Working in digital marketing, stress is inevitable. It is part of the job description.
You cannot be effective without pushing your personal limits from time to time.
But, if you’ve always been stressed, maybe it’s time to reevaluate the causes and address your biggest stressors head on.
Below, you’ll find seven of the biggest stressors for digital marketers and some tips on how to deal with them.
1. Measuring scales
Pressure
Measuring metrics in and of itself isn’t exactly stressful. The stressed part of scales comes in two forms.
First, you have the metrics score.
Let’s say you’ve been working on a campaign for the past six months and you put all your marketing heart and soul into it.
You devoted more than full-time hours to the campaign and did everything you were supposed to do, and then some.
Then the campaign ends and the results are calculated. The scales return to inform you that, unfortunately, despite your efforts and doing everything that was suggested by the professionals, the goals were not achieved.
I used the latest budget and spent the last 6 months on a campaign with no results. Insert a sad sigh.
So you take the data you had from the campaign, and you say it wasn’t a total loss because at least you learned more about user behavior or targeting, or ad copy, or keywords.
Now, it’s time to claim a bigger budget and try again. Enter pressure.
The second part of metric pressure is the part that I think digital marketers struggle with the most. This is part of having no scales at all! Yes, it happens. I like a lot.
Take content metrics for example. Completely 81% Many marketers are incorporating content into their marketing strategies, however 65% of marketers struggling to measure the impact of their content marketing strategies.
That’s more than half of those who don’t understand (or at least have a hard time trying to figure out) the metrics they’re supposed to measure.
how do I deal with
set yourself up for success, And not tensionimmediately.
In the early stages of developing your strategy, you need to decide which part is the most important in this campaign.
Is it direct sales? Increase video views? Maybe it’s as simple as doubling the share and not directly related to a dollar amount.
Either way, you need to select the primary objective, then the secondary objective, undergraduate, and so on.
It is important to go beyond simply defining the main objective of the campaign because the primary objective is not always achieved, especially in the first round.
Additionally, you want to have some other metrics to measure against in order to pinpoint some outright success or failure, not just focus on a primary or secondary.
2. Low to no budgets
Pressure
Oh boy. No budget or a very low budget to work with makes the job of a digital marketer very stressful.
All too often low to no budgets are paired with very high expectations.
This forecast could be something like generating 10,000 new leads by making a homemade YouTube video and not having an advertising budget to promote the video. Talk about a stressful situation!
how do I deal with
Not everyone is gifted with big or “experimental” budgets.
But as digital marketers, we need to be willing to work with both players, big and small.
By articulating realistic expectations from the start, you will be able to communicate to your boss or client what they can expect to get by spending X amount.
No, we cannot predict the future.
Yes, we certainly hope and work hard for the best, but by being aware of what can actually happen with a given budget range, you avoid an overwhelming amount of disappointment and stress.
After the budget meeting, go back to your desk and run your own numbers on what you’ve seen as a result in the past.
Get an idea of how much time it took to achieve similar goals and how long it took you.
Then, produce a report showing what worked, under what circumstances, and a projection of what your boss or client should expect based on X budget.
3. Google updates
Pressure
Oh, Google. We are constantly trying to stay up to date with every update you make.
We even try to prepare before updates and algorithm changes happen. However, you still cause us digital marketers an insane amount of stress with every new update, Google.
In the blink of an eye, a major change can just happen and our websites or our clients’ websites can be affected by it. Most of the time they affect negatively as well.
So yeah Google, sometimes you bring stress.
how do I deal with
One of the best ways to handle the pressure of Google is to stay on top of anything and everything that’s going on in the industry, just as Google does.
Google notices things like user behavior, electronic errors, spam, and a few other web issues.
You should too. Doing so will help you better predict when changes will occur and what kind of changes are likely to happen next.
Subscribe to the best SEO blogs. These blog posts are written by experts, some of whom have good connections with Google and a long history that gives them better chances of predicting, adapting and sharing strategies with other marketers.
Take it a step further and follow the SEO experts who not only know their stuff but are great sources of SEO forecasts.
4. Wear lots of hats
Pressure
Whether you work at home, an agency, or own your own business, I can bet all the money in my wallet ($4 and change) on the fact that you wear more than one hat.
Inbound marketers generally try to do it all, serving as an SEO, UX designer, social media specialist, PPC expert, and content marketer.
