How to Deal with the Top 7 Stressors for Digital Marketers

How to Deal with the Top 7 Stressors for Digital Marketers

Working in digital marketing is stressful. It’s part of the job. You can’t be effective unless you occasionally test your personal boundaries. However, if you’re constantly stressed, it’s time to reevaluate the causes and confront your biggest stressors. Below are seven of the most common sources of stress for digital marketers, as well as some suggestions for dealing with them.

Every digital marketer experiences stress. It takes various forms and is caused by various factors. As a result, digital marketers struggle to create successful campaigns, generate traffic, and drive conversion.

One out of every four marketers reports being overly stressed. Such distressing moments can lead to digital marketers losing their competitive advantage. It is preferable to address the stress elephants that have been crawling your marketing skills as soon as possible.

• Metrics for Measuring 

The Anxiety: Measuring metrics isn’t difficult in and of itself. Metrics are stressful in two ways. First, you have the outcome of metrics. Assume you’ve been working on a campaign for the past six months and have poured your marketing heart and soul into it.

You’ve worked more than full-time hours on the campaign and completed everything you were supposed to, plus more. After the campaign is over, the results are calculated. The measurements let you know that, despite your efforts and following every advice from experts, your objectives were not achieved.

You’ve spent the last of your budget and the last six months on a campaign that hasn’t produced results. Insert a solemn sigh. So you take the campaign data and say it wasn’t a total loss because you learned more about the user behavior, targeting, ad copy, and keywords. Now it’s time to go begging for more funds and try again. Incorporate tension.

The second aspect of metric stress is the one that I see most digital marketers struggle with. The drawback of not using any metrics at all is this. Indeed, that does occur. I genuinely enjoy it.

Take, for example, content metrics. 81% of marketers use content in their marketing strategies, but 65% of marketers are unable to quantify the effectiveness of their content marketing strategies. That’s more than half of those who don’t understand (or are having difficulty figuring out) what metrics they’re supposed to measure.

If one person says, “We’re not even ranking on Google’s first page,” your Tuesday morning will be ruined. If you believe that everyone is counting on you to produce leads immediately. Hiring a marketing specialist or purchasing the best CRM automation tool will not solve marketing problems overnight, or even in a few more nights. Getting management on board with clear objectives and a solid strategy can help manage expectations and save your sanity in this situation.

HOW TO DEAL? 

• Set yourself up for immediate success rather than stress.
• You should define the most important aspect of this campaign in the early stages of strategy development.
• Is this direct selling? Boost video views? Perhaps it’s as simple as doubling engagement and has nothing to do with money.
• In either case, you must first define the primary goal, followed by the secondary, tertiary, and so on.
•  It is critical to go beyond simply defining the campaign’s main goal because the primary goal is only sometimes met, particularly in the first round. In addition, rather than focusing solely on one metric, you should have a few others to measure in order to quantify some success or total failure.

Limited to no funds 

The Tension: A digital marketer’s job becomes even more stressful when he or she does not have a budget to work with.

You’ll undoubtedly be balancing your budget between lead volume and lead quality, as well as all the appropriate channels to reach your target audience. Navigating the ROI for each of those budgets can be a time-consuming and challenging task. This is why our digital marketing firm employs SEM and Social Media Ads specialists to assist with this.

Frequently, low-to-no budgets are accompanied by extremely high expectations. These expectations could include generating 10,000 new leads by creating a homemade video on YouTube and spending no money on advertising to promote the video. What a stressful situation!

 HOW TO DEAL? 

• Budgets that are large or “experimental” are not available to everyone. However, as digital marketers, we must be prepared to collaborate with both large and small players.
• You’ll be able to inform your boss or client what they can expect to receive by spending X amount if you set realistic expectations from the start. No, we cannot forecast the future.
• But yes, we hope and work hard for the best, but by making it clear from the start what can and cannot happen with a specific budget range, you can avoid a lot of disappointment and stress.
• Return to your desk after the budget meeting and run your own numbers based on what you’ve seen in the past.
• Determine how much and how long it took to achieve similar goals.
• Then, prepare a report outlining what worked, under what conditions, and a prediction of what your boss or client can expect to receive based on X budget.

Google Updates 

The Stress: We are constantly trying to keep up with every update that you make. We even try to prepare ahead of time for updates and algorithm changes. Google, you continue to stress us out with each new update.

Keeping up with the evolution of platforms and media channels can be a full-time job in and of itself, with Google’s algorithms and Facebook’s overnight changes. There’s also keeping up with marketing jargon and distinguishing between genuinely useful marketing trends and the latest ‘new and shiny thing. Subscribing to Rocket can keep you up to date on what’s going on in the world of digital marketing in Australia.

In the span of a single eyeblink, a substantial change may have happened that would have affected our websites or the websites of our clients. They typically have negative effects as well. So, Google, you do occasionally make people anxious.

HOW TO DEAL?

