If you’re struggling with marketing fatigue, this episode of the Know, Like & Trust Show with Britney Gardner is a must-listen.

Table of Contents

I’ll walk you through a time when I had a problem with marketing fatigue. I found I was doing a lot of work, but not seeing the desired results. When I decided to take a step back, I realized how much of what I was doing wasn’t actually necessary. I learned how to pare down my marketing activities, set boundaries, and focus on the important things. It’s made a world of difference in my business and I’m sharing to help you avoid content burnout as well.

In this episode, you will learn the following:

Content burnout – how to combat it
Why content batching will decrease your fatigue
How to set boundaries and say no to marketing opportunities
How to measure your results from content marketing

Listen to this episode on:

Highlights in this episode:

[00:00:39] Why content burnout and marketing fatigue is a danger to your business

[00:01:50] – Braces fatigue and how it relates to content burnout

[00:03:40] – Managing marketing fatigue with three steps.

[00:06:07] – The first step to overcoming marketing fatigue

[00:09:45] – Personal story on minimizing busywork

[00:12:29] – Putting it all together to avoid marketing fatigue.

Article

We’re going to talk about Content Burnout this week. I know, such a fun, sexy topic, right? Here is the reality: content burnout is no joke.

And I know I’ve shared a ton of info heavy on content strategy, content frameworks, and various different multistep processes you probably want to follow for a robust and easeful content strategy online. But it’s still a lot of steps, and it’s time for a little break, a little diversion, shall we say, into what content burnout is, what marketing fatigue is, and why we want to avoid them.

What is marketing fatigue?

Fatigue of any kind will lead to overall burnout in your business. That’s not great! And I’m talking about any kind of fatigue:

physical fatigue
emotional fatigue
definitely marketing and content fatigue.

And any time you feel like something’s just never done, and you have to keep on at it (like being on that content creation hamster wheel), it will eventually cause a big problem in your business.

So how are we going to address it? In this article, we are going to cover steps you can take to combat content burnout, how content batching will actually decrease your overall burnout and fatigue, and we’re going to talk a little bit about boundaries as well.

With that, let’s hop into what the whole Content Burnout conversation is actually about in the first place. If you aren’t sure what marketing fatigue is, I want you to think about it like you would braces fatigue (or mask fatigue, these last few years).

A fatigue analogy to understand marketing fatigue

So this idea of fatigue was introduced to us by our orthodontist. My nine-year-old had braces, and someone recently, someone was like, “Wow, they’re doing braces really young these days.” And yeah, they are. I mean, this is way younger than I had braces.

When we were first referred to the orthodontist, I thought, no, he’s eight. Why would we do that? And our dentist said, well, his teeth are kind of wonky, and it’s going to be increasingly difficult for him to brush and floss properly until all of his adult teeth come in, and they are ready to be straightened. So I want a consult. And then we went to the orthodontist, and they were like, we want to do two phases.

And my first gut reaction was no; I’m not paying for braces twice. This is a money grab. I am not here for this. But the orthodontist explained it to me like this. Our son has multiple problems in his mouth.

His mouth is pretty small, so he’s got wonky teeth, his palette is the wrong shape, and he has a pretty severe overbite. And he said, for us to correct all of those problems, it would be at least three years straight of him wearing braces. And what they’ve found is that kids just aren’t compliant for that length of time. Anything longer than 18 months or so, their compliance level dips way down, and then ultimately, it takes either longer for them to have their treatment or the treatment never fully finishes and their teeth revert back to how they were, and they go into adulthood without all the benefits of braces, despite the fact that they had to wear them.

Once it was just explained to me like that, I said, oh, yeah, so we are doing this. We are paying twice the amount, of course, but we are doing this to help prevent that fatigue.

Now, let’s translate that to your business, and we’re going to talk a little bit about marketing fatigue. So when you start feeling like, oh, my goodness, I have to do that again, it is time to take steps to combat this marketing fatigue. If you don’t, again, that burnout issue will rear its ugly head.

How to combat content burnout

But how do you combat that marketing fatigue? What are the steps that you should actually be taking? There are four things that you can do.

The first is looking at what you can pare down.
What can you outsource or fully release?
What can you just say no to?

What can you pare down?

One of the things I talk about with all of my clients, whether they’re doing done-for-you content work with me or they’re building their DIY content planning, visibility, and strategy, is that it’s always going to be smarter for you to condense your creation time. This means content batching.

It’s why I introduced that content template system in the Show Up System, so people would have the tools to condense their creation time. Do a bunch of content brainstorming now, plan a bunch out in a batch, and then everything happens for you the rest of the week, or the rest of the month, or whichever kind of batching you choose to do.

And that goes for really any business activity, but specifically any marketing activity. If you’re creating brand awareness videos for ads, don’t create one every day. Do all five on one specific hour, time block, or however it works for you. When you spread things out, you definitely have that, “Oh, I’m doing this again, feeling.” It’s not fun, and it definitely will lead to that fatigue.

What can you outsource?

One of the other things that I have done to decrease my marketing fatigue is I hired a podcast manager several months back, and it has been fantastic. Shout out to Haley here, at Heart Centered Podcasting, if you’re wondering who I used. It has released a bunch of regular activities from my weekly schedule on my calendar. Some of those things are things that cannot be done until the week before the show. So it’s something that I wouldn’t have been able to batch. Other things are things I probably could have batched and pared down to a smaller time.

But either way, paring that stuff down and hiring someone to help me with that has really decreased the fatigue I feel around creating a weekly podcast here.

