No time for strategic thinking tops list of marketer worries in 2023

Campaign | Social

What keeps you up at night? Well, if you were one of the marketers who answered our recent email and social survey, the odds are very good that what keeps you tossing and turning is a lack of strategic planning time.

That’s the takeaway, with 32% of total respondents citing not enough time for strategic thinking as their primary concern. We’ll discuss that more later in this article. But first, here are some of the other topics topping marketers’ lists of woes.

AI and social media also rank high as concerns

In our survey 24% of respondents cited how AI will affect my business as an area of interest. Again, with the rapid proliferation of new generative AI applications, many marketers are clearly watching the direction this technology will take in the future. In our opinion, the best way to combat AI anxiety is to jump right in and try it. Starmark is currently using an AI intern to assist with some of our internal repetitive tasks, and we also published a recent article about how to supercharge your creative process with AI.

Other high-ranking concerns relate to making the most of my social media investment and keeping track of everything we are doing in so many channels, with 10% and 12% of respondents citing these as concerns, respectively. So, if you feel as if your head is spinning with multiple marketing channels or the pace of change in social media marketing, you’re not alone. But maybe checking out our Gen Z guide to TikTok or a rundown of a tight-spiraled multi-channel campaign for football fans will ease your mind.

When doing more with less, strategy suffers

A lack of time for strategy is a complaint we hear increasingly often from CEOs, CMOs and marketing leaders. One likely explanation is the contraction in both budget resources and jobs without a commensurate reduction in ambitious sales and marketing goals. After all, if time is money, the opposite — money is time — is also true. In this case money in the form of marketing personnel, tools and specialized talent within marketing departments.

After the layoffs of the last two years, that resource pinch is driving more focus to short-term performance versus durable, long-term growth creation. In short, it’s a dearth of strategic thinking driven by budget concerns.

Strategy support doesn’t have to break the bank

In response to this growing concern, Starmark recently launched a subscription-based strategic consulting service. It’s light on the budget but heavy on the strategy support that more and more companies need today.

Whether you’re a current Starmark client or a new friend, it’s a turnkey approach to give you greater strategy depth without having to increase your headcount or manufacture more hours in your already overbooked day. If that sounds like music to your ears, definitely get in touch.

About the survey

As our email and social audiences have grown, we deployed these surveys through our social channels and via email to get a handle on the biggest concerns for marketers in 2023. Our goal is to gear our content toward what our audiences care most about.

In the final tally, we had 99 total responses (n=99) after cleaning the data. For ease of reporting, the percentages in the article above are rounded up to reflect an even 100 responses.