Key points
- TMM’s State of Marketers report surveyed 1,248 marketers, not about marketing itself, but about how people in marketing roles are actually doing
- The headline: the community hasn’t fallen out of love with the craft, but the conditions around the job have got harder, and connection to the wider industry may be part of the answer
- The top five words marketers used to describe the job: challenged (positively), then uncertain, chaotic, stressful, and overwhelmed
- 80% of people who felt positively challenged also ticked at least one hard feeling on the same question, it’s not a good camp and a bad camp, most people live in both at once
- Imposter syndrome sits at 46% overall, and doesn’t go away with seniority: 4 in 10 marketers with 16+ years’ experience still feel it
- 97% of respondents use AI, but the more senior use it for strategy and see the most value from it, while more junior people using it mainly for writing report a less positive relationship with it
- Freelancers report feeling more connected to the industry than people working on-site in teams, seemingly because they build community deliberately rather than waiting for it to happen
- Practical recommendations: don’t wait for connection to happen, use AI for more than typing, look out for juniors specifically, and invest in “scaffolding” like regular pay reviews and clear priorities, since one in seven marketers has never had a pay review at all
Table of Contents
- Why the report exists
- The big takeaway
- The words marketers use to describe the job
- Good and bad, often on the same Tuesday
- Imposter syndrome doesn't discriminate by seniority
- AI: saving time without reducing workload
- Connection and the freelancer paradox
- Six practical takeaways from the report
- Audience Q&A
This session broke from TMM’s usual guest-led format: Joe and James talked through the findings of TMM’s second annual State of Marketers report themselves, reflecting on what came out of surveying 1,248 members of the community.
Why the report exists
Joe traced the idea back to his own early career, an anxious, uncertain first marketing role at a three-person company, and a decade of running TMM events since. His observation: TMM’s research has always focused on marketing as a practice, but rarely on marketers as people. The first State of Marketers survey ran in 2025, and the response, people saying it made them feel seen, prompted a second edition in 2026.
The big takeaway
Joe framed the findings around three statements: the community hasn’t fallen out of love with the craft of marketing, the conditions around it have got genuinely harder, and connection to the wider industry appears to be part of the answer.
“The community has not fallen out of love with marketing. The conditions around it have got harder in the last 12 months.”
The words marketers use to describe the job
The top response was “challenged (positively),” followed by uncertain, chaotic, stressful, and overwhelmed. James’s read: marketing’s unpredictability, driven by algorithm changes and the pace of AI, naturally produces this mix, and juggling multiple roles within one job (rather than a single specialism) tends to be where the sense of overwhelm comes from.
“The fact that it isn’t certain, to me it just screams opportunity.”
Good and bad, often on the same Tuesday
One of the most striking findings, in James’s view: 80% of people who ticked “positively challenged” also ticked at least one hard feeling on the same question. The report’s own line on this:
“Folks can be creative and frazzled, often on the same Tuesday, and that’s not a you thing.”
James described going into the analysis expecting to find two distinct groups, people who love the job and people who don’t, and instead finding that most people hold both experiences simultaneously.
Imposter syndrome doesn’t discriminate by seniority
46% of respondents overall report feeling imposter syndrome; that rises to 62% for people in their first two years in the industry, but doesn’t disappear with experience, 4 in 10 marketers with 16+ years still feel it. James, drawing on patterns he’s seen through TMM’s mentorship groups, offered three unscientific but practical reframes: accept that constantly learning is part of the job description, not a sign you’re behind; if you can’t control the strategic work, take real pride and ownership in the smaller pieces you can; and build a small daily learning habit (he cited AI educator Heather Murray’s practice of dedicating part of every day to learning) to avoid the pressure of feeling permanently behind on change.
AI: saving time without reducing workload
97% of respondents reported using AI in some form. But how people use it correlates with how they feel about it: those using it for strategic, brainstorming-level work (typically more senior people) report the most value, while those using it mainly for writing (typically more junior) report a less positive relationship with it overall.
The most striking year-on-year shift: fewer people report feeling behind on AI, more report still figuring it out, and more report it’s actively saving them time, 46% said so directly. But one quote from the qualitative data captured something else entirely:
“Despite the incredible help AI has been in making things quicker and easier, there is no less work to be done.”
Joe’s read: this isn’t really a complaint about AI, it’s a comment about workload. Activity tends to expand to fill whatever space is available, so time saved by AI doesn’t necessarily translate into feeling less busy, since more gets asked of that freed-up time instead.
Connection and the freelancer paradox
Marketers scoring their industry connection between 7 and 10 out of 10 reported meaningfully higher optimism about their role. The unexpected finding: freelancers, who might be expected to feel the most isolated, reported the highest connection scores, while people working on-site in teams reported the lowest.
James’s explanation: freelancers tend to build community deliberately, out of necessity, rather than waiting for it to happen, whereas someone embedded in a larger team, especially a lone marketer in a big non-marketing organisation, can end up genuinely isolated despite being surrounded by colleagues.
“Build your community before you need it.”
Six practical takeaways from the report
- You’re not alone. The challenges surfaced in the report are shared widely, not individual failings.
- Resilience isn’t the fix. Telling people to “be more resilient” isn’t a useful response to genuinely harder conditions.
- Look down the ladder. More senior marketers have a responsibility to help junior colleagues navigate a changing industry, particularly around AI.
- Use AI for more than typing. The data suggests deeper, strategic use produces more satisfaction than using it purely for writing tasks.
- Don’t wait for connection to happen. People who make deliberate effort to connect report the highest optimism and support scores.
- Invest in “scaffolding.” Concrete, practical fixes like regular pay reviews (one in seven marketers has never had one), clear priorities, and proper junior development materially improve how the job feels, even without changing the work itself.
James added a related point on AI and juniors specifically: AI can’t develop taste, only judgement built through experience can, which means senior marketers have a genuine advantage AI doesn’t erode, but also a responsibility to give juniors the room to develop that judgement themselves, rather than letting AI make decisions for them by default.
Audience Q&A
Asked whether marketers feel able to ask for support (or a pay review) without professional risk, Joe and James acknowledged this as a genuinely difficult, unresolved tension rather than offering a tidy answer, while noting that asking rarely reflects badly on the person doing the asking, even when the answer is no.
Asked how to better educate internal colleagues about what marketing does, both pointed to the same underlying idea: treat internal understanding as a two-way relationship, not a one-way education exercise. Go and understand finance, ops, or sales on their own terms first, in Joe’s words, “the number one thing they wanted from marketing was a chat,” and the shared language that builds makes it far easier to explain marketing’s value back to them afterwards.