Does Content Marketing Have Your Marketing Team In Over Their Heads?

There are so many ways to market your business—through traditional print advertising, radio ads, television commercials, billboards, social media, email… the list goes on and on.

Expecting a single employee—or even an in-house team—to handle all these variables, as well as managing your website, your blog, and everything else you do That’s asking one or even a few people to do the jobs of a dozen full-time employees.

It’s easy for your in-house marketing team to find themselves struggling to achieve even minimum goals, while your business struggles to find new leads and grow. Today, we take a look at how to tell if your content marketing strategy has your team totally overwhelmed, and what you can do to fix it.

How to Tell If Your Marketing Team is Overwhelmed

Every day you head into the office, greet your marketing team, sales team, and anyone else who happens to be nearby. Everyone seems happy. Everyone seems productive. At the very least, they definitely seem busy. 

Unfortunately, appearances can be deceiving.

Your marketing team may be putting on a brave face while trying to put out three hundred fires with three buckets of water and a wet blanket. How can you tell if content marketing has your marketing team totally overwhelmed? 

Here are some signs to watch out for:

• Nobody seems to have any ideas anymore: Creative burnout can easily derail even the most basic marketing efforts. If your marketing team struggles to come up with new ideas or just totally draws a blank, they may simply be working so hard to maintain the status quo that there’s just no room for anything new. 
• Workweeks keep getting longer… and longer… and longer. If your employees are clocking more and more hours per week, or even having to take work home on the weekends just to get things done, your staff is going to get burnt out, increasingly cynical, and in over their heads.
• There’s literally no time to update anything. Your website hasn’t been touched in a long time and still pushes products or services you don’t even offer any longer. It’s showing its age, but there’s no forward momentum on getting it updated. No one has the time to research web design companies, compare proposals, make a decision, contact the company, and get the process rolling, already. 
• Even with all that work, results are… disappointing. Everyone’s busy and working hard, putting in longer hours and juggling more and more tasks, but… none of it seems to be accomplishing anything. Maybe you’re starting to fall short of metrics that you used to be able to hit, or maybe you’ve been able to maintain the same metrics, but you’re not growing. Either way, it definitely seems like all that work should equate to way more in results than you’ve seen.

If you just read this list and recognized your own office in one or more of these signs of workplace burnout, you need to make some changes before things will get better.

What Can You Do to Solve the Problem of an Overwhelmed Marketing Team?

First, you can take some time to really ask them what kind of help they need. Schedule a meeting with everyone in marketing, whether that’s just a single employee or a small team. Make sure to emphasize that you’re here to listen, and then really listen to them. Ask them to think about what tasks are most overwhelming to them. Take notes. Don’t try to justify or excuse anything, just listen to what they have to say.

You may find that a marketing team that effortlessly handles print and other traditional advertising is lost when it comes to staying up to date with the newest trends in digital marketing, and there’s just not time in the day for them to catch up. 

You may discover that the problem isn’t any one task or set of tasks, but just the sheer amount of work it takes to manage everything.

Cut off those nights-and-weekends expectations. People need time away from work to live their lives, occasionally see and interact with their families, and just to clear and refresh their minds. If they’re working longer and longer hours just to achieve the same metrics they used to be able to hit in less, the problem probably isn’t the staff, but in how much of a workload they’re being expected to carry.

Let everyone know that you don’t expect them to stay on the job once they leave the office.

Finally, let them know help is on the way. You can build a cohesive marketing team that can handle print and traditional advertising alongside content marketing, SEO, website design, and every aspect of marketing online you can think of… by contacting a reputable digital marketing agency to take that overwhelming pile of work off your marketing team’s hands.

A Marketing Agency Can Provide Essential Content Marketing Support

Marketing agencies like ours don’t exist to do away with your in-house marketing team, but to work alongside them. Let your in-house marketing team focus on print and traditional marketing techniques, plus the sort of things that really need to be handled in-house. That might include personal communications with current customers and clients further along in the Buyer’s Journey, putting together sales, discounts, and other promotions, and staying active and involved in the local community by sponsoring local events or working with local charities and nonprofits.

Meanwhile, your digital marketing agency’s work will complement your regular team’s efforts. They’ll work with you to produce an updated, mobile-responsive website that is continually refreshed to keep it looking and feeling new and up-to-date, plus a content marketing strategy that uses proven Inbound Marketing principles to locate potential new customers and encourage them to learn more about you, research the solution you offer for their particular problem, and take the next step by turning from potential prospect into Sales Qualified Lead.

The ideal marketing agency gets to know your in-house marketing staff and their priorities so they can align their efforts with yours, help you generate more leads, and achieve the success that helps your business grow.

Your Marketing Team Has Ideas. Let Us Help.

Cut the creative burnout and get your marketing team energized again by working with an Inbound Marketing agency to take some of the weight off their shoulders. Waypost Marketing is a digital marketing agency in Greenville, SC, and we work with clients nationwide to generate more leads, nurture those leads into customers, and help businesses grow.

To get started working with a digital marketing agency who can supplement and support your in-house marketing team while helping you build growth and achieve success, give us a call at (864) 288-6162, or just click the banner below.