Google Home and Amazon Echo are the latest technology. iPhoneX and OnePlus 6 was launched in all its oomph and gained roaring accolades with ground breaking sales. Digital advertising, innovation and customer service have been rewarding, the brands that stayed on top of these elements have been rewarded.

We are poised to explore more amid the 2018 trends, there have been plenty of new marketing trends that claim to impact the go-to market strategy. Yet there are umpteen challenges that are posed ahead of social media marketers.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media marketing germinated in US with their presence in various social platforms. India came into play quite later yet took on the strategy swiftly and is one of the leading market for B2B or B2C domain on social media. Yet, the marketers of global standards often face a challenge of integrating the social media efforts throughout their organization.

Initially piloting the social media and its implementation was the task wherein marketers observed the hurdles, consuming majority of their resources. However, as marketing matured, and trends have become more predictive through omnichannel and agile marketing, the integration has led to positively influencing the companies by establishing effective marketing communication, leading to better customer satisfaction and procuring better returns.

Larger businesses find it easier to integrate the social media activities throughout all the business units. However, a tactic approach in silos acts as an impeding force as opposed to overall integration strategy that disables a company from completely utilizing the medium for better business outcomes.

Top Challenges of Social Media Marketing

As per a recent report from The Manifest, in social media marketing most critical facet is the execution of it due to lack of appropriate financial and organic resources.

Another report from Simply Measured and TrustRadius suggests that measuring ROI from social media marketing efforts is an imminent challenge that 60% marketers agree on as a daunting task. Some more seasoned marketers opine that besides that other top challenges are linking social activities to business outcome, formulating an optimum social media strategy and dedicate internal resources to execute them.

Some more challenges are failure to develop a formal strategy and establish a building method to develop a repertoire of followers and influencers. Again, competing with already popular brands and gain attention of social media influencers is one of the other leading hurdles among marketers. It is quite difficult and filled with obstacles to identify brand advocates, reach out to them or communicate with them and predict their behavior against the stern privacy concerns.

These are followed by challenges like not able to track results and keep pace with the ever-changing features of the social media norms and trends and finally another important challenge for marketers is to figure out the most appropriate social media platform to market on.

Small Marketers to Enterprises – Nuanced Challenges

The degree of Social media marketing challenges again varies based on the size of the company, while segmented from small size (1-50 employees), midsize (51-1000 employees) and enterprises (>1000 employees). However, resource allocation, measuring ROI and social media strategy remain the same across all sections.

Developing a standard social media strategy is a more predominant challenge among small businesses and having adequate resources internally is a common problem among large enterprises.

The challenges are further classified and differ based on the businesses’ experience and expertise in social media. Gauging the ROI is commonly observed in organizations that have had quite a long stint in social media marketing whereas the prevailing issues of strategic approach to social media marketing is faced by those with sparsely experienced in social media marketing.

 Business enterprises leverage the social media marketing platform more frequently as compared to the smaller business; LinkedIn being more easily embraced be small businesses. Besides the challenges, the culture and organizational goals also have a bigger role to play while addressing the social media marketing challenges and against those prevailing standards when marketers exert towards integrating the strategy across the business.