a diverse skill set that includes digital marketing, content marketing, SEO, and social media marketing. To find the best inbound marketer for your team, the first thing you should do is decide what that person needs to be able to achieve for your business.

Ask yourself: What will the new marketer’s tasks and duties include? What skills do those tasks and duties require? What goals or challenges will the new marketer face? Use your answers to these questions to write a compelling job description. (Here are 37 pre-written marketing job descriptions to help you get started.)

Next, post your jobs where talented inbound marketers will find them. While traditional job sites like Indeed.com, CareerBuilder.com, or LinkedIn will help you cast a wide net, we recommend checking out Inbound.org, which is the only job listing service in the world that’s exclusively focused on inbound marketing and sales jobs.

Finally, focus your job description and new hire 100-day plan what people value most in their careers. This year, the data shows that 60% of people consider opportunities for growth when looking for a new job, while 50% are looking for a good work/life balance. This also varies by international region, with workers in Southeast Asia (SEA) and Latin America (LATAM) valuing growth opportunities the most.

Does Your Company Face Any of These Challenges?

A thorough analysis of your marketing strategy and its current performance will help you discover where your biggest marketing opportunity lies. This will allow you to focus on improving the areas that need the most attention, so you can start making your marketing far more effective.

If you’re faced with a challenge and want ideas on how to best tackle it, you can always consider getting some help by any of the various types of marketing training that are available.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2012 and has been updated for freshness and comprehensiveness.

You’re ready to get your inbound marketing machine going. You’ve read the case studies and statistics showing how effective inbound marketing is at pulling together a full enrollment class.

And then you start thinking about the all the different strategies and tactics and new social media platforms and metrics and… Holy cow, it can all seem to be a bit much. Where is a small education marketing team to start?

Well, we’ll tell you. Here are some guidelines to follow so you can get started with your own inbound marketing plan.

Start with the Baby Steps

We all have to walk before we run. Don’t think about the full volume of what inbound marketing can do for you and all the options you have under the rubric of inbound marketing. Finding a focus can be especially difficult for new schools and programs, or independent schools, that don’t have a pre-existing marketing framework to use as a reference point. So for starters, put your focus on taking action. 

When you’re first starting, your immediate goal is to take consistent action. Set some milestones, such as publishing one blog post a week and making one new offer a month.  Hitting these milestones will create habits and build skills your team will need to grow your inbound marketing chops,  refining your workflows so all their underlying tasks become easier to execute over time.

Focusing first on taking consistent action will also let you establish a baseline of your efforts’ performance, which you can then use to set more results-oriented goals in the future. 

As a very first step, create your personas (this free template can help). Inbound marketing always starts with the right personas. Putting together persona profiles forces you to investigate who your target market really is, what they care about, what they want to know, and where they’re getting their information.

Get Some Quick Wins 

You can tap into existing resources to quickly hit your action milestones. If you already publish a blog, review your current posts in light of your new persona profiles. For posts on topics that meet your personas’ needs, freshen them up with a new, improved keyword strategy. Update them with more current information. If your persona process revealed that your blog has been focusing on the wrong topics, time to change course with your posts.

You can find a lot of good, relevant blog content in materials the school already has. Go through different department newsletters, course syllabi, or admissions materials. Use them as starting points to generate some new blog posts quickly. 

Want some quick wins with your content offers? Take a look back at your old content offers. Pick one that best fits what you know about your new personas. Freshen up the content if needed with updated information or new graphics. Spruce up some new CTAs to place on your website and to promote via social media.

A great first choice for creating a new content offer is to look at who’s already in your database. Do you have a sluggish, un-engaged pool of emails? Put together a re-engagement campaign for them. 

For additional email tips, take a look at this free guide >>  

Whatever you decide your quick wins will be, here’s a library of 360+ templates you can use to quickly create great looking content. 

