Marketers and mental health: taming stress triggers in the marketing industry

October 13, 2022

Filed under: Marketing & Mental Health, Marketing Strategies, Spending Budgets Wisely — @ 4:26 pm

In this article on Marketers & Mental Health, we review how to tame four common stress triggers that marketing professionals face: Proof of ROI, Rejection, Tool Updates, and Never-Ending To-Do Lists.

The marketing industry is a hotbed of stress triggers, which can put a huge strain on your mental health if you’re not prepared to tame them.

Any good mental health expert will tell you this: if you can’t change the circumstances, all you can do is change how you react to them. And lordy, that should be every marketer’s mental health motto. Get a tattoo, crochet it on a pillow, make it your screensaver. Just embrace it.

Marketing EVOLVES, every single day, in ways that are often unwelcome. Things that were once free now have a price. Platforms that were once popular are now passé. Tracking and targeting for ads now have fences that can shut you out. New marketing channels pop onto the scene without warning. Stuff changes all the time. And change causes stress. And the stress is relentless. I’ve heard marketing compared to a never-ending carnival game of whack-a-mole, and it’s not an outrageous analogy.

But marketing can also be exhilarating, rewarding, and immensely satisfying. Marketers are entertainers. We are educators. We are influencers. And we possess – if we’re good at our jobs – an insightful perspective into what makes people tick and how to push their buttons.

So why are we, as an industry, generally so unsuccessful about managing how WE tick? We live in triage mode, crisis mode, gearing-up mode, and launch mode. Why aren’t we more conscious of adding a few modes to our professional lives that are kinder to our mental health?

Here are four of the most common stress triggers in marketing, and some thoughts on how you can tame them to foster better mental health. And it all starts with awareness.

Proof of ROI

The Stress Triggers

Your resources – both time and money – are precious and finite. Yet the quest to prove ROI for every marketing dollar spent goes unfulfilled. Should you put your dollars “here” because you can track clicks and trace sales, at the sacrifice of putting them “there,” which is more important but less or not trackable? These are constant, stressful choices for you.

But more than that…bosses and bean counters demand to see ROI before approving budgets. Few of them will equate a rise in sales with successful marketing unless you can show a direct link. And even fewer of them feel comfy with the fact that “increasing brand awareness” is a worthy marketing spend if it doesn’t lead to instant, tangible revenue.

The Taming Method

You need to embrace The Dark Funnel, and you need to educate all your stakeholders on it. This visual should hit home for any marketer (and hat tip to The F Company for creating it):

A visual showing steps in the dark funnel of marketing, which is a critical solution for taming a stress trigger.

Faith in the dark funnel is critical for every marketer. Some people still print out travel articles they see and stick them in a “bucket list” folder. Two years later they visit your hotel or destination from an article in that folder, and how will you know that article was the origin? You won’t. But that sort of thing happens all the time. Faith in the dark funnel is a stance you must cultivate…and champion. Marketing is a cumulative endeavor. You can’t just do ONE thing. A litany of things must be deployed to penetrate awareness and incite action. You won’t be able to track them all, but they ALL matter. So educate your stakeholders. Show this visual at every budget meeting. Remind them that the leads and sales they ultimately see are only the final step on a long and necessary runway.

And remember: you can’t find love on a spreadsheet. And getting folks to love your brand is priceless.

Rejection

The Stress Triggers

Social posts go unopened. Emails go unread. Ads get skipped. Media pitches get ignored. Shall I go on or is that depressing enough? We put our souls and creativity into our work and when it lacks response, the feeling of rejection is deflating. This is doubly true if you’re an agency marketer: you face rejection by your clients AND you face rejection by your marketing audience. Lovely. Why even get out of bed in the morning?

The Taming Method

Cultivate your resilience. Marketing feels SO personal to you, but to your audience, it’s just one more piece of noise vying for their attention. Their lack of response is not personal, and we all know that folks need to be told something around a dozen times before it starts to penetrate their awareness. And they may not even see 10 of those attempts because of clutter, algorithms, spam filters, and other obstacles.

So your job is to give them that repetition. The more you get up to bat, the more hits you get. Learn from your strike-outs. How could you swing differently next time? Or adjust your stance? The point is… change your perspective. It’s not rejection. It’s all just data collection and a foundation for opportunities to change what you do next. One of my favorite quotes about resilience comes from the Harvard Business Review:

Every bit of so-called rejection is an opportunity. Now you know what didn’t work. So get up to bat again and find something that WILL work. It’s just a necessary part of the process.

