Marketing is a fun, interesting job, but as with anything you spend a lot of time doing, you can get burned out.

The same goes for your audience – if you’re just handing them the same old content, recycled over and over, they’ll get burned out too.

Chances are, if you feel it, they feel it. Fortunately, we have some helpful ways to avoid B2B marketer burnout. Read on to learn more.

What is Burnout?

First off, burnout is when you’re emotionally, mentally or physically exhausted by something. When it comes to marketer burnout, it tends to happen when you’re overwhelmed and feel like you just can’t keep up with constant demands.

It can also occur when you get stuck in a rut and find yourself just mechanically doing the same tasks, over and over.

Burnout rate goes hand-in-hand with job satisfaction, as well. Burnout sucks, and it’s important to take an active approach to overcoming it.

The problem is, as a marketer, when you start to burn out, your audience picks up on it too, which makes your job more difficult.

How Burnout Impacts Your Audience

There’s a trick music producers use to get their vocalist to deliver the right tone: when they’re singing, they make the face of the emotion they’re trying to convey. Sing (or speak) with a smile and you’ll automatically sound happier.

It may sound silly, but it works. If you’re writing a blog and you’re having a bad day, your writing won’t be as upbeat and engaging as it probably should be.

It becomes a vicious cycle, because your results suffer, which makes your job even less satisfying, and well, you can see where this is going.

That’s when you start losing subscribers and potential leads, because your audience sees the same stuff on repeat.

So avoid job burnout and you can avoid audience burnout too.

Identifying Burnout

How do you know if you’re burned out?

Ask Yourself:

• Is your attitude at work increasingly cynical, irritable, impatient, or critical?
• Are you consistently low on energy and unable to concentrate?
• Do you feel disillusioned about your work?
• Do you suffer from lack of sleep, headaches or stomach aches?

Some of the most common factors that lead to burnout are work-life imbalance, monotony and workplace dysfunction.

In other words, if your work overwhelms your personal life, you’re doing boring tasks on repeat, or you’re dealing with things like an unpleasant colleague or a supervisor who likes to micromanage, you’re more likely to get burned out.

Avoiding Burnout for You and Your Audience

Depending on what the cause is, you have a range of options to mitigate burnout factors.

If your stress is primarily due to a workplace issue, it’s a good idea to discuss your problems with your supervisor. You’d be surprised how often one small conversation can have a big impact.

Prioritize getting some exercise and better sleep. People severely underestimate this. 33% of adult Americans aren’t getting enough sleep.

Breaking the Monotony

If you find yourself struggling to write interesting content, you’ve probably been writing the same thing way too much, and your audience will pick up on that.

You’ll do yourself and your lead generation a massive favor by trying something new. Whether that’s launching a whole new channel, like starting a podcast, or just changing up the content of your existing stuff – a splash of something new goes a long way.

Instead of writing your nth blog post about how great your product is, write about something topical in your industry.

Explore new trends, or if you want to keep it centered around your product, do a roundup of the best ways your customers use it.

Pick a successful customer and write a case study on why they’re successful with it. Then, not only are you doing something a little different, you’re also generating a useful bit of content and social proof.

Strategies to Deal with Burnout at Work

As marketers, it feels like we never stop. If you’re using content marketing, you’re under pressure to consistently deliver engaging, top-tier content. That can get overwhelming, so plan ahead to take some pressure off.

Use a content calendar to manage your deliverables and time on whatever basis you find most effective – weekly or monthly. When you have a concrete list of your current workload, and estimates on how long each will take, you can see how much mental bandwidth you actually have.

More to the point, so can your manager. If you’ve got 40 hours in a week and 35 of them are already booked up with other tasks, your manager might reconsider tossing another 8-hour task at you. Either that, or deprioritize other tasks.

Don’t forget to leave space for unexpected or emergent work, so that you can deal with the inevitable sudden changes without worrying.

Setting priorities is key and requires open communication with your boss. If you’re unsure whether something is higher priority, ask. It’s never a bad idea to make sure everyone is on the same page.

If your manager hands you a task that you know you don’t have time and capacity for, say something like ‘Sure, I can do that, but it will take [x] hours, so it’ll mean deprioritizing something else to make room.

Managing Burnout is Important

Nobody wants to have to drag themselves out of bed for work every day. It’s important not to get into a rut, and there are ways to improve a stale situation.

Don’t be afraid to have an open, honest conversation with your company about how you’re doing. Their employees’ health is important to their success, and most employers will work with you to try to avoid burnout.

Your audience (and your happiness levels) will thank you!