We all have those days. Days where you sit at your desk, look up to the ceiling, and mentally ask, ‘why?’. Whether you work in a large marketing team for a B2B corporation, or are the sole manager of marketing duties within a smaller business, you’ve likely asked these questions to the office fluorescent lights more often than you’d like to admit. Here are the answers to those questions, and how you can go about solving them.

How am I supposed to do all this work?

Digital marketing is a term that covers many, many different things. You might think you have a handle on social media, email marketing and content creation, but then all of a sudden your team decides to try PPC, develop an SEO strategy and experiment with display ads - all of a sudden you’re stuck with more tasks than you ever imagined possible. And it’s Thursday. And they want all of this done by Friday.

Unless you’ve mastered the art of time travel, it might be time to pick one thing and focus on it. Be realistic with your team and your managers about the amount of work you can get done, and consider which marketing avenue is going to deliver the best results. There’s no point juggling 20 campaigns with no real results - it’s always better to create one solid strategy, and execute it to a high standard. If you have the luxury of being part of a marketing team, try having a specialist for each type of marketing - this means you can cover more bases, without stretching yourself too thin. If you’re just a one-person operation, weigh up the data that you have, and stick to one campaign at a time. If you burn out, your marketing efforts will fizzle too, leading to no results for anyone.

Why is marketing everyone’s last priority?

This is familiar - you need an expert in your team to write a blog? You need sign-off on an important asset? You need one - just one - photo of a team member for the website that hasn’t been stolen from LinkedIn? Good luck. In B2B companies, the stakes are high, and ultimately that means that the customer always comes first. Internal marketing teams can find themselves struggling with completing basic tasks, purely because on the list of ‘things to do’, marketing sits right near the bottom.

But how can you fix this? One way is to get a marketing agency involved - higher ups are much more likely to pay attention to your marketing efforts if you have outside help to present results, and another is to provide proof to everyone that needs it. If you’re struggling to get the sales team involved in content, let them know how many leads the last blog attracted. If you need sign off, emphasise the amount of attention that the asset could get, and therefore the value that it could bring to the company. As for the photo, we can’t really help with that. Maybe just hide behind a plant and make it a candid.

Why doesn’t anyone else in this business care?

This follows on from the last two points - your colleagues might not notice the amount of work you have, or how much you need their input, and it feels at times like they simply don’t care. This isn’t necessarily the case - the business environment is chaotic on a good day, and as mentioned, marketing tends to slip through the cracks.

If you convince yourself that people don’t care, you run the risk of yourself - and your team - being isolated. If you’re in your own little marketing bubble, then colleagues might find themselves confused about what you actually do, and how it benefits them. Try having a bi-weekly, or even monthly, meeting with everyone to discuss successful experiments, results, and goals with the rest of the business. Once others start seeing the positive impact of your efforts, they’ll begin to see how marketing fits as part of the wider company, and start taking it more seriously.

How am I supposed to keep up with the ever-changing digital world on my own?

This is a big one. From Google core updates, LinkedIn algorithm changes, and even just the latest industry trends, it’s a lot to stay up-to-date with, and even with tools you might find yourself drowning in information. Just when you’ve sussed the latest development in digital, it’s changed, and just when you’ve written a piece of content about a juicy new update, there’s already 30 of them on the internet from your competitors.

Unfortunately there’s no quick way to do this. However, if you want to really keep track of what you need to know, sign up to newsletters, keep an ear out for podcasts, and stay active on LinkedIn and other social media. Reading articles and connecting with fellow digital marketers means that you’re much more likely to pick up on the latest info as soon as it’s available, and you’re much better positioned to adjust and tweak your strategy in an agile way.

What is the point?

If you haven’t asked yourself this yet, you must be new. Digital marketing can be extremely frustrating if you aren’t getting the results that you need, and if you feel like your efforts are just shouting into the void, then it can be tempting to wonder why you’re trying to market in the first place. The easy answer is because it’s your job, but marketers who aren’t passionate about keeping up with trends, seeing results and improving as they go are never going to really get the most from their role.

To be “good” at marketing, you need to focus on providing value to people, and creating content that doesn’t just create leads for your business, but helps to inform your audience, and answer the questions they didn’t even realise they had. If you can connect someone with an answer to their core issues, then you’ve marketed, sure - but you’ve also helped that person solve a problem. The “point” lies in the mindset, and once you’ve shifted your way of thinking, you’re not begging the ceiling to answer this question any more.

If you’re finding yourself asking these questions day in, day out, then it’s not a bad thing to need a little extra help.