Marketing Overdose: Favorite Drugs of Addicted Digital Marketers & Free Detox Tips

Being a marketer has never been so challenging, neither so important. And companies know it and can no longer live without us! It is becoming addicting for businesses to have lifesaver digital marketing professionals like us!

Why?  Because we attract clients and make sure they are happy! We help consumers to identify and connect with brands, make them feel unique, and spread the messages they want to hear. Right? right…

Yet, easy to say, hard to do, as digital marketing has become more complex than ever! That’s why we marketers end up doing very addictive marketing drugs.

So it is time for an intervention article! In this post, I’ll share the top daily drugs that we marketers end up consuming (or are they consuming us?)! Besides, I will also try to detox you and your team!

Ready for this intervention?

Drug #1: Content

Effects:

Content can make you feel excited and imaginative but sometimes makes marketers feel anxious and paranoid with uniqueness and creativity.

Addiction Pattern:

When composing our pieces of content, our head speeds around how to benefit our target audience, how to best represent our brand, and how to measure the success of such content. And on top of that all, what we struggle the most with is a way to make our content unique, engaging, and still clever and suitable to our brand. I can tell!

Detox Tips:

Build an annual or at least monthly calendar. This way, you won’t end up figuring out what to publish each day, and you can plan things better and in advance. Having said this, I also advise you to have a buffer for posts on last-minute trends, which you can’t predict.
Besides, if you also suffer from a lack of ideas on what to put on the calendar, try getting inspiration on movies, shows, theaters, music, etc. Try also asking for your friends’ opinions and thoughts. And why not gathering all those pieces of content (articles, social media posts, ads, etc) that inspire you, and try to capture their essence on your own work?

Drug #2: Data

Effects:

Data management can make you feel alert, bringing you into a highly productive ecstasy state. It can sometimes lead marketers to anxiety and over confusion.

Addiction Pattern:

Digital marketing is all about data! However, when trying to make the most of all the data that gets into the system, we marketers struggle. We are truly superheroes when it comes to collecting disperse information from a wide range of sources, but we are no miracle workers. Often, all this data is not uniform at all, gets us confused, and many times ends up delaying our daily tasks, even if we’re inserting them in a lifesaver CRM system, like Salesforce. Multi-channel data management frequently ends up consuming a part of us…

Detox Tip:

Ensure the data is inserted properly into your CRM, the source of all truth. How? By having all teams on board! Every single person who accesses your CRM system must know how to use, manage, and edit it correctly. This way, all the data, no matter from which channel it is coming from, is uniformly put together. Then, you can make the most of it and act upon it rapidly, using it in your marketing assets! So, do invest time and if needed, money as well, on training and teaching your team data management good practices!

Drug #3: Campaigns

Effects:

Campaign management gives the marketer energy, overconfidence to take risks, and a feeling of being wide awake. Yet, it can lead to paranoia with performance, accentuated ups and downs, and depressive states in which you question campaigns’ purpose and existence.

Addiction Pattern:

Digital marketing has grown a lot in complexity, and so have its campaigns. Marketing campaigns are now full of interactions to track and channels to integrate. So, to many marketers, campaign management has become a true horror story.
It feels like any step you take, any move you make must be tracked in a campaign. And, often, we get lost in the middle of all those many campaigns. This is particularly accentuated when the goals of the campaign are not clear and you end up thinking something like “wait, what am I doing here?”.
This hard reality may hit you harder when it comes to paid campaigns, such as Google or social media ads. For these, goals may be hard to set and it is super difficult to come up with who to target and for how long to target. At the end of the day, it isn’t easy at all to measure the performance of our campaigns, neither is it simple to justify ROI.

Detox Tip:

Here’s a step-by-step detox plan you can adopt to best overcome digital marketing campaigns trauma:

1. “When am I beginning this activity? When will I finish it?”. If the answer is “now” and “never” then is not a campaign, it is just part of your marketing strategy. If, on the other hand, you have predefined a specific timeline, then you are on your way to creating a marketing campaign.
2. Think about the goal of your campaign, and don’t use way too generic goals. No one’s asking you to wish for World peace. Instead try something more palpable, such as getting around 100 people registered for an event.
3. Then, it’s time to chose who to target and where to target. And my best tip on it would be for you to be reasonable. For instance, it is super cool to do social media ads, and some marketers achieve impressive results with those campaigns. Now, if your audience is 80-year-old ladies who hardly use a smartphone, do you really want to create social media ads? What I’m trying to say is for you to study carefully your audience and use the most suitable digital marketing channels to communicate effectively.
4. The final step, if you want to measure ROI or any other KPI, is keeping track of your overall costs and expected investment. So, please use your CRM or stick to an excel or something alike to keep track of your expenses and results.

Drug #4: Communities

Effects:

Community management can make you feel affectionate and chatty, making experiences more intense. It can sometimes lead to anxiety and multiple personality disorders when trying to fit in everywhere.

Addiction Pattern:

Developing a strong social media strategy for your brand is an addictive digital marketing challenge. Firstly, you have to find time for everything, all those social media, measuring their performance, planning each and every post… everything! Then, you also have to create fresh and suitable content for each of your personas! Plus, you may strive to switch up the voice and the tone you use for each channel and audience.
And, at the end of the day, it is certainly hard to always have cool and original ideas, especially when you lack resources to put into practice all those crazy ideas, right?