At an agency, employees have their own unique specialty to focus on but often find themselves assisting other departments.
Business owner, they know very well what it feels like to balance 50 different hats on their heads at one time better than anyone else.
how do I deal with
area and really focus on your area of expertise.
Yes, stay on top of the millions of updates happening in all areas of the digital marketing world, but put your primary focus and research towards perfecting the craft of your niche.
Prioritize key objectives for your specific niche, and then, if time permits, see how you can help in other departments.
A good example of this is if you are a social media marketer to subscribe to both comprehensive digital marketing podcasts such as web edge And more focused podcasts like Perpetual Traffic Podcast that focus on Facebook only.
This will keep you informed of both the industry and the trends, updates, and strategies for your specific niche.
5. Lack of development strategy
Pressure
The pressure is always to rush and deliver results.
Even though it is now a known fact that digital marketing takes a long time, we still all want the results of yesterday.
This is why so many budgets are wasted because we start trying to achieve results and we forget to first develop a strategy that will get us to those results.
how do I deal with
Determine your goals, what your needs are, and then define a strategy that should be able to get you there. Don’t run backwards.
The new project or campaign flow should look like this:
- Select the audience: Who will this campaign be for? Who do you want to reach?
- Select the target: What do you want to accomplish with this campaign? What are the primary and secondary objectives?
- Determine the budget: How much can you spend on this campaign? How long do you think it will take to achieve the goal?
- Select the strategy: What is the best way to get there? What type of marketing will help you achieve the goal? Do you need ads? What type of content do you need?
- Implementation of the strategy: Put one to four together and give the chosen method a shot.
- Select results: Have any results been produced? Did you collect any data? How close or aligned are you to the goal?
- Do it again.
6. Not generating conversions
Pressure
You finally found the right niche with your PPC campaign and managed to lower your CPC by 40%. Clicks fly in and come from exactly where you want them to come from.
However, no one is buying. Traffic is at an all time high and still no one is converting on the website. Why?!
how do I deal with
Usually, when it comes to earning clicks and no conversions, something is wrong with the actual landing page or website.
Check the following to see if you can diagnose why people left without converting:
- Page speed: How fast is the page loading? If it takes too long to load, people won’t wait and you’ll get a click without the conversion. Former Google employee Mile Oye says, “two seconds It is the minimum to accept an e-commerce website. At Google, we aim for less than half a second.”
- Design: Is it confusing to come to your website? Whenever I visit a website I will leave it without even absorbing the content if it is too overwhelming. What I mean by very tired is a pop up box that takes 3/4 of the page and it’s not clear how I can close it, site with 90% text and no clear path on which text box to read first, autoplaying videos only to freeze within the first 2 seconds to Three seconds. If you think your design is great and it still isn’t getting conversions, submit the site to 10 different people (a variety of people) and collect feedback.
- content: Is what they click on what they will actually get from the landing page/website? If you promise a 50% off coupon and send users to a “new shoes” category page, you won’t be so shocked when you get a ton of clicks and no conversions. Make your message really match the content of the page.
7. Grammatical errors
Pressure
The to-do list is piling up and we need to post that bit of content, like yesterday. So, we put it together and add the final pieces, give it a little bit of a trademark feel and then send it off.
Within about 24.5 seconds, your phone goes off with a Twitter notification mentioning the brand and a screenshot of the subject line reading, “How to handle technical SEO on a low budget.” Your heart is sinking, but you are not the only one.
“Oopsie” subject lines, social media post corrections, and ad headline errors happen all the time.
how do I deal with
Slower!
I promise it takes a lot less time just to re-read your copy before publishing or ask a colleague to check it than it does to send out an apology letter on social media, an email newsletter, and restart the campaign.
Don’t be proud of being perfect. We are all human and mistakes happen, but fewer errors will happen if you take an extra minute and double check your work before publishing.
conclusion
Have you noticed that most of the “how-to” tips in this article are ways to improve organization or set clearer expectations?
Working in digital marketing can be incredibly stressful, so you’ll need to think about how you can eliminate or reduce the parts that don’t excite you.
Whether it’s careful design processes or learning to let go and delegate, whatever works for you, just make sure you stick with it.
More resources:
- 15 of the best digital marketing tools and why we love them
- Is it still worth getting a Digital Marketing Certificate?
- The ultimate guide to digital marketing
Featured image: fizkes/Shutterstock
