Every digital marketer gets a bucket of stress. It comes in different forms, triggered by different causes. End-result is digital marketers find it hard to formulate successful campaigns, generate traffic, and drive conversion.
1 Out of 4 Marketers Report Overly Stressed Levels
Such distressing moments can lead to losing the edge for digital marketers. Better to address the stress elephants, that have been crawling your marketing skills, sooner rather than later.
Here are some common stress triggers for digital marketers and how to dust them off.
- Measuring End-Results
Stress Cause
Digital marketer’s every task must be measurable to display the end-results either to the client or to the boss. This is where they get the most stressed out. All they worry revolves around “what ifs”:
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● What if, after 6 months of struggle, they fail to general expected results?
● What if conversions are close to zero as opposed to the client’s trust?
● What if traffic to the website is nowhere to be seen when the owner is waiting for 6 months to see their business touch the sky?
End-results are only visible after implementing strategies and watching their performance. Clients or owners often get impatient when digital marketers fail to generate results after a few attempts. However, digital marketers know well that it takes time to get the website higher for ranking, but clients or owners only want on-hand result.
Stress Buster
Before jumping on the bandwagon, decide the primary goal of your strategies. What is it you want to achieve through your strategies.
● Is it traffic?
● Google rankings?
● Conversion?
● Brand awareness?
● Engagement?
Deciding primary goals give you a clear direction on where to go and where to reach.
Without goal setting, you are simply hitting in the dark with expectations that the arrow will touch the center. Goal setting lights up with strategy development needed to achieve the expectations.
- Lack of Planning in Advance
“If you Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail”
Stress Cause
It’s the end of the week. You are already physically and mentally exhausted. And your client is asking what you are going to do next to meet their expectations. You know well what you have to achieve – thanks to goal setting. But you haven’t done any of the planning on how to achieve it. Strategies are blurred. Your teammates don’t have any idea what to do next. By the sound of it, goal-achieving is going to be a disaster. Or it may end up in the trash when you sit down to perform activities.
Waste of time and welcoming stress.
Stress Buster
First and foremost benefit of planning is it keeps the stress at bay. Advance planning tells you what you have to do next when you are going to achieve it, and how others are contributing to reach the target. When you know everything, why fear anything. I know digital marketing is unpredictable as you can’t assure when the need arises. Planning ahead puts the priority in front and eliminates the distractions. Even if sudden demands come out of the blue, you will be ready to make changes in your existing plans to balance the peace.
- Pressures of Working under Low-to-Zero Budget
Stress Cause
As you go on with your digital marketing career, you notice how many things needed to accomplish goals. Activities that require money add an extra layer of stress on your already low-budget profile. Or maybe you took the project of the client who can’t afford to manage growing expenses of digital marketing. That’s a major dilemma for digital marketers.
Stress Buster
Align your goals with the budget offered by the client or the owner.
In the first step, you clarified the goals. Now its time to outline all the activities, paid and free, that would take place in order to achieve the goals. Let’s say for e.g. you decided to include paid advertising, a registered blog domain, hiring staff like designer or writer, sponsored web content, social media promotion, etc. Estimate costs of all your listed items and compares them with your marketing budget to know how you will end up spending.
There you have two options: if the client is ready to pay as per your planned activities, show them the estimated cost in an understandable format or if he/she is not ready to pay, then make necessary adjustments.
As a successful proof of your planned activities, you can show the results of past clients who were ready to pay for the expenses. A convincing formula.
- Sudden Google Updates
Stress Cause
One day you were happy with the rankings of your client’s website or owner and had a peaceful sleep, another day you saw the sudden drop of rankings throwing your peaceful breaths far away in the corner. Not mentioning the calls or shoutings of clients eating your brains out even if it is not your mistake.
You are set to first console your clients. Next, you are making a set of steps taken to get your sites out of Google Update Mess. All the time, you are worried about what strategies you need to get the rankings up again.
Stress-triggered?
Stress Buster
Stay updated with users’ behavior.
Google is all about users. You can’t say when is Google going to surprise you with another update. But you can be sure of users’ behavior and assuming upcoming changes if you be conscious of what users want and how they want it. For e.g. nowadays short videos are getting more traction as compared to long-form articles. And Google is showing YouTube videos, as the answer to users’ queries, at the first rank. It signals the adoption of Videos as a part of content strategy.
Got it?
- Involvements at All Levels
Stress Cause
Do you involve yourself at each stage of digital marketing? Ranging from defining goals to strategies to promoting ads to writing – all by yourself?
It may make you feel like you are the hero of the town, saving the day for clients or owner, but in reality, you are reducing your productivity by 40%, as per the research.
Reduced productivity results in increased stress. As a result, you are back to square one.
Stress Buster
One brain, one task.
Don’t give yourself reasons to multitask. Do the opposite. Assign tasks to other employees and tell them to complete it without your involvement. For guidance, be there. Don’t get your way to complete it on your own just because the teammate couldn’t. Put a stop on the habit of others to rely on you for each and every small task. If you are a single person digital marketer, I suggest you automate some tasks and hire a few people to get the work done. Manage everything well. Work on one thing at a time.
At the end of the day, review the work submitted by others. Send notes on changes you need, instead of changing it yourself. This way, teammates will learn what you want exactly. And you are free from wearing too many hats at a time.
- Haunting Conversions
Stress Cause
Maybe you drive a ton of traffic. Maybe you successfully achieved engagement. And maybe brand recognition is much better than it was before you took charge of the project. But if you are not driving conversion, a major stress cause will come from your client or the owner. As I said earlier, all they want is increasing the number of sales day by day. Failure to drive conversion creates the fear of losing a contract which turns into stressful days and sleepless nights.
Stress Buster
If you drive engagement but not conversion, you seriously have to look after your website.
Users leave the website due to 3 key reasons:
● Slow Page Speed. Maybe your website is taking too much time to load content.
● Complicated design. Instead of going for fancy designs that confuse users, choose simple designs depicting crystal path to users on where to go.
● Bluffing content. What they see is not what they got. Initial content that promised 50% discount is nowhere to be seen on the website. Check on cases like this and rectify them as soon as possible.
Better to hire someone who constantly checks and verify all the details. Remember, no multitasking.
- Managing Tiny Winy Content Stress
Stress Cause
Here comes the content to fill the remaining space with stress. Content not submitted yet. Content not as per guidelines. Grammatical mistakes in content. Don’t know what else. I just know that content-relevant tasks delay the whole process of a digital marketing campaign which again triggers stress.
Stress Buster
Three stages of writing: decide, write, proof-read.
Take the responsibility of the first stage as only you know what content is necessary for the website. The second stage, obviously, should be taken by the writer. Put a deadline on when do you need content. The deadline should be earlier than the actual date as it leaves space for improvements. Ask another colleague to proof-read the content and eliminate mistakes.
You are free to work on creative tasks.
Did I miss something?
Do let me know what else stress you out as a digital marketer and how you deal with them. I will try my best to come up with a solution too.