Tool Updates

The Stress Triggers

Major software or platform updates. New marketing channels your competitors are already crushing. System upgrades. New boss brings new methods to the mix. It is beyond stressful to keep pace with the evolution of marketing tools. Even marketers highly specialized in one particular field face this. SEO experts blow a gasket whenever Google does a surprise update that requires them to shift their strategy, pronto. Imagine what marketing generalists feel like in that circumstance? Stressed, overwhelmed, and frequently…frozen. These things don’t feel comfortable to us, and change is hard to embrace, especially at the pace it’s thrown our way in marketing. We often view such things as disruptors (and not in a good way) that are hijacking our valuable time away from being productive. Learning curves and unfamiliarity drag us down.

The Taming Method

If tool updates are putting a strain on your mental health, you need to recast your thinking on what marketing is all about in order to tame this trigger. Marketing IS evolution. By its very nature, it MUST evolve because methods get stale and people get desensitized. You want to break through all that clutter you know exists? You won’t do it by remaining stagnant and using the same old tools the same old way. Annoying? Possibly. Reality? Definitely.

Marketers must not only embrace change…they must seek it proactively. And this isn’t easy because humans like to stay in their comfort zones, where we feel safe and in control. In our marketing comfort zone, things are predictable: the time each task will take, the steps each process has, the results we can expect to see. But y’all…that might feel comfortable but it’s not successful. To be successful, you need to get yourself into the growth zone:

A diagram that shows the journey from the comfort zone to the growth zone, which is one way to tame stress triggers for better marketing mental health.

As you progress through the fear zone (hardest) to the learning zone (a little easier transition), that next step into the growth zone is where marketing THRIVES. That’s where new ideas are born, calculated risks are taken, and the rewards are higher. Find a way to make peace with journeying from your comfort zone to your growth zone and stop thinking of tool updates as disruptions. They are the lifeblood of marketing.

And if social media updates are your particular nemesis, here are four tips to conquer your frustration when social apps get an overhaul.

BTW, hat tip to whoever created that comfort zone diagram, which I screen-shotted months ago and stuck in a folder in my phone. It had no credit listing on it and I have no idea where I stumbled across it. See “Proof of ROI” section above…I rest my case, but I wish they had put their logo on it.

Never-Ending To-Do List

The Stress Triggers

Is this category not self-explanatory? You’re…never…done. The work generates itself and never stops. If you’re in PR, there’s always one more journalist to pitch or one more angle to try. If you’re in visual design, there’s always one more version you know you’ve got in you to create. And if you’re a department manager or a solo marketer, it’s even worse. You put it on the website, but then you have to tweet it, post it, email it, promote it, pay for clicks, share onsite, educate staff…and keep doing it. Do we have the right video? Was the photo arresting enough? Is the copy punchy enough? If it’s not getting attention, how can you spin it a different way so it sounds new? It’s exhausting.

And here’s what happens: burnout, 12-hour days, and really stressful Sunday nights as you look at the week ahead. Also: to-do lists that mock you, task management software that dings you so much it’s become white noise, and a persistent, oppressive feeling you could be doing more.

But who sets the boundary on where “more” ends?

The Taming Method

You do. YOU set the boundary on where “more” ends. Marketing is – while lives aren’t usually at stake – a lot like triage in an emergency room. Not everything is a heart attack requiring a triple bypass. And at some point, patients you’ve tended for a long time need to be released. New projects, tasks, and opportunities fly at you daily and you’ve got to make quick judgment calls on what gets attention now, what can wait until next week, and what doesn’t merit a single brain cell of thought.

Let me be crystal clear and super blunt: you will never do all the things that “could” be done. So you need to get super choosy about selecting things that “should” be done. This is about managing expectations, both for yourself and for your boss/stakeholders. And this is about TIME, the only non-renewable resource in marketing.

Marketers are often people-pleasers and over-achievers, and that makes us want to do it all. But that’s physically, emotionally, and mentally impossible. Yet, setting boundaries for ourselves – hours worked in a week, limits on campaign legs to pursue, tasks we agree to take on – is something that many marketers find incredibly difficult. So, if that’s you, here are a few resources to help you out:

Learn how to stop chronically overcommitting your time here.

Learn how to recast your time to spend it more productively here.

And learn how to embrace JOMO – the Joy of Missing Out – here.

