It’s been said that “marketing budgets drop like a stone at the first sign of trouble.” Most of us will recognize the truth in that sentiment based on the last couple of years, in which a global pandemic, geopolitical disruption, and ongoing market challenges have led to what Gartner calls “multiple consecutive cycles of reduced funding.”
The compounded result is that “marketing budgets have dropped from an average of 9.1% of company revenue in 2023 to 7.7% in 2024 … a fall of 15% year over year.” This is despite a busier, more pressured, and increasingly technologically advanced playing field involving more digital channels, increased e-commerce options, and brand-new AI tools.
In short, we’ve all been asked to do more with less for quite some time now. But are we doing more of the right work? Is all our hard work actually translating into real results? Are we actually making an impact every day?
That’s what led Wrike to commission the 2024 Impactful Work Report, a revealing study of the state of the workplace today. Working in conjunction with Sapio Research, we surveyed 1,000 business leaders and 2,500 knowledge workers across the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, and Japan.
The results paint an interesting picture for the marketing industry, its people, and its purpose.
What makes work impactful in marketing
Marketing is a simple term for a hugely diverse field. It encompasses everything from advertising to design, event planning, and creative project management.
The Wrike/Sapio research focused on marketing, PR, and communications professionals in large agencies or dedicated departments in major enterprises. The size of their workplaces makes them particularly busy juggling multiple clients, campaigns, and creative teams — often cross-functionally with other departments like product, customer service, and legal.
They’re tasked with a variety of marketing efforts, such as generating demand, strategizing digital marketing, organizing corporate events, or commissioning creative design. The idea behind it all is to drive new engagement and deliver more customers. Our report’s authors would call this impactful work, which ”contributes to the strategy, growth, and revenue of the business.”
The problem is that impactful work accounts for only a little over half of what marketing professionals do all day. The rest of the time — between 42% and 46%, according to our research — is spent on administration, including:
- Duplicating work, searching for information, and toggling between tools
- Attending unproductive meetings
- Repeating work that was already done
That’s all low-impact work, and it’s having a real effect on the marketing industry — and its bottom line.
The real costs of low-impact work
The 2024 Impactful Work Report put a price on all this low-impact work, and it’s quite astonishing. Across the board, every year, $15,138.03 is wasted per employee and $7,016.82 per business leader on low-impact work.
In an era where every marketing dollar is being stretched further than ever, this should serve as a wake-up call. Imagine if all that money was redirected toward paid search or other extra marketing support?
But the effects of low-impact work in marketing aren’t just monetary — they’re also contributing to poor staff morale. In fact, our research shows that many marketing employees are dealing with:
- Heavier workloads: Most feel their workloads have grown by almost a third.
- Lack of fulfillment: Only 17% feel very fulfilled by the work that they do.
- Poor productivity: Just 70% of marketing employees feel productive at work.
- Reduced recognition: Barely half feel their work is recognized.
- Culture of fear: Less than a third feel comfortable saying no to extra work.
- Low autonomy: Only 17% believe they’re empowered to prioritize impactful work.
In general, just 59% of all workers surveyed feel happy at work, a problem that’s leading to some half a million dollars lost every year on marketing employee churn.
Leadership isn’t impervious to the effects of low-impact work either, feeling increased pressure. Across the board, more than 44% are worried about the following scenarios:
- Their team/department will not be able to deliver business outcomes because there is a lack of alignment across the organization.
- Their team/department will not be able to deliver business outcomes because they have not prioritized improving efficiency.
- Their organization will experience revenue loss because it has not prioritized improving efficiency.
It all points to a sense of unease, uncertainty, and unmet expectations — all caused by low-impact work.
A potential balm in AI and automation
One of the most promising parts of the research focused on AI, which most respondents agreed was of benefit to the marketing industry.
Most of the marketers surveyed felt that AI or automation is assisting them, but there’s a big discrepancy across internal hierarchies, with the technology supporting leaders with almost 47% of their workload and employees with only 16%.
While not a cure for all ails, AI and automation are ideal for taking some of that low-impact work off employees’ and leaders’ plates alike, allowing them to devote more time to valuable tasks and strategic initiatives.
It can, for example, accelerate marketing workflows, generate content, automate approvals, assess project risk, and much more. That said, the effective use of this technology depends on a) choosing the right provider and b) allocating sufficient resources to train and implement the tools.
The authors of the 2024 Impactful Work Report say that in order to achieve optimal results, “strategic AI usage and clear company-wide prioritization need to be focused on in equal measure because the former supports the latter.”
Translation: We need to start getting serious about AI, from top to bottom.
A persistent ecosystem of inefficiencies
Low-impact work exists because the modern work environment supports it. The constant busyness, the rapid pace, the cluttered tech stacks — it all helps to disguise and dampen the work that really matters.
Our researchers asked marketers all around the world what they felt were the biggest causes of inefficiencies in their workplaces. Both leaders and workers listed these as their top five:
- Time wasted on activities like meetings and duplicative work: In general, this amounts to almost 13 hours a week.
- Too many projects and a lack of prioritization: Most marketing leaders and workers believe that prioritizing high-value work is not a focus.
- Poor communication and collaboration across your organization: Almost half of the respondents agree it’s difficult to communicate with teams who use different software.
- Poorly designed or outdated processes: Across the board, searching for data and information across multiple platforms costs teams up to three hours every week.
- Ineffective use of technology: Marketing leaders only have visibility over some 61% of their team/department’s activities, leading to huge blind spots in operations.
The last one hits hard as marketers have generally been among the first movers when it comes to new technology, faced as they are with an increasingly digitized audience.
However, the last few years have taught us that you really can have too much of a good thing. In fact, according to Gartner’s 2022 Marketing Technology Survey, the utilization rate of martech is a rather underwhelming 42%. That’s a lot of costly tools sitting in an unused tech stack.
One simple end-to-end solution for marketers
The 2024 Impactful Work Report makes it clear that the time is now to eliminate, consolidate, upskill, automate, and prioritize if we want to shift the balance towards impactful, profit-boosting work. As Wrike Chief Marketing Officer Christine Royston shared recently, “With limited spend available and only modest increases expected, it’s crucial that marketers think strategically about exactly how to achieve the most impactful results.”
The report contains easy-to-use tips for fostering a lean environment (spoiler alert: You need fewer meetings), boosting employee morale, and consolidating tools to save the average worker up to four hours per week.
The authors also outline three simple steps to increasing employee happiness, driving engagement, and growing revenue:
- Decrease the number of priorities for workers.
- Set clear goals with employees.
- Shift work to one platform.
The last step is the key to unlocking all others. Wrike’s intelligent work management platform is a favorite among marketers worldwide because it supports every aspect of their workflows, from creative briefs to proofing and approvals, campaign management, resource management, and reporting and analytics. It accelerates work with automation, improves processes with AI, and consolidates all available data in one easy-to-use source of truth.
Along with our own global marketing efforts, Wrike supports marketing professionals in household-name companies like Sony Pictures Television, Electrolux, and The Estée Lauder Companies. Our powerful features, time-saving tools, and industry-leading Work Intelligence® have helped busy departments and agencies everywhere become 40% more efficient in processes and workflows, cut emails by 85%, and slash meetings in half. It’s the easiest way to ensure that you and your team are focused on work that really matters.
Everything I see now in Wrike is live and in its current status, which is a big plus to me. We can jump on the job, look at the last couple of comments on it, and pick up the ball and run with it from there.
Ashley Risstrom, Senior Production Manager
Want to learn more about how Wrike facilitates high-impact work and drives revenue at 20,000 organizations worldwide? Download the report in full or start a free 14-day trial with Wrike today.
