Marketers and their jobs. Love-hate situation. Relationship status: It’s complicated. In DigiDay survey, 78% of marketers ranked their happiness at work as greater than “satisfied,” but at the same time, 2/3 of professionals declare that they want to leave the current job within the next two years.
Professionals have mixed feelings towards their position in the company, sense of safety or salaries.
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We decided to investigate what’s so frustrating.
1. Stress
68% of marketers say they experience more stress at work now than 5 years ago (Marketing Pain Points 2015). It stems from increased customers’ and supervisors’ expectations.
Consumers, connected social and mobile, want a real time service and instant responses. Partly it can be addressed with Marketing Automation, but you can’t automate social media interactions or personal messages. As a result, marketers feel that more and more time, availability and engagement is demanded from them, what entails difficulty in finding work-life balance.
Another problem: their job involves testing new solutions and platforms on the daily basis. Marketers have to change their habits often and enter new territories, what by definition increases the risk of failure.
2. Lack of trust and appreciation
The famous Fournaise study showed that CEOs „do not really trust and are not very impressed by the work done by marketers”. As much as 80% of CEOs don’t see value marketing departments deliver.
It looks different in companies that implement Marketing Automation. The platform creates an environment where marketers don’t work in a silo, but communicate with the rest of the company more efficiently, measure and show results of their undertakings, and can integrate their actions with the work of the whole team (including sales or customer service departments).
3. Low salaries
Lack of recognition of marketers’ work translates into lower salaries. 40% of marketers feel underpaid and overworked (DigiDay). The problem here are metrics. When you have tools to track the efficiency of your actions and attribute results to your undertakings, you have the confidence to negotiate a raise and back your request with reliable data.
4. Data integration
In the Pain Points report mentioned above, data management is named one of the biggest challenges. Why?
Theoretically, we have access to mountains of data. Each platform you use offers analytical panel, but these insights are partial, incomplete and thus useless. The problem is not to hoard data, but to integrate them into an actionable customer profile, which will become a base for your further marketing actions.
Marketers experience the Curse of abundance: they have too much chaotic and unorganized scraps of information.
To avoid that, try to limit the number of software you use. Choose one central platform where you will gather all the data, for example, Marketing Automation system. With it’s support, you will set the automatic marketing processes,as well as create a newsletter and create Facebook Ad targeted to a custom audience. When you can do it all using one tool you save time – it’s more efficient to master one platform, where you collect, organize and utilize data for designing marketing campaigns, than…spread yourself too thin using various softwares and apps
5. People hate marketers
Not-marketers hate marketers, accusing them of:
- Unreliability
- Ignoring customers’ needs
- Focusing only on sales
- Being too pushy
- Manipulation…
And marketers deserve it. Mass emails, overlooking consumers’ reactions to messages, offers not tailored to medium, situation or recipient preferences… It all exposes marketing practitioners to negative feedback from the audience. And that knowledge doesn’t help reduce stress or frustration.
6. Buzzwords
In 1923, Claude Hopkins wrote “Scientific Advertising,” postulating that we adopt a scientific approach towards ads. Today, 93 years later, we have more analytical tools for testing and measuring effectiveness, but we choose to produce multiple buzzwords and fads.
Marketers are lost in the new notions and trends they bring to life. And the more we talk and write about marketing, the more our discourse detaches itself from the real life and everyday marketer’s practice. The theories and concepts don’t help us understand customers better, they stay on the way to recipients.
Think of:
- Inbound marketing
- Greenketing
- Engagment marketing
- Mindful marketing
- Growth hacking
- Agile
- Content is the king
- WOMM
- H2H
- Age of the customer
Do we really need all that jargon? Many of these terms can be broken down to a traditional marketing mix and 4 Ps, as Samuel Scott observed. Your supervisors don’t get that mumbo-jumbo. Your customers don’t either – they want a relevant message and don’t care if you apply H2H-oriented growth hacking in greenketing paradigm to achieve that.
Each time you take a look at your newsfeed, it turns out that some medium or rule has died. Email marekting, cold calling and Facebook have been proclaimed dead a dozen times. Experts kill methods and create new standards or ideas each day, so marketers waste a lot of time and energy to be up to date. Yet it turns out that most of the „innovative solutions” are just smoke and mirrors. Testing them sucks up resources, and the results can only disappoint. Marketers overdid with abstract deliberations in their field.
Complain time! What annoys you in your job? What feels tough, what stops you from being more succesful and happy? Share in comments.
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