Detox Tip:

My major remedy for you on community management resembles a lot my content detox tip: create a social media calendar. Ideally, this calendar would be annual, but if you don’t think you can plan it so in advance, just create a monthly calendar. Always leave room for some buffer posts, the ones which must come more spontaneously out of a trending topic.
Then, my second tip is: use and abuse of content re-purposing and recycle it on several social media channels, adapted to each one’s tone and style! Let’s face it, no one’s always full of creative thoughts neither that is always that much going on in the world. So, whenever you are out of ideas, just grab that old blog post and turn it into an infographic, or a video, or audio… endless possibilities!

Drug #5: Website

Effects:

Website management can make you feel alert, wide awake, and very detail-oriented. It can sometimes lead to paranoia with security, insane search for perfection, and feelings of doubtfulness, rejection, and outdatedness.

Addiction Pattern:

Another drug in the life of every digital marketing professional is website management.
We are major players when it comes to managing and optimizing our website. Assuring that website’s navigation is thought intelligently is a marketers’ task. And, even if we aren’t responsible for changing the navigation menu or something like that (which are likely designers or developers’ tasks), we are the ones accountable for tracking and suggesting those changes or similar ones. Thinking about the visitors’ sources and paths, their history and interactions, and their way to conversion is our job too. So, optimizing the navigation, and conversion points, such as forms, are a huge part of our daily lives.
Finally, the content of our pages is also a crucial aspect to be monitored, and here SEO optimization is key. Yet, since the rules of the SEO game are always changing, it makes it almost impossible to find “true facts” about it. Thus, as marketers, we always end up worrying (it consumes us!) the things and strategies we still bet on and see almost as universal good practices, have been made obsolete by search engines.

Detox Tip:

My tip for website management addiction is a mindset remedy: please do accept that change is inevitable. Your website will be in constant evolution and optimization. It is an ongoing task to perform. So, be ready to make changes based on valuable data (Google Analytics will be your best friend for website’s reporting purposes), and remember that going back and forth with placing, format, type, almost anything of your conversion points is normal and recommendable. Don’t be desperate if you never feel fulfilled with your website! It is a learning process.

Lastly, when it comes to SEO, my best advice is for you to schedule performance reports – ALWAYS. Keep track of the keywords you’re optimizing to and assure they make sense with Google’s rules of the SEO game.

Drug #6: KPIs

Effects:

KPIs tracking and reporting can make you feel alert and very detail-oriented. It can lead to obsessive and paranoid behaviors as if you are always being put to the test, and too narcissistic ideals, in which you end up fascinated by vanity metrics.

Addiction Pattern:

As good marketers that we are, we know that every action, task, or campaign we handle must serve a purpose. Yet, in the middle of tons of analytics tools and their endless sea of functionalities, we easily get lost! And I am not even going to mention how confusing it gets when we need to use cross-domain tracking and measure it properly! Oftentimes, we end up checking for vanity KPIs that do not reflect performance quality at all, neither are they valuable to our business! For example, have you ever found yourself measuring the wrong metrics, thus taking wrong conclusions about your results?

Detox Tip:

Here, my detox remedy is super easy: regardless of which task you are doing, always start by defining KPIs. And make sure you are checking the right KPIs, don’t just track what other people usually track. Think about your specific case, and also think that the KPIs you are measuring today may not be the ones suitable to track tomorrow. It is also super important not to get lost on vanity KIPs (you know, those classic and inspirational KPI’s all digital marketing gurus are measuring, but are not really useful for you right now)! Finally, promise me you’ll create a reporting plan, scheduled and well-defined.

+1: Soft Drugs: Attention & Multi-tasking

Effects:

Lack of attention and multi-tasking are widely consumed soft drugs. They cause short-lived periods of excitement and reality escape, in which you become overconfident on your capabilities. They can lead to nasty comedowns and accumulated stress and anxiety, and an absolute loss of focus. At extreme levels, they can lead you to suffer from multiple personality disorder, in which you lose the sense of yourself while displaying diverse roles along your days.

Addiction Pattern:

This is the most consumed drug by today’s professionals, in particular, marketers. It makes us suffer from really deep attention issues. Every day we interrupt our tasks tons of times because the phone rings, WhatsApp notifies us, a new email drops, etc… Besides, given our flexible, multi-tasking, and agile profiles, marketers are particularly put to the test with all these distractions.

P.S.: Especially because these “distractions” are also our working tools.

Detox Tip:

Put your cellphone on the side when you really need to focus. Detach from it for a couple of hours, unless strictly needed: if you are waiting for an important call or if you must work on your cell phone. The same goes for social media and other entertainment assets on your laptop, of course.
Another important tip: fight against doing it all at the same time. Segment your tasks per area or related subjects. And do it intelligently.

I hope you have related to this post, marketer! Subscribe to our Knowledge Center to know more about the world of digital marketing, in particular, the Salesforce Marketing Automation tool, Pardot! 🙂