Hey folks. I’m starting a new role as head of marketing at a startup. I’m no stranger to startups having spent years in one at my previous gig.

However, this is the first time I’ll be joining somewhere as a head of rather than working my way up. I’ll literally be a team of one, which is quite new territory as well.

My background is more content / creative / positioning / brand strategy, but through the help of AI, I’ve been able to pick up other marketing fundamentals - e.g. forecasting, unit economics, ramp up modelling, as well as the fundamentals of SEO etc.

Anyway, I’m feeling a bit of imposter syndrome as this is a great company doing great work and I don’t want to fuck it up. I’m reading loads and trying to brush up on areas that I feel aren’t my strongest.

Just wondering if anyone has any advice on how I should tackle my first few weeks? Any solo head of marketers out there in startup land? How have you used AI to help scale your output?

Sorry, probably a bit vague but just generally after some thoughts / advice etc. Thanks!

I have following situation.

Started local campaign in Q2, for each dolar spent I got 6.6 dollars in pipeline ARR, and we are expecting to close deal for that will bring us to 300% ROAS from that local Q2 campaign.

In Q3 I got higher budget and freedom to go all markets, campaign so far is going really good in terms of leads, opportunities and lead quality.

But I feel like CEOs perception is that I increased costs instead of that I brough new business for Q4 and Q1. He is used for "free" SEO leads and paid acquisition is strange concept for him.

CSO is telling me that sales should be leading marketing budget instead of endorsing me.

But from my POV I created huge new opportunities for sales department, campaigns are bringing best ICP they can wish for, and they should be closing them soon.

How do I capitalise this situation, I want to scale more instead of fighting whether or not I should be doing what I'm doing. I'm 1 person marker I want to hire more people and expand influence of marketing department.

I started posting on TikTok purely for fun, and somehow my second video went viral and received almost 1 million likes. I gained thousands of followers overnight and have been polishing, managing, and growing the account ever since (for a year now).
Since then, I’ve expanded to other social media platforms and I’m approaching 300k combined followers. My numbers are very good and I really haven’t done much at all to get them to where they are. I follow some trends, keep in line with posts that do well, but that’s pretty much it. No super secret tricks.

The ironic part is that I’m not particularly passionate about social media marketing itself. I feel like I stumbled into a game that I got lucky with.

My question is: does this kind of experience look valuable for other marketing jobs in general, or is it only relevant to social media roles? I’m interested in broader areas of marketing and would like to use this experience to transition into something beyond social media management.

Had a weird interview last week.

For context, I'm a graphic designer who specializes in high end print and direct mail.

During the interview I explained a campaign I work on that combines direct mail with digital ads. We test different versions, see what performs, and use that data to build the next campaign.

Before I could even finish explaining it, one of the interviewers basically said the client was throwing money away and it was a bad marketing strategy.

So I pulled up the work.

Turns out both interviewers had actually received my direct mail pieces at their homes.

Then one tells me her mother received one of the holiday pieces. I pulled it up and she confirmed that was the one. Then she tells me her mother actually bought the service during that campaign and had it installed in January.

Her mother also lived in one of the exact markets we were targeting.

So I joked, "Well, I guess we know it got at least one conversion. It can't be that bad of a strategy."

The mood changed immediately.

We went from joking and having a pretty casual conversation to straight business, and the interview ended right at the 30 minute mark.

Now they've basically ghosted me after asking me to send additional work.

The funny part is they originally interviewed me months ago, hired someone else, that person didn't work out, and then they came back to interview me again for essentially the same job.

At this point, even if they offer it to me, I'm not sure I'd take it.

Industry I was interviewing for was B2B business and the people I was interviewing with have about 50 years between them, both of them and B2B business on manufacturing industries. My background is pretty diverse from Fortune 500 to Mom and Pop shops to B2B, B2C products, healthcare, pharmaceutical and construction. I've seen a wide range of marketing strategies work with different industries, so I'm a little more open-minded to new ideas and different approaches when it comes to marketing. But I'm only a designer who has opinions on marketing not a degree in marketing. Lol

Am I reading too much into this, or would that interaction give you second thoughts too?

Hi! Attached is a pic close to our booth set up - without ordering new, what are you guys using to display your G2 badges for the quarter? We got 3 new GREAT ones and I would love to show them. We're out of table top space, we tried removable vinyl but it fell off after 20 min. Then we tried magnets. Our backdrop is cloth, pop up in vinyl and table is a cloth collapsible.

Thank you!!

Our B2B leads always drop off during the 6 weeks holiday in the UK. This obviously leads to sales moaning about lead generation in Q3 😡

What tactics have you used previously to compensate for this quiet period? I did think about doing some Content Syndication at the start of Q3, but then it's always difficult to do outreach follow ups as everyone is on annual leave.