Overall, there’s no denying that marketing can have a strong negative impact on your mental health unless you learn to tame the stress triggers. Awareness is key: what are YOUR stress triggers and how can you tame them? Of course, the four stress triggers explored above are just a few of the most common. Because if I listed them all, that would make this article way too long to read… and that would only stress you out more. 😉

Four tips to conquer your frustration when social apps get an overhaul.

July 28, 2022

Filed under: Marketing & Mental Health, Digital Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Social Media — @ 3:28 pm

When a social media app does a major overhaul of its format and features, frustration ensues. Most marketers go through six stages of emotional grief: anger, resentment, resistance, resignation, petulance, and… eventually… acceptance. This is ESPECIALLY true of DIY or “one man band” marketers, who are drowning in general marketing tasks and have little time to learn the new rules of the game in one particular specialty.

Instagram is on a path to emulate TikTok, and even though it’s been a rocky start, they are committed to getting there. Twitter is rolling out a “notes” feature, which lets you tweet long-form content. YouTube Shorts was launched in 2021 and yet many brands have been slow to tap its potential (even though the platform gets an average of 15 billion daily views).

For marketers, changes like that can be utterly exhausting. Sure, if you’re an Instagram marketer (for example), and that’s ALL you do… you’ll dive in immediately and figure out how to harness all the new opportunities. But if managing a brand’s Instagram account is only one of your 100 diverse responsibilities, a dramatic overhaul of the app is a roadblock that can tank your productivity and wring you out emotionally.

Resentment and resistance can only be indulged for so long before results start to suffer. So give yourself a brief period to pout and then figure out how to embrace the changes in a way that works best for you.

And if you’re NOT a social media specialist whose entire job is to immerse yourself in these apps, here are four tips to help you get past your frustration when social media apps do an (annoying) overhaul:

Divide & Conquer: There are two things contributing to your exhaustion. One is figuring out what the new features are and if they’ll benefit you, and two is learning how to use them. Both things take time, which is likely in short supply for you. So, don’t do it all at once…research first, worry about learning the skills later. The world won’t end if you don’t adopt the new features quickly. In fact, if social media is only a fraction of what you do, your presence isn’t likely to be that robust and so your audiences won’t be expecting cutting-edge marketing here from you anyway. Take your time. It’s ok.
Do Research: The best thing about the internet is that someone, somewhere will have written a helpful article within a day of the overhaul. You can find summaries of what’s changed, how to use the new features, and why they’re useful (or not). A Google search for things like “Instagram update” or “Twitter Notes feature” (or whatever) should bring you to the latest articles the day overhauls are announced. Wait a few days and “how to” articles are bound to follow. You can also check sites like Social Media Today and Search Engine Journal.
Create and Use a Test Account: Part of the emotional frustration you feel comes from worrying you’ll screw up and not use the new features correctly…and your audience will see it. This is where having a secret “test account” comes in handy. Setting up a second account on a channel that’s private, with only you and a few friends/colleagues as the audience, is an easy way to play with all the new features until you get comfy with them.
Watch and Learn: You may not have the bandwidth to do EVERYTHING a social media app allows you to do, but you can certainly cherry pick features that make sense for you. So, watch what other accounts do and try to recreate them in your test account. This means you may need to follow more than just your local or regional competitors, because if they’re in the same time-poverty boat as you, then you won’t learn much by watching their accounts. Follow BIG brands, that are bound to have expert social media teams using the latest cool stuff.

And above all, relax. I know it’s frustrating when overhauls like this disrupt your routine. Suddenly things you finally learned how to do efficiently are no longer efficient to do. It’s annoying as hell. But social media apps will continue to evolve constantly…it’s just the nature of that marketing medium. So if you’re going to have a presence on those channels, this is a necessary evil.

Just remember: It’s perfectly OK if your social media marketing isn’t robust because you’re spread too thin. As a marketer, you have to make choices…and as long as you’re choosing to be robust in OTHER areas that bring you a strong ROI, it’s fine for social media to get less attention. In fact, we flagged that as #17 in our list of Top 20 Tips for Tourism PR & Marketing Agency Clients. It’s worth a look.

Because really, at the end of the day, success in marketing is about how much time you can spend on it.

20 Tips for Tourism PR and Marketing Agency Clients

March 22, 2022

Filed under: Marketing & Mental Health, Public Relations, Digital Marketing, Website Strategies, Customer Service, Marketing Strategies, Media Relations, Spending Budgets Wisely, Branding Strategies — @ 2:32 pm

a red colored lightbulb with illumination marks signifying 20 tips to help tourism PR and marketing clients get the most out of their agency.

