01
Marketing teams are tiny
The median marketing team has 3 people. 72% have five or fewer, and 43% are one or two people running every channel.
72%of teams have five or fewer marketers
97% say the team is stretched or cannot hire.
Who we talked to
84% of buyers are director level or above, and 25% are VP, C-level or founders.
I'm also acting as marketing ops. I'm acting as email nurturers. I'm acting as an SDR person. I'm acting as the paid media team.
I am kind of like a one and a half person team, where I have a campaign manager, slash content marketer, he's just like wearing five different hats, just like I do.
02
The bottleneck is execution
The problem is getting work out the door. 71% lack the hands to execute, and 51% are held back by making the creative.
Teams could name more than one.
I think it's execution and operational efficiency. Because right now, I think everything is treated like a net new project, so it's not very scalable. And so it's hard to run things simultaneously.
Every time I ask for a new set of ABM ads, the design team cringes. And they're like, you need more ads? We just gave you more ads.
03
A campaign takes three weeks to go live
The median campaign takes 21 days from brief to live. 46% take a month or more.
21 daysmedian from brief to live
It was us looking at the pipeline, identifying where there's gaps, developing a campaign, putting it in market, 90 days later, doing the same thing again.
With my team and introducing process improvements and AI, we've already collapsed that 45 day campaign cycle to 28 days.
04
The stack is HubSpot first
HubSpot runs marketing automation for 71% of teams and Marketo for 22%. LinkedIn is the top ad channel.
Marketing automation
Some teams run more than one.
Most-mentioned tools
It took me so many hundred clicks to move pictures over and then find out the picture doesn't fit this well.
We're sending emails from one platform, the push notifications from a different platform, and it's hard for us to understand what was the channel that really drove that conversion.
05
AI use is mostly experimental
AI use is mostly one person at a time with a chat tool. Only 31% of teams have built AI into how they work, and 5% run agents in production.
Assistants teams already use
Claude comes up more often than ChatGPT (42% against 28%).
I save two days, making it in two hours on an AI program, and then I lose two days when my sales people come back and say, well, actually, I kind of really want this over here.
We tried, we built like a custom agent internally that didn't, the results weren't that great with the actual emails themselves.
06
Agencies fill the gap
56% of teams lean on an agency, contractors or offshore help to get campaigns out, and 81% of them are unhappy with it.
56%rely on outside help to execute
I hired, like, an agency to do a lot of the work for us versus hiring because if I wanted to do things quickly, hiring would just take too long.
We hired an agency. We have several people, interns kind of stepping in to manage social. We're just not seeing those results. I think that content output because the agency doesn't know our business is mediocre at best.
07
What teams want to run
Paid ads, email and ABM top the list. Each one touches several tools before it can go live.
Teams could pick more than one.
We need the tools to help us say, how do we take our one idea and make it the 100 variants we need?
We have to stand up email nurture. I mean, there's like no outbound comms that nurture leads that might have come in or anybody that we might have spoken to.
08
What slows down a yes
The most common hesitation is not price or trust in AI. It is timing and getting the rest of the company on board.
We've brought on tools and vendors in the past six months where it actually has ended up being more work on our team, and so I'm just like a little bit sensitive to that.
I talked to different vendors and we're very hesitant to do anything that requires like more managerial time on top of it. Like now we're managing a whole other project or a whole other tool or something that already takes a lot of time.