Keen to get some ideas from you guys 👌

In 2023, less than half of marketers were using AI in their day-to-day work.

Today? 7 in 10.

That's one of the biggest shifts we've tracked across 3 years of the State of Marketing Survey with responses from real marketers across r/marketing, r/advertising, and beyond. No PR firm, no paid panel, just people answering honestly.

A few more things that changed since 2023:

• Remote work climbed from 39% to 48% of respondents, while "return to office" made headlines everywhere else
• AI use specifically for content/copywriting jumped from 43% to 62%
• Lead generation is eating every other marketing priority (32% → 42% B2B and B2C naming it their top focus)
• Survey participation grew as well from 289 people in 2023, 428 last year (+48%) meaning more data, more confidence in the numbers

We're gearing up for the 2026 edition, and this time we're going deeper on AI: which tools, which workflows, how deep it really goes.

Want your team's reality reflected in this year's benchmark data? The survey takes about 10-20 minutes. https://lookingformarketing.com/survey

What's one question you wish we asked that we haven't?

Previous year's survey data can be found here: 2025, 2024, and 2023.

Hello, 4 months ago I started working in a startup digital marketing agency.

At first we agreed on an vague and part-time (4 hours) role, like an assistant of the project manager. I would help the project manager with the deadlines and internal communication, I would schedule/post the photos and videos given to me, and I would do some community management (answer messages and comments), and research for content ideas and competitor analysis.

Now I have been "promoted" to social media manager, as they have been giving me extra tasks, like making graphic posts, creating stories, editing videos, doing reports, creating strategic plans for the content, and writing scripts for videos. I am currently managing 9 accounts on 3 different platforms, and now they want to add another 2 platforms. All of this in the span of 6 hours.

I feel like I am handling too much. I want to give more time to each of my projects.

I am a Junior, with no prior experience, except a 3-month internship, where I didn't learn much. I also don't have a senior where I can ask for advice or help. My "senior" is the project manager, who's my college classmate, and working experience is that they have worked in the company for 8 months.

What do you think? Am I overthinking it or is it actually overwork?

I'm a marketing team of one. Pretty much a generalist running social media, events (almost one roadshow a month), content (mainly case studies and recently developing thought leadership content). I do have designers helping me but that's not their main job (we're a creative agency).

Most days I feel like an arts & craft department? Writing copy, preparing layouts to brief designers, coordinating between stakeholder approvals and sending for production. Just preparing for events (which is 90% design work) takes up much of my time. E.g. one event backdrop sometimes can take up to five rounds of revisions.

Feeling a little bummed as I'm getting a little bored being the layer of messenger between our stakeholders and my designer colleagues.

WLB is great but sometimes I'm concerned if I'm truly moving the needle with my work as we're also a sales-driven organisation.

I have over 10 years of work experience as a technical writer and marketing copywriter.

Partially completed Associates degree in communications (more than 15 years ago) and have a Certificate in Technical Writing.

Should I choose the UMPI BBA with a concentration in Marketing

or

WGU Bachelors in Communications

I also hope to do a Masters in Organizational Leadership or maybe an MBA?

I would like to get better positions as a marketing/copywriting/content strategist/digital content specialist or internal communications.

I would also like to expand my career to go into management preferably, like Marketing Communications Manager or Lead Content writer or similar positions.

Thank you!

After 12+ years as a brand and marketing manager spanning from indie (team of one) to global (team of 40), within CPG in a very competitive category, I think that I’ve fully reached my cap on burnout. I just. can’t. care. The passion, creativity, ideas and more often lately even the cognitive thinking is at an all-time low. I sit frozen for a week on a PPT that should take one day. I’m in therapy weekly and although there’s so many other areas of my life that need my attention like relationships or family, 90% of what we talk about is work. I can’t go a week without having a panic attack in the morning. I cannot do this anymore.

No matter how hard I try, it’s like my brain is running on fumes. Its taking a serious mental and physical toll, and my doctors have been offering to place me on a mental health leave, but I’m stressing because I don’t have a plan for when that’s over. I dont think I want to come back to this. If I take leave, I want to use the time to first focus on my health and relationships, then work trauma, but I really think I want to look at something else - whether that’s still in this side of marketing or something else entirely. Maybe another industry? Maybe a specialized role I’ve never heard of that is more… I guess mindless in the sense of not constantly chasing KPIs. Something more people or partnership managing or internal account/category or asset management. Maybe leave marketing entirely? But I also fully support myself in a high COL so I can’t start most new careers from scratch :/

I just don’t know but I’m feeling so lost yet stuck, and it’s absolutely tearing me up and affecting everything in my life. I don’t want to lose myself and I really need to take a break but I can’t use the break to ease my anxiety without a semblance of a new plan.

I know most marketers here are on the analytics, growth and digital side and this is more creative and planning, but anyone relate? What would you guys do?

