Life Optimization Strategies: How to Avoid Marketing Team Burnout

• Content Creation: Those who work in content marketing often struggle under the mounting pressure to continuously create engaging, original content that will increase brand awareness. Competition is constantly increasing and more research is required to help marketing campaigns stand out in the crowd of google ads spanning the already swarmed internet. Over time, these challenges can make content creators feel that their marketing efforts are not paying off for their businesses.

• Reputation and Customer Interactions: Getting your arms around your company’s customer relationship management system (CRM) is rather stressful in its own right, especially when paired with the complicated world of e-commerce. Marketing teams constantly try to understand and maintain good standing with their target audience while engaging the attention of their potential customers.

  Trying to be genuine and convincing is hard work. Is your LinkedIn profile representing you and the company well? Are you clear enough on social media? Are you providing an enjoyable customer experience for every target demographic? Are the customer acquisition, retention, and conversion rates going to increase or decrease? Are we oversimplifying our buyer personas? If you are burnt out, you might take a moment to reflect on whether you are asking yourself these questions more than usual.

• Relationships and Remote Work Are Difficult: Marketing requires numerous strong relationships and connections to function. Connection and communication require collaboration spaces, touchpoints, platforms, and non-siloed marketing channels to do their best work effectively and efficiently. Businesses need to be able to rely on the partnerships they make and be able to maintain them if they prove beneficial to their marketing plan.

• The Grind is Constant and Overwhelming: The marketing lifecycle never stops. Marketers will never get to the end of their to-do list; even if they did, the bar would simply rise. This is not an optimal life environment for work/life balance.

  The constant grind causes considerable mental stress for marketers. There is always another landing page to redesign, retargeting to do, more metrics to analyze, more search engine optimization, another stage in another new customer journey to track, and further tweaking for every strategy being implemented. Long hours, a lack of breaks, excessive responsibilities, monotony, and struggles with clarity and focus can all cause marketers major anxiety that leads to workplace burnout.

A key life optimizer strategy is to embrace the fact that we’re all in this together. We should have each other’s backs in good times and in bad. Marketers and organizations can keep an eye on each other to ensure everyone gets what they need in order to head off burnout.

If you are struggling with burnout, you must take care of yourself. Here are some signs that you or someone else is struggling with burnout:

• Physical Health Issues

  These include lack of sleep, decreased appetite, and physical and mental exhaustion.

• Mental/Emotional Health Issues

  These include depression, anxiety, decreased motivation, and a loss of passion for the work.

• Performance Issues

  These issues include lower productivity, poor focus, and a shorter attention span.

Strategies for Optimal Living

• Accept what you’re going through and reach out for help. Denial of your struggle and insistence on powering through them is not healthy. It will dig you deeper into the hole. Acceptance is the first step in getting better because now you have a heartfelt reason to make positive changes and set healthy goals for yourself.

• Be kind to yourself. At the end of the day, we are only human, we do our best, and everyone makes mistakes to learn and grow. It’s important to tell yourself that even when you struggle, you are good enough. Treat yourself with warmth and respect. Start and end your day with positive affirmations. Prioritize your physical and mental well-being. Remember that you don’t live to work. You work to live. You will live a more optimal life when you enjoy your work and efficiently and effectively support yourself.

• Take care of your physical health. Make sure to get enough sleep, eat a healthy, balanced diet, stay hydrated, and try to find time in the day to exercise, even if you’re just taking a short walk. Anything that gets the blood moving is a life-optimizer solution.

• Give yourself a break. Staring at a computer screen and attending meetings for a significant portion of the day is stressful, exhausting, and sometimes boring. For optimal life wellness, allow yourself a break, even a short one, which can ease the tension.

  Better yet, there are several ways you can spend your break. Go outside, meditate, and participate in your hobbies to optimize your life and balance your energy. Simply getting away from the screen is a great way to replenish your depleted energy. As important as it is today to be proficient in digital marketing, SEO, and social media marketing, remember that all that screen time is extremely draining.

• Get fractional marketing support. While it may have once been possible to hold the sum of human knowledge when it comes to marketing, that ship has sailed. Every day, there is a new technology, app, or strategy. Understand that you can’t do it alone. When you don’t have the budget to hire additional team members, reach out to an agency that can round out your team and take on some of your burdens.

While marketers do need to advocate for themselves, there are two sides to the equation. The organization has a responsibility as well. For employees to feel comfortable taking the steps to make their work experience more healthy and enjoyable, employers need to meet them halfway. Employers should support their employees, encourage them, and give them opportunities to do what they need.

