Did you get to read today’s latest news about the new trendy marketing strategy you should use in your next campaign? Ohh no, that’s too bad.
But did you find out about the update Instagram just launched? You didn’t see it on Techcrunch? But everybody knows about it and Starbucks and Coca-Cola already made a campaign with it.
I bet you already read the article about the journalist that became a marketer and how he writes about why content marketing is the new king. No, not even this article? Oh come on, why do you even use the internet if you can’t keep up with all the news that you need to read, understand, experience and get the best results so your boss will be proud of you.
I believe if you are a marketer, you know what I’m talking about.
Staying updated to everyday’s news is not easy. Especially in the digital marketing industry where everything is moving too fast and yet, too furious.
Working only 8 or 9 hours per day is not enough. You need to work on your campaigns, you need to optimize your campaign, to stay in touch with your community, to design banner ads, to launch display ads campaigns, to monitor your email marketing, to use the new updates Twitter and Snapchat launched, you need to reply to a comment on Youtube and let’s not forget about your company’s blog and also to launch that press release you told your colleagues you were going to take care of last week.
And if you’re the only marketer in that company, you’re screwed.
Also, you definitely need to know what’s your expertise. What’s the one thing you’re good at, but also keep in mind that you need to figure out the other 10 other topics a marketer should understand.
What Rand Fishkin said about the “t-shapped” marketer is not an easy strategy.
I’m with you 100%. It’s not an easy way to be a marketer today.
I struggle myself with all of these situation I’m just telling you about.
Time is my best friend but also my biggest enemy.
As a marketer, I want my customers and clients to use their time on my product. Work with my product. Use it everyday and make it the part of their lives. I want their time. Their daily time, or at least, their most precious time, or the most valuable.
But I don’t have time. I want everything to move faster, to work better and to grow faster.
I’m looking at marketers like Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Neil Patel or Oli Gardner and I want to be like them. I want to write articles on my personal blog every day, that will encourage hundreds and thousands of other marketers. I want to launch side projects that keep me happy and that make me millions of dollars (keep on dreaming).
I want to be where they are in the shortest time.
And let’s admit it, you definitely want it too. Or maybe you don’t want to be like the one I already told you, but you have the guy or girl you are reading about and you one day you want to be like he or she. And if that day could be tomorrow, then it would be great.
Here comes the news, podcasts, books, articles and all this content I want to consume and these are waiting for me to click on them and just relax while I’m drinking my third cup of coffee for today. And guess what, it’s only 12 pm.
I don’t have time to read all of these steps on how to do another marketing tactic, so I will skip that and jump on my Google Docs dashboard where I will continue writing the article I started this morning. So I choose a podcast, hit play and start writing. Guess what? I can’t focus on the podcast or on writing the article. So I go over on my social media networks, open as many tabs as I can, starting with Facebook, continuing with Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, Slideshare, Instagram. Scroll scroll scroll – nothing – x – scroll scroll – nothing – x – nothing – nothing. Inbox (1) “new” mail. I open it, it’s the daily newsletter that the Saas company just sent to me. Open, another article with some promotional discount. Delete.
Ohh yes, and let’s not forget about the people reaching to you on Facebook just to ask you how you’re doing. Because since I sit on Facebook all day, I can clearly spare a few minutes to talk to you.
No, I won’t talk to you. I’m going to ignore your message and most of the time I’m not even sorry about this. And guess what, I’m not even pick up my phone and hit the green button because you called to ask me what is the name of the last movie we talked about 2 weeks ago. Because you want to see it right now and you don’t remember it.
One of my best friends taught me a lesson. If you don’t want to pick up the phone, just don’t do it. If you get asked why you didn’t answer their call, you just say you didn’t want to or you couldn’t. Why?
Because if you don’t respect your time, they won’t respect your time either.
So it’s your choice whether you hit the green or the red button.
And yes, my “time” is my friend and also my enemy. There are a lot of things to do and I need to do them not only well, but give it my best.
Being a marketer is sometimes a struggle that only marketers can understand. Only marketers will understand that they don’t look at their phone because they care about their friend’s picture from their last vacation or their newborn baby. He only cares about how the new update on Facebook is working, he is checking a brand’s Facebook page and see what hashtag is trending now on Twitter, trying to figure out how he to join the conversation with brand.
I know, sometimes marketers are evil people that didn’t look at your last picture on Instagram or that didn’t stay updated with your story on Snapchat. But guess what, they are working more than 8 h/day because they want more than mediocre results and the end of the month.
So here I am, some of the words you just read here are some of the personal professional struggles I’m fighting with, almost everyday.
And I believe that there are plenty of other marketers who agree with me.
But no one knows the struggles today’s digital marketers deal with. Because others think all they do is staying on Facebook, chatting on Twitter and posting beautiful pictures of their coffee and sunsets on Instagram.
I just want to say that you are not struggling alone.
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