How to Prevent Digital Marketing Burnout (for Your Content and Yourself)

By Jacquelyn Benda on 01/18/19
Updated on 12/03/24

I love a good campfire. The warmth, the crackling sound of wood, the smell — all of it.

Campfires don’t tend themselves. To prevent the fire from burning out, you need to add wood and stoke the embers.

For us digital marketers, our internal fire needs to stay lit so we stay motivated to create engaging and effective content.

Unfortunately, marketing burnout happens to the best of us from time to time. Here are a few ways to keep the digital marketing flame alive — both for your content and for yourself!

Prevent Burnout in Your Digital Marketing Content

From blogs to emails to landing pages to online ads, digital marketers create a lot of content.

With the amount of content digital marketers are expected to produce in a given week, it can be difficult to make your content exciting every single time. After all, how many times can you write about the same truck and still make it sound fresh?

Avoid content burnout with these three tips.

1. Break Up Your Content

Instead of writing one long blog post about the latest truck on your dealership’s lot, break up that blog post into a blog series.

Blog series allow you to write extensively about specific aspects of your product. These posts will educate readers and hopefully keep them coming back to read the next post!

Utilizing blog series is also a great way to fill up your content calendar without having to brainstorm brand-new content ideas all the time.

For 9 Clouds auto clients, we often write blog series that break down the features of a new vehicle model into three posts: “Comfort and Convenience,” “Design and Styling,” and “Performance and Handling.”

2. Avoid Scope Creep

Scope creep is a common term in the project management world. It refers to the gradual increase in a project’s requirements due to ill-defined expectations.

When starting a new business relationship, you should talk about project scope and the expectations you have for each other. At 9 Clouds, we work with our clients to create a personalized content scope at the beginning of each relationship.

Here’s an example of a typical content scope at a digital marketing agency:

- Two blog posts per month

- Two emails per month

- One landing page per month
- Four Facebook ads per month

Sometimes, a client will ask its digital marketing agency to produce more content than the amount that’s been scoped. If the agency is consistently doing this extra work, it’s only a matter of time before burnout occurs . . . when it could have been avoided altogether with proper planning and communication.

3. Write More Evergreen Content

We know it’s difficult to write about a completely new topic for every post. That’s why we love writing content that’s evergreen, meaning the content remains relevant as time goes on.

For auto dealers, writing an entire overview about each new vehicle model is helpful and informative . . . but it’s also time consuming, and the content is outdated within a year.

Writing about topics (like auto financing and service) that are always relevant typically increases content engagement while decreasing the amount of time spent creating the content.

Prevent Marketing Burnout in Yourself

It’s not just content that digital marketers need to worry about. In order to consistently produce the best content possible, we need to prevent burnout in ourselves as well.

Here are three ways we digital marketers can keep our internal fires lit.

1. Know When to Keep Going and When to Break

Nothing feels better than knowing when you’re in the creative zone. The words keep coming, and you’re banging out assignments left and right. Wouldn’t it be great if we were “in the zone” all the time?

Unfortunately, every digital marketer hits a creative wall now and then. If your lack of progress comes from distractions, try removing yourself from them, and grind through the project.

However, if you’ve been staring at the computer screen for an hour and made essentially zero progress, it’s probably time for a break from all content, not just your current assignment.

Try running a flight of stairs, take a 10-minute coffee break, or walk around the block before coming back to your computer.

2. Maintain a Healthy Work-Life Balance

When digital marketers don’t actually leave their work at the office, it’s a sure sign that burnout is coming.

You rarely escape work if you’re staying at the office for hours longer than you should or if you consistently check emails while at home.

At 9 Clouds, we try to emphasize a good work-life balance for our team. Having breaks from work is essential for digital marketers to remain motivated and to produce their best possible work.

3. Consume External Content

Consuming new ideas and fresh perspectives is key to avoiding digital marketing burnout.

Subscribe to marketing newsletters and attend marketing conferences to keep up with the latest developments in the digital marketing industry.

Not all content you consume needs to be related to your industry, either. Good writing is good writing. You can be inspired when you least expect it!