Looking to the Bigger Picture

Once you feel like you’ve started some good habits and met your small milestones, it’s time to move one step further and do a little planning for the future.

For your blog, this means brainstorming a list of 30-40 blog topics. Don’t do this on your own. Bring in people from admissions, perhaps a faculty member and student or two. With a working list of blog topics, ramp-up your publication schedule. For the first time, set a goal of publishing 2-3 posts every week. At this pace, your topic list will keep you running for a quarter. For your next brainstorm session, you can ramp these numbers up even further. 

This is also a good time to take another look at your social media platforms. Which ones are really worth your effort? Perhaps you should keep some for student and prospect communications only. Learn which channels parents and potential employment sources gravitate to and reach out to them with content that keeps them interested in your campus. 

Clarify which social media platforms deserve your focus, and who you’re trying to reach with each of them. Then optimize your profile, and set up templates and best practices for each one. Your social media profiles are distribution force multipliers, so make sure they’re getting your message out.

This is also the time to expand your vision beyond driving traffic to your website. Your goal has never been simply to get traffic. It’s time to convert some of your website visitors into prospects and get their email address into your database. You do this through a stellar content offer, say a guide to your academy’s applicant assessment process or the scholarships available at your school that motivates people to give you their email address to get it. 

With their email address in your database, you now have options to target them further with content that pushes them down the enrollment funnel.

No Actions is Too Small 

However small your baby steps are, take them now. Inbound marketing builds on itself. Whatever small changes you make now will continue to provide benefits well down the line. Blog posts you publish now will continue to draw traffic over the years. Out of the blue, someone will retweet one of your content offers months after you sent it out. You might warn students that “the Internet is forever,” but when it comes to inbound marketing – this can be a great plus.

Another great advantage to inbound marketing is everything that you can learn from every single action you take. Every. Single. One. You’ll learn more about your market, about what works with them and what doesn’t. You can build each subsequent email series or blog editorial calendar on better intel. You’ll also improve your own internal workflows that will help you generate more content more quickly.

Inbound marketing creates a continuous, virtual cycle the pushes everything forward with greater momentum the longer you do it. But first, you’ve got to get started.  Want a more detailed action plan? Here’s an inbound plan for your first 100 days.

“Getting found” isn’t a new phenomenon for inbound marketers. In fact, being searchable is one of the founding principles of inbound marketing — a principle that continues to evolve as consumers begin to change their habits and innovative new technologies start to emerge. 

According to the 2016 State of Inbound report, 66% of marketers agree that growing SEO is their top priority for 2017. And while Google’s algorithm updates as we known them have notoriously favored text-based updates for desktop and mobile, gaining SEO momentum in the future requires marketers to shift their focus a bit.

What about voice search? Or how about SEO for other platforms such as Facebook and Medium? Users have reached a point where they’re looking beyond Google in favor of more unconventional search engines such as social networks, bots, personal assistants, and messaging apps.

What does this mean for marketers? Well, people change. Habits change. Technology changes. Which means inbound has to change, too. To help you keep pace on the SEO side of things, check out the infographic below — and then head to stateofinbound.com for even more information on where SEO is headed in the future.  

What do you think about the future of search? Leave your comments below or engage with us on Twitter using the hashtag #FutureofInbound.

It’s inevitable: at some point, your client will give you the silent treatment. They probably don’t mean to make you blow steam from your ears — it just happens — and getting over the communication slump starts with walking a mile in their shoes.

It’s important to remember that many companies are understaffed and stretched thin. And even though studies show that burnout is bad for business, we see it happen all the time.

While it may be frustrating when you can’t get an answer from your client, it’s usually not the result of ill will or without reason. There’s a good chance your client lives in meetings for most of their days, leaving them with only a small window to take calls and answer emails. An empathic approach to your client relationships — rather than an angry one — will be better for both you and your client in the long run.