• One of the best ways to deal with Google’s stress is to keep up with everything that happens in the industry, just like Google.
• Google monitors user behavior, cyber bugs, spam, and a variety of other web issues. You should as well. This will allow you to better predict when changes will occur and what types of changes are likely to happen next.
• Subscribe to the most popular SEO blogs. These blog posts are written by experts, some of whom have long-standing relationships with Google and thus have a better chance of predicting, adapting, and sharing strategies with other marketers.
• Take it a step further and follow SEO experts who are not only knowledgeable but also reliable sources of SEO predictions.

Trying on too Many Hats 

The Tension: I’m willing to bet all of my money ($4 and change) that you wear more than one hat, whether you work in-house, for an agency, or own your own business. In-house marketers typically try to do everything, including SEO, UX design, social media specialist, PPC expert, and content marketing.

Employees at the agency each have a unique specialty that they focus on, but they frequently find themselves assisting other departments. The business owner, on the other hand, understands what it’s like to wear 50 different hats at once better than anyone else.

 HOW TO DEAL?

• Focus on your area of expertise.
• Yes, keep up with the millions of updates that occur in all areas of digital marketing, but devote your primary attention and research to perfecting the craft of your niche.
• Prioritize the main goals for your specific niche, and then, if time allows, consider how you can help in other departments.
• If you work in social media marketing, a good example is to subscribe to both broad digital marketing podcasts like Edge of the Web and more specialized podcasts like the Facebook-only Perpetual Traffic Podcast.
• This will keep you up to date on trends, updates, and strategies in the industry as well as your specific niche.

Inadequate Strategy Development 

The Tension: The pressure to hurry up and produce results is constant.

Even though it’s common knowledge that digital marketing takes T-I-M-E, we all still expect results yesterday. This is why so many budgets are squandered we dive headfirst into producing results without first developing a strategy to get there.

HOW TO DEAL?

Define your goals, as well as your needs, and then devise a strategy to get you there. Work forward, not backward.

An illustration of a new project or campaign flow is as follows:

• Define the target audience: Who will benefit from this campaign? Who are you attempting to contact?
• Define the goal: What are you hoping to achieve with this campaign? What are the primary and secondary goals?
• Establish the budget: How much money do you have to spend on this campaign? How much do you believe it will cost you to achieve your goal?
• Establish the strategy: What is the most efficient way to get there? What kind of marketing will help you achieve your goal? Do you require advertisements? What kind of content is it?
• Put the strategy into action: Put one to four together and try out the chosen method.
• Define the outcomes: Were any results obtained? Did you collect any information? How closely did you align with the goal?
• Repeat the process.

Inability to Generate Conversions

The Tension: You finally hit a sweet spot with your PPC campaign and were able to reduce your cost per click by 40%. Clicks are pouring in, and they’re coming from precisely where you want them to.

However, no one is interested. Even though traffic is at an all-time high, no one is converting to the website. Why?!

You can do your job flawlessly and still have conversions suffer due to a critical point in the business. Perhaps the sales team is not following up on leads, or customers are becoming overwhelmed at a critical stage of the onboarding process. It is best to collaborate with your larger team to establish clear expectations and identify actual gaps in your pipeline.

HOW TO DEAL?

When there are clicks but no conversions, there is usually something wrong with the landing page or website.

Check the following to see if you can figure out what’s keeping people from converting:

• Page Speed: How quickly does the page load? People will not wait if it takes too long to load, and you will gain the click but not the conversion. “Two seconds is the threshold for eCommerce website acceptability,” says former Googler Maile Ohye. Google aims for less than a half-second.”
•  Is it difficult to navigate your website? If a website’s content is too overwhelming for me, I’ll leave without even reading it.
• What I mean by too overwhelming is a pop-up box that takes up 3/4 of the page and doesn’t make it clear how to close it, a site that is 90% text with no clear path on which text box to read first and videos that play automatically only to freeze after two to three seconds.
• If you believe your design is excellent but are still not receiving conversions, send the site to 10 different people (a diverse group of people) and solicit feedback.
•  Is what they clicked on going to be what they get from the landing page/website? If you promise a 50% off coupon and direct users to your “New Shoes” category page, you shouldn’t be surprised if you get a lot of clicks but no conversions. Make sure your message corresponds to the page content.

Grammatical Errors

The Tension: The to-do list is growing, and we need to get that piece of content published as soon as possible. So, we scramble to put the finishing touches on it, add a little branding flair, and send it off.

Within about 24.5 seconds, your phone receives a Twitter notification mentioning the brand, as well as a screenshot of the subject line, “How to Tackle Technical SEO on a Low Budget.” Your heart sinks, but you are not alone.

Subject line errors, social media post corrections, and ad headline errors happen all the time.

How To Deal With It?

I promise you that re-reading your copy before publishing or asking a colleague to double-check it takes far less time than sending out an apology social media post, an oopsie email newsletter and restarting the campaign.

Don’t take pride in being perfect. We’re all human, and mistakes happen, but if you take the extra minute to double-check your work before publishing, you’ll make fewer mistakes.