The second thing is what can you release by outsourcing or by not doing at all? I’m not fully releasing the podcast creation. I am the only one that can record this, but I was able to release some parts of it, which was paring down. So what can you fully release?

Hiring someone to help me has really decreased the fatigue I feel around creating a weekly podcast.

What can you fully release?

And one of the things you can do right now is choosing to be on just one social media platform.

Maybe for you, that means you are literally not on a platform. You post nothing. Maybe for you, especially if you’re a Show Up System user, you are primarily on one, you’re only engaging on one, and you have a limited presence on some other platforms using the Show Up System templates so that it can be an easy way to add to your content system activities.

Or can you outsource your ads? If ads are a part of your marketing world, what can you fully release? Allow someone else to control it completely so you are not in the daily grind activities.

What can you say no to?

And then third is just simply saying no more often. And this one hard for a lot of solopreneurs. This is definitely hard for the Type A kind of people, but once you start getting used to it, you will almost become addicted to it. Probably you’re like, oh, what else can I stop saying yes to? What else can I just not do?

An example in my own business for this recently is I participated in a giveaway at the end of July through the beginning of August, and it was great. It was a wonderful list-building activity, and it worked out well. I had two more requests like that come in on the heels of that giveaway. One is another giveaway coming up this autumn, and it looked like a good opportunity.

I had one affiliate promo period at the beginning of August. I’ll have another one at the beginning of October. I was doing the math in my head, and that’s two months in between. So I won’t create an email list fatigue issue, and it also won’t feel so heavy for me.

But I also had some other requests. I had one of my clients who was doing an affiliate launch that she asked me to be a part of. It was right on the heels of that first giveaway, and then I had another content launch that a friend of mine was doing that’s going to be right at the end of September. And it was probably something I would have normally participated in. And it’s a product I definitely agree with, and I have taken, and I could do a legit affiliate promo period over it. But I had already committed to this other thing at the beginning of October, and I said, you know what? I just don’t have to do this. This is not something that has to be a part of my business.

Learning to say no more often and, as a result of these things, not having to market as much with my list and my social media audience, is something I’m doing to set healthy boundaries in my business. I’m ensuring the marketing fatigue doesn’t even become an issue. I’m preventing it before it’s happening.

What to do when you’re feeling burnt out

If any of these things sound familiar to you, if you feel like marketing fatigue is something that’s a real problem in your business right now, I would suggest you go through each of those three things.

You pick one thing that you can pare down, one thing that you can fully release, and then commit to saying no to at least every other opportunity that comes your way for the next quarter.

If your lead generation hasn’t suffered, maybe you didn’t need to be doing those marketing activities in the first place.

And then you reevaluate and ask, hey, what’s working? Did my overall lead generation suffer due to my paring these activities down or releasing them? And if not, if it didn’t suffer, if you’re still in the same profitability zone, maybe it was something that you didn’t need to be doing in the first place. This has been a huge business lesson for me over the years.

A personal story on minimizing busy work

I have talked on the show a couple of different times about how I took, quite possibly, the longest maternity leave ever. It was almost two years long. And one of the reasons I did that is because I had serious marketing fatigue when I started paring things back. Actually, at one point for a solid year of that time period, I had my revolving monthly business expenses down to less than $100 a month. In my case, I was still paying things for Adobe Creative Cloud and certain $ 9-a-month services and hosting, things like that.

I had scaled back so far. One of the reasons I did that is because I had huge burnout and fatigue from all of the things I had been doing before I made that decision for that long maternity leave.

I realized I was actually doing a lot of busy work. Paring down my marketing while I was on maternity leave made me realize I was doing a lot of busy work, spending time in the name of working, in the name of promoting and marketing my business. As it turns out, they weren’t actually producing that many leads, and that meant that they weren’t producing that much income. So when I returned to my business, I committed to less busy work.

Paring down my marketing while I was on maternity leave made me realize I was doing a lot of busy work, spending time in the name of working.

When I relaunched my podcast, for example, I decided that while, yes it’s a weekly podcast, but if I miss a week it’s okay; no one’s going to come screaming at me. And I think I’ve only missed two weeks since I came back and that was two years ago. So only two weeks over the last 100 weeks or so.

Neither of those times did anyone say, hey, what happened? I didn’t see your show on Monday.

We make these things really big in our head. So as you’re looking at what you can pare down, what you can fully release and what you can say no to, yes, there may be a few people who notice a few of these things, but that’s not everybody. You don’t have a responsibility to be perfect all the time. Mastery over perfection, right?

Why measuring your content saves you time

In addition to that, when you’re looking at what you can pull back from to decrease your marketing fatigue, it’s often things that you’re doing that aren’t tied to results. And that is why in both the Show Up System and Content Lab, my last modules are all about measuring your results.

I love having consistent content. You guys know, I preach and live and breathe by it. But if that consistent content is not pulling in results for your business, you need to know that. The easiest way to know that 100% is to measure what you’re doing.

I was able to see what was busy work and what actually made me money because I had the separation of maternity leave. If you don’t plan on taking a big chunk of time away from your business, in-the-moment measuring will help you determine what is results-oriented and what is busy work.

When you are appropriately measuring what you’re doing, it’s a lot easier to make these decisions that combat marketing fatigue. What can you pare down? It’s a lot easier to decide what to fully release because you can actually start looking at which things are not pulling their weight in your business and those are the things that you can put on the chopping block.

Marketing fatigue is a real thing. I don’t want you to experience it like I have in the past. So if you just take a few moments to internalize these three steps to avoid it, I think you will be much happier as a result. And if you haven’t yet experienced it, know that paying attention to these three things will help you deal with eventual content burnout.

Do you need help measuring your content?