I'm run a email marketing campaign for my SaaS product and I'm so confused: why my setup counts delivered mails as opened?

I also tested this with my own 6 mails and the situation are the same: when email go to my inbox, it counts as opened (even If I not seen it)

If there is email marketers, please say how to track actuall open rate on my campaigns

Hello! Hoping someone here can advise.

I work for as in house marketing at a very small company. 2 years ago, we got acquired by a larger company, whom owns hundreds of companies internationally. We all do serve the same niche market of customers, but in different capacities (eg some of us are manufacturers, some are distributors, some are marketing companies, but our customer lists are all B2B buyers in a very specific market)

The president of our parent company wants there to be an effort for all 100+ of his acquired companies to compile our marketing email lists into 1 list for all of us to use for our emails, so as customers sign up for our email list they will also be added to the email lists of over 100 different companies, all doing their own marketing cycles independently.

This doesnt sound like best practice, but Im wondering the legality of it? Especially since we have companies all over the world, and I know EU is very strict.

I was working with this client for about 1.5 months. She kept saying she wasn't able to close deals, leads are bad, people aren't picking up, although this happened with another client too, and things are slowly picking up for my other clients now. I suggested various changes, but every couple of days I'd hear the same complaints. I asked for call recording, but they only shared once and nothing else. I added more qualification questions to the leads, but she said the same thing keeps happening, and now she sent me this message:

"I'm not able to do that. At the moment, I'm only using my personal iMessage number to contact the leads. Also, I would like to make this my last month with the ads. I will not be continuing with the advertising services moving forward. Unfortunately, the results have not justified the amount of money and time I've invested. As of today, I've received 194 leads and have only been able to close 3 clients. At this point, continuing to spend money on ads without seeing a reasonable return does not make sense for my business, and I also don't want to continue investing my time following up with leads that are not converting. Please consider this my notice that I will not be proceeding with the ads after this month. You can disregard moving forward. Thank you."

There won't be a refund since she paid 3 months($3K) upfront and there was contract, but I'm considering offering her a different funnel, maybe a masterclass funnel as she was interested before to start of her own, to see if she can close better through that instead. My honest read is that the real problem might be her closing skills or her simply being tired/burned out, not the leads themselves, in my finance niche of credit score, bad leads are literally part of game. Revenue matters to me here, so I'm wondering if I should offer something extra, maybe if she manages to close through a mentorship funnel, she'll extend the service again.

Would appreciate honest input on whether this is worth pursuing or if I should just let her go.

Should I address my founder’s communication style after only six weeks?

I started a job six weeks ago at a 20-person company. I like the product, my coworkers, and the work, but communicating with the founder often makes me feel like I’m walking on eggshells.

A few examples:

- During my first week, I was late responding about an insurance form. He messaged: “We want autonomy and proactivity. We don’t do babysitting :)”

- We once had a long, tense exchange in a team chat because he sharply challenged my interpretation of an analytics document. Eventually, we realized we had meant the same thing.

- I was asked to monitor SEO performance after a multilingual website migration. I shared a pre-migration checklist because I wanted to understand what was being implemented before becoming responsible for auditing the results. He replied publicly that my message looked AI-generated and that generic AI content wasn’t necessarily relevant. The checklist itself was based on legitimate concerns such as redirects, hreflang, and high-traffic pages.

He also frequently challenges my recommendations about advertising campaigns. However, he recently told me to be more confident and proceed with my ideas when I believe I’m right—even when he pushes back.

He says he’s simply direct and doesn’t have time to waste. He generally has good energy, but other employees have also told him that his written communication can come across as harsh.

Should I tell him something like:

“I like the company, the product, and the team, but I think we need to find common ground in how we communicate. Sometimes our conversations feel more confrontational than collaborative, and it makes me feel like I’m walking on eggshells. I’d like us to find a way of communicating that helps us work effectively together.”

Is this reasonable feedback, or would raising it after only six weeks be a mistake?

Ps. A month ago, employees confronted the founder (boss) about his sometimes harsh written communication style in his yearly performance review.

The CPG company I work for has been restructuring most departments. I started as an associate category manager last year and they now have eliminated the category department and I’m now a product marketing manager. I have degrees in marketing but my only experience before this was working at a small IT MSP company as their only marketer doing everything.

There is no framework, processes, or even a leader hired for us. The digital marketing director graciously took over my team when the guy who was going to be my new boss quit with no notice. I have no idea how to launch into this new role when I have no guidance or previous background with it.

I’m going to be responsible with go-to-market strategy, product naming, product packaging and copy, product positioning, mapping end to end buyers journey, and consumer segmentation.

We have copy writers, insights, graphic designers for pdps and kit boxes, brand team, digital marketing team, social media team…

I have no idea how to name a product with a strategic background. I am not that creative. I also have never made a gtm strategy for a product before. I’m also not great at positioning a product (because a lot of the stuff we make is odm so we really aren’t that much better than the competition) and I’m not a bullshitter when trying to make something sound better than it is.

