According to a recent study by Workfront, a project management company based out of Utah, 80% of marketers feel both overworked and understaffed.
Yikes.
To gain some insight into the stress levels of modern marketers, Workfront surveyed 500 marketing professionals to learn more about the factors contributing to their anxiety. The survey revealed that a quarter of marketers feel “overly stressed” or “stressed to the max” by their jobs.
However, despite this stress, 84% indicated that they did not regret choosing marketing as a career path — but that doesn’t mean they don’t see room for improvement. According to the study, the majority of marketers’ stress stems from the following:
- proving your value to people who don’t understand what you do (55%)
- juggling all of your work to get it done in a 40-hour work week (51%)
- people who think they have great marketing ideas, but don’t (42%)
- constantly having to put out fires (36%)
Let’s take a look at a few ways that marketers can combat the first two key stressors on this list (because let’s be honest, stressors three and four are often outside of our control).
Stressor #1: Proving Your Value
A major issue that we see putting a strain on marketers — and particularly impacting their relationship with sales — is accountability. Because many marketers don’t have a way to track their impact on pipeline, it can be difficult for other departments to take marketing’s work (not to mention marketing’s leads) seriously.
Fortunately, putting a process in place to track ROI can go a long way toward proving marketing value. Technologies like marketing automation are designed with this purpose in mind, and allow you to tie every marketing initiative to a specific campaign, which can then be tracked and measured. Being able to say with confidence that ‘campaign A’ exceeded expectations can help marketers can a foothold at the all-important “decision-making table.”
Here are a few helpful resources for marketers who are interested in improving their accountability within their organizations:
Stressor #2: Juggling Too Many Marketing Tasks
Another big pain point for marketers, particularly at smaller companies, is the quantity and diversity of the workload. At any given B2B organization, there are needs for email programs, social marketing, copywriting, design, lead generation, and more. But more often than not, it’s a single marketer or a small team juggling all of these needs.
Consolidating all of the tasks within one marketing automation system can really help marketers switch more fluidly from one task to the next. Automating as many of these programs as possible can also provide substantial time savings to small teams that are itching to move onto new initiatives. For example, lead nurturing campaigns can put your sales nurturing strategy on autopilot, and scheduled social postings can make sure that your social presence remains consistent, even when you’re not in the office.
Here are a few additional resources that help explain how marketers can better budget their time:
You can check out the full write-up and summary infographic of the study on Adweek here.