Why Clients Go Dark

There are several explanations for why your clients aren’t answering you. It could be as simple as email clutter. Haven’t we all tried to block off calendar time to clean out our inboxes, only to veer off course into this project or that phone call? We’re only human.

Experts say you need an entire minute to recover from reading a single email. And at bare minimum, you’d need three hours a day dedicated only to reading and sending emails if you were to stay completely caught up on your inbox. Your client might not have the bandwidth to sift through their inbox every day.

They could also be waiting on another department or team member to weigh in before they get back to you, and they just don’t have anything new to report. They could be putting out other fires they perceive as more important, or they could simply be stalling because they’re suffering from a bit of decision paralysis (again, it happens to the best of us).

Worst case scenario, they have bad news to deliver and they’re putting it off. But don’t jump to conclusions. While it’s normal for you to devote roughly 25 percent to 40 percent of your time to a project, clients usually devote only 5 percent to 10 percent of their time. Most likely, their lack of communication stems from the fact that they’re juggling a lot at once and are strapped for time.

The question is this: How do you move forward without feeling like you’re constantly nagging them?

Strategies for Breaking the Silence

It’s not easy to keep clients engaged when they’re seemingly tuning you out, but these simple strategies can help you stay in touch without hurting the relationship.

1) When setting deadlines, emphasize the most important ones.

If you assume your clients are going to miss any deadlines right out of the gate, you’re already planning ahead. Tell them upfront which deadlines are essential, and be firm about which will affect the success or timing of the project. If they’re going to forget something, it might as well be one of the less important somethings.

2) Be clear about the consequences of missing specific deadlines.

Don’t be afraid to put things in concrete terms: “If we don’t get X, we can’t make Y happen.” This will light a fire in many clients right away because they don’t want to risk failure of their project. If you’re not clear about what you need from your client, you’ll end up taking the blame for missed deadlines yourself.

3) Don’t use calendar due dates.

Instead, set deadlines in number of days. For example, “Five workdays after we receive X, we can deliver Y.” This creates a more visual timeline of what happens when even one small deadline is missed. It also gives your client a better understanding of the big consequences their lack of responsiveness can have on the project.

4) Get a structure in place for clear communication.

Agree on turnaround times and communication methods right away with your client. Ask if phone calls are better than emails. Maybe face-to-face meetings are more your clients’ style. Don’t assume that what works for you will work for them. If they have days they know are more hectic or they know they’ll be unavailable, make note of those, too.

5) Don’t end a meeting without scheduling a follow-up.

It’s kind of like getting a second date with someone you like: If you like someone, you shouldn’t hesitate to ask him or her out again. Go after your clients in a similar way. If you leave the schedule open-ended, you’ve just created another step you have to take to set it up later (and more messages for which you’ll have to wait for responses).

6) Create a ‘If we don’t hear from you’ plan.

Proactively ask your clients things like “How can we move this forward on our own, just in case we don’t hear from you?” It creates a backup plan right away, making it more likely that your deliverables and timeline can press onward. Plus, the more your clients can trust you to make decisions on their behalf, the stronger your relationships will become.

7) Get acquainted with your clients’ schedules.

When you want to escalate your communication urgency appropriately and respectfully, that might look very different if your client is having a “normal” week as opposed to being out of the office for a family reunion or vacation.

Get a sense of what your clients’ weeks typically look like so you can set reasonable deliverable dates. Making a “tell us about your week” question part of your usual status meetings with clients is a quick, easy way to anticipate issues and also understand what is reasonable and what might not be.

The Better You Understand Your Clients, The Easier It Becomes

From the agency’s perspective, an unresponsive client can squeeze the agency’s time to complete the project. Sometimes, a project has a fixed deadline, so no matter how the client delays the work, the agency still has to scramble to get it done. It can also lead to rush charges or other unnecessary expenses. But think of client silence this way: You should always be seeking to understand your customers better anyway, and unresponsiveness is yet another opportunity to do just that. Getting through this slump could be just the thing to bring you closer together.