How can I grow these skills? Any books, YouTube videos, pages to follow? I want to be successful in this job when I have no leader to guide me. I do love marketing but I just have no where to start and the people restructuring didn’t think that far either.

I do love my coworkers and the core of my company, I just don’t like the poor leadership direction they’re taking us. I don’t want to quit or leave yet. I want to make myself successful for this change.

I've been working at a media planner / strategist for around 6 years in London. I enjoy my team (which seems rare) and my company culture overall, but I find the work quite draining, and ultimately uninteresting. It's also terribly rewarded imo.

I often meet media owners, sales teams for broadcasters etc, and wonder if I'd be better suited for that type of role. I also believe the pay is better, but possibly more stressful due to targets?

Anyway - anyone made this jump got any advice? How did you find it? Do you recommend it? Is anything in saying ringing true?

I have been at my current job for 6 months. I took the role because it was supposed to offer a ton of opportunity for growth, the chance to be the first person to do real marketing work at the company, and a decent pay bump. My title is marketing manager and the job description described the role as owning marketing efforts for the various business units.

Since starting, the role has not been as advertised. Here are some issues.

- The CEO who I report directly to was a terrible micromanager. He also delegated our meetings to his admin, who doesn’t seem to care about my time at all (she misses weekly check in meeting with 0 notice).

- The same CEO retired for health reasons, but is still attempting to pull the strings from home. His admin added him to the company LinkedIn and he uses it to comment on things.

- The business unit leadership just takes no interest in collaborating on anything. Unfortunately, I’ve been told to make sure they approve of every little thing despite their general lack of marketing knowledge, which is why they hired me.

There is a lot more, but I don’t want to go on too long. The executive chair of our board is a marketing guy, and a well connected one at that. I took the job to work with him, and that lasted a month before things shifted.

I am wondering what I should do. I don’t want to get let go for doing the job without getting the approval, but I fear that doing nothing is just as bad, if not worse. I am good at my job, I’m good at marketing, and I want to contribute, but I feel like they are trying to force me out or just don’t care. What do I do?

Hey guys, so we are a NYC based company and there's one client who wants us to basically do everything, this client is a home remodelling offline store who has no social presence no website nothing and want us to basically build brand from scratch.

The services that he wants from us are : website, seo, smm, d2c meta ads, local meta ads (to drive traffic into store) and may be google ads also.

He basically wants an agency to handle everything from him, we have the manpower to do so and everything but this type of pricing is something which is very complex to understand like we charge a flat fees for SMM but for d2c meta ads we use to charge base + performance fee and then local ads is something different

We are thinking of making it easy for him to understand with one set up fee + monthly retainer fee and increase pricing based upon Quarterly KPI performance, what do you think should be these numbers

Has anyone run a marketing department only to be informed traditional and digital marketing activities are no longer important for the success of the business? Our department must now take on the role of research and informing leadership where it makes sense to expand the business?

I am a creative and business intelligence or analyzing markets are not my strong suits. I’ve typically partnered with these roles to determine what campaigns are needed to support expansion. Not both.

Would love your advice.

I'm at a loss on what to do here actually as I can't see enough data to see how it affects me.
My affiliate software now has an update that allows me to see which orders were reffered by ads, and it turns out it's pretty much ALL of them.

Would anyone know how these affiliates normally work with their ad setup? My main concern is just exactly how many customers would have found me from my own ads rather than clicking on an affiliate ad and then getting 10% commission from it.

The specific ones I look at don't seem too engouraging either, such as a customer that's already ordered 11 times before and so on.

Usually I see posts about trying to leave agency-side, but has anyone thought about going back?

I was in an agency for 3 years, was doing creative marketing and strategy, then left for an in-house brand manager role pretty early on because I got tired of being in the same place for so long and wanted to try something different. Plus the promotion pipeline at my agency was blocked.

However now I kind of miss the fast-paced life and have had other agencies reach out to me. I'm kind of tempted to go back instead of saying in my current role, which is B2B. To be honest, I don't know what I want to do in my career long-term.

Has anyone been in this position before? What drew you back or what kept you fixed on staying in-house? Would hiring managers think it's incoherent to have a career move like this?

Every now and then I get an ad in my feed selling some kind of product. A book, a retreat, a strategy sheet, etc. For some kind of often ridiculous price ending in .97.

I click on the ad because I’m intrigued, but I get this long single page website that scrolls on for a year and a half. The same information regurgitated in different ways 7 times, with 20+ reviews that may or may not be real.

Most times, I don’t reach the end of the page to even see the price. My logic is, if you have to try THAT hard, if you can’t condense the value of your product into one decent sized EPK with a purchase link, it’s either a scam or not worth it.

Thoughts?