We’ve been serving PR and marketing clients in the tourism industry for 20 years. Big global brands. Tiny obscure companies. Obscenely huge budgets. Shoestring budgets. Individuals with personalities that range from Type A to Zen. Doers. Procrastinators. Screamers. Huggers. Savvy marketers. Marketing agnostics. Marketing skeptics. No two clients are the same…and there have been thousands of them in our history.

So, we’ve learned a LOT about what it takes for a client to get the most out of both marketing and its agency. Here, drawn from our extensive experience, are 20 tips to help tourism clients succeed in public relations and marketing:

Changing marketing goals too frequently, or lacking them completely, can only achieve short term results for your efforts. Either be ok with that or make a solid plan and stick to it.
If you water down a BIG BOLD idea, adjust your expectations down from BIG BOLD results. All too often, circumstances cause a client to dilute an idea’s execution…but then expect the same powerful results associated with the original concept. That just ain’t how it works.
If you feel you have to micromanage your agency, they’re not the right match for you. Let ‘em go, even if it’s us.
Positivity works magic in PR. If you have faith it will produce…it will. If you don’t…it won’t.
It helps results tremendously if your entire organization is aware of your marketing plans. Devote resources to educating and engaging them, and you’ll see a greater ROI in marketing.
Make the time to collaborate with your agency. If you skip meetings, miss deadlines, and sit indefinitely on things awaiting approval, you’re only tapping around 50% of their potential.
If your boss doesn’t understand marketing, won’t leave, and remains skeptical about every campaign… dude, find a new job. We’ve seen it. It never ends well.
Tourists want visuals. Invest continually in photos and videos…every itinerary, every package, every story angle. Without them, you’re losing marketing opportunities…which means you’re losing money.
If you have “marketing envy” and always wish your organization could do things as cool as your competitors (or your agency’s other clients), learn what it takes operationally to execute such things. Then decide if your organization can make it happen. You may not be nimble enough, your pockets may not be deep enough, or the concepts may be the complete wrong match for your brand. If your organization is not equipped for it, stop being wistful. Invest your energy in what will work best for YOU.
It’s totally OK to put some marketing initiatives on a steady low flame temporarily (or even permanently) while you focus your resources elsewhere. Just make peace with it and don’t expect them to yield big results.
It is totally NOT OK to turn PR on and off completely. It’s the one marketing medium that doesn’t respond well to fits and starts. Either do it consistently (at any flame level) or just don’t do it.
Use tailored landing pages for your digital campaigns. Without them, you’re losing a ton of business. For some organizations, this is a no brainer. For others, it’s like pulling teeth. Every. Single. Time.
If your guest service and/or guest experience is inconsistent or subpar in any way, marketing will not help change that. In fact, the more guests we drive to your door, the more money you’re going to waste. The damage those guests will do through social media, review sites, and lack of referrals/return quietly sabotages the positive benefits that marketing brings. And a business can’t survive on new guests alone, who are more costly to acquire than referrals/repeats. Fix the foundation, and you’ll see marketing pay off in spades.
You can’t find love on a spreadsheet.
A website should be both beautiful and functional, but if you had to choose where to put more resources…choose functionality every time.
Forget what we said in #15 entirely. Stop thinking of “beauty” and “functionality” as two different things. Together they comprise “user experience,” and if your website doesn’t deliver equally in both areas, you’re losing money. Period.
Social media is more demanding than any other marketing medium. If you want to deeply succeed here, be prepared to staff it fully and keep up with the breakneck pace of ever-evolving rules, features, and channels. Doing set-and-forget style marketing only taps around 20% of social media’s potential. It’s fine if you choose to do it that way in the context of your overall marketing plan. Just expect your notable results to come from other sources.
If your risk tolerance is low, then PR is not for you. Often in PR, the greatest risks yield the highest rewards, but there are no guarantees. That’s what makes it so exciting!
There’s a reason creative, clever tourism packages and programs get a ton of press and social media love. Boring things just don’t command attention.
Consistent indecision will tank your marketing ROI more than making a definitive poor choice ever will. That sounds dramatic, but history generally proves it to be true.

And here’s a bonus item, since we kinda negated #15. Be candid with your agency at all times. Issues and concerns can be overcome easily with open communication. A good partner – as all agencies should be – will welcome the candor.

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed the client experiences we’ve had, and every relationship has helped us grow. And it’s enabled us to help brands of all sizes achieve their marketing and business objectives. Big shout-out to all our clients for putting their trust in us, and here’s to the next 20 years!