Here are some of the many ways in which employers can do this:

Employee Treatment, Motivation, and Mental Health Support

• Time Off: Give your employees more time off. Encourage breaks and paid vacations, give them space, and let them unwind sufficiently.

• Provide Flexibility and Interesting Challenges: A rigid work environment and repetitive work can be a major problem for marketers, so defeat it by offering new challenges and changes so workers can learn and grow in their careers and enjoy it while they do it. Let them take initiative once in a while, reward them for their work, build them up, and let them know that they are contributing very well and that you appreciate their efforts. Guide and motivate them, so they know what to do with their power when they have an opportunity to take charge.

• Stamp Out A Toxic Work Environment: Toxic work environments are terrible and lead to employee burnout and turnover in the marketing department. For these reasons, you must make your workplace as healthy as possible. You can achieve this goal by communicating well, building strong relationships internally and externally, and organizing and participating in team-building and bonding events.

• Paid sabbaticals are great for your team. As you partake in all of these supportive practices and teamwork functions, you should also be willing to adapt to frequent, inevitable changes, including the trend of paid sabbaticals. These can be used to recharge and reset. It’s a true life-optimal life wellness strategy. The marketing industry is always evolving, and it’s tough, but adapting to it and helping your team feel prepared and motivated helps the business move forward.

• Prioritize Mental Health Support in the Workplace. Mental health support should be one of your company’s main values. Make sure to fund assistance programs that your employees can take advantage of when necessary. Encourage them to take care of themselves — and do the same for yourself to set a good life optimizer example.

• Inform Them of Their Potential. No one wants to feel like a hamster on a wheel. Ensure that your employees know their career potential and how their work matters to the organization. For example, if you notice that an employee is a particularly brilliant strategist, then promoting them to a leadership position where they can extend that skill would be a positive step. This life-optimizer strategy shows them that they are truly excelling and makes them feel valued, that their work is paying off, figuratively and literally.

• Provide ample training and resources. As the marketing landscape changes, your employees need to be prepared. Make sure they receive good training in the latest online marketing developments and become familiar with any new apps.

• Use A Roadmap Template. A roadmap template provides a visual of how marketing efforts work together to achieve business goals. It helps the marketing team collaborate efficiently and effectively across the various digital marketing channels and increases brand awareness.

• Make work more efficient for everyone by utilizing marketing automation. Marketing automation takes less work and completes more tasks at a faster rate.

• Use A/B Testing for an Optimal User Experience (UX). A/B testing is the process of presenting multiple versions or designs of a user experience to see which version performs the best. This testing method is an authentic and time-efficient way to collect valuable data that can guide data-driven decisions and initiatives.

• Balance The Team’s Workload. If your workflow is too slow and cutting into valuable time that should be allocated for other things, then you could outsource your marketing. You can also balance the workload by hiring new team members, delegating tasks to other departments, utilizing intern talent, and prioritizing the most important tasks.

• Set New Goals. Setting a fresh set of goals motivates people to solve problems and improve their overall performance while giving them a sense of purpose.

• Be a lifelong learner. Research new ideas and build on them. Whether these ideas are related to content strategy, SEO strategy, or some other form of digital marketing strategy, have an open mind and unlock their potential. Let yourself learn, grow, and become more involved in what you’re doing.

• Listen to music. Music can create a pleasant atmosphere, lighten a dour mood, help some people focus, and prevent boredom. It can pump someone up, and make them feel more energetic and motivated. Some people can concentrate while listening to music with lyrics, some can only concentrate with instrumental music playing, and some can’t concentrate with it at all. Do what works for you. If you do listen to music, then make sure to wear headphones to avoid distracting your coworkers.

• Mix in quick and easy tasks. Do other tasks in between complex work tasks, such as clearing out old emails. Addressing simple items on your to-do list can boost your morale and improve your concentration.

• Set healthy boundaries and standards. Turn off notifications if you don’t want to answer work calls or emails past a certain point in the day or over the weekend. Set goals according to how you learn and work. Remember that you are an individual, so you will approach each assignment in your own way. Respect that and set realistic and balanced standards for yourself.

In summary, whether you are a marketer or a marketing leader, your dedication to self-care, healthy goals, and boundary setting will benefit your life and the entire organization.

To avoid burnout, marketers can use these strategies to optimize your life — while improving the productivity and the quality of your work. Marketing is a demanding industry, and not every work environment is as accommodating or cohesive as you would like it to be. This is why it is important that every person in any department or position should know that they are valued and that their work-life balance matters massively to a thriving, functional team.

Tell your colleagues and yourself this every chance you can and focus on which life-optimization strategies you will use to make your life and career as enjoyable as possible.