Name: The Marketing Equalizer
Uploaded: 2026-01-23T12:16:26.250Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 45 s
Description: The Marketing Equalizer

Transcript for "The Marketing Equalizer": Hi, everyone, and welcome. I'm Jillian Ryan, senior manager of content marketing strategy at Intuit Mailchimp, and I am thrilled that you could join us for this webinar. Today, we're unpacking the Marketing Equalizer, a new research partnership with WARC, Focus on the realities of mid market marketing today and what it actually takes to compete in an environment that increasingly rewards scale. Whether you're leading a team, executing day to day, or doing both of those things at once, this session was built for you. Because what this research makes very clear is that mid market marketers aren't lacking ambition. They're navigating constraints. Today, it's about how to use AI to turn those constraints into leverage. I would love to take a moment at the start to get a sense of the room today and and who we have in attendance. We'd love to know where you are in your AI journey. So as you can see on the with the poll right now, we have four different options that you could select. Within your AI journey, would you consider your team to be embedded? So that means AI is a systematized part of your everyday work streams. Are you applied, where you're applying AI to set tasks but maybe not everything that you do? Are you emerging? So that means you've experimented a bit with AI and you're testing the waters. Or are you AI absent, which means you haven't really adopted AI yet at all? Now I'll give you a moment to respond, and we'll be sure to share the results later in the presentation so you can really see how you compare to your peers and the rest of our attendees. Now, as you click those boxes, it's important to remember that wherever you are in your journey, you'll be able to take something away from this session. We're going to explore what the data tells us about the current state of mid market marketing and where there may be opportunities to increase effectiveness. Then we'll dive into how AI can help unlock those opportunities and what you need to know and do to get started. Now today I'm super excited to be joined by two of our partners in this research who are going to bring their wealth of perspective and expertise to this subject. So first, I'd like to introduce Marianne Pfeiffer, who's the founder of one hundred and eight Degrees Digital Marketing, a trusted digital agency serving mid market organizations. Marianne, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you so much for having me, Jillian. I am really excited to share what we are seeing with mid market teams who are using AI in a smart, practical way and that others can learn from. Great. Thank you again. And then we also have Lexi Wolf, who's the head of advisory at work, the global authority on marketing effectiveness. Lexi, with that, I'm gonna hand the reins over to you. We have a lot of really great data and insights to get through, so why don't you start by telling us a little bit of background on the study? Of course. Thanks, Jillian. I'm really excited to be here today and to bring this research to life. Our focus of this study was to benchmark the state of the mid market. So we were focusing on organizations ranging from 10 to four ninety nine employees and to do that we took a global mixed method approach. We conducted a survey of twelve oh five marketers in mid market companies across The US, UK, Canada, and Australia and New Zealand. And then we also conducted in-depth interviews both with mid market marketers themselves and with expert perspectives on marketing effectiveness in AI, so we talked to leading industry voices about where they think the industry is going. And together this all shapes a really comprehensive analysis of the state of mid market marketing and the opportunity that AI poses. So let's dive right in, shall we? Let's start with a snapshot of the mid market. So looking at their structures, their strategies, and outlook. And the first thing to know is that mid market marketing teams are small, but they're mighty. Over half of mid market marketing organizations operate with 10 or fewer marketers. So as you see, 32% of them have between six and ten marketing staff, and 19% have less than five marketing staff. And even among the larger sample of organizations that we we sampled, so the companies that had between two hundred and fifty and four hundred and ninety nine people, one third of those teams still only had a marketing staff of 10 or fewer. Yeah. And I think one really important insight to add here, Lexi, is that these teams are optimistic about their growth, even though they are lean right now. So nearly three quarters of the marketers that we surveyed said that they expect their marketing headcount to grow this year. And virtually none of our respondents predicted reductions in the size of their team. Yes. And isn't that a headline that we need to hear right now? I love that one. But having lean teams does pose a little bit of an obstacle, right? Our data found that these teams struggle with expertise gaps. Around half of marketing teams struggle with finding and affording specialist hires as well as upskilling for their teams, and talent retention is also a really commonly cited challenge for these organizations. And so let's look at maybe the makeup of the specialists that they do have. When we look at what exists in these marketing teams, a really clear pattern emerges. Most of the specialization in teams is clustered around channels, so we get social specialists, paid media specialists, website management specialists, The places where output is really immediate and performance is easiest to observe tend to get resource allocated to them. Strikingly, despite all of its buzz, as you'll see, these teams have the least amount of specialists in AI, which is a tool that's shifting the very landscape of the industry as we know it. Yeah, and this is really a rational response to limited headcount, but it does create a structural imbalance within these organizations. Teams are well equipped to run today's marketing channels. But they're also underequipped when it comes to innovating strategies and evolving for how marketing works, not just for today, but for tomorrow. Exactly, Jillian. And that same imbalance shows up really clearly in where their investment where their marketing investment is actually going. So the good news is that mid market marketing organizations are committing a really healthy amount of budget to marketing. Half of them commit 11% or more of their total operating spend. So we're seeing a really strong willingness to actually put marketing budget towards the work that we do as marketers. But where that imbalance shows up is in media budgets. So when we look at where that media investment is actually going, it tends to be concentrated across four to five media channels, and those channels skew heavily towards paid digital, especially search and social. And what this creates is a real short term bias. So the channels that Lexi just referenced are channels that deliver immediate returns, which sounds great in theory, but they're also pay to play. So when your spending stops, your momentum will also stop. But this is not the case with owned channels. So think about your email marketing, your SMS marketing. Those are channels that deliver really strong ROI across the funnel. Yep, exactly. Mary Anne, I would love to bring you into this conversation for a second and just pause here and get your point of view. What do you think are the implications of this trend in terms of the media mix, And what role do owned channels play in that mix? Sure, Lexi. So what we see with our clients is that Paid Channels are very powerful, but they are also fickle. Algorithms change, costs rise. And we're talking about small teams with, you know, maybe some niche expertise, but not a lot of time. So they cannot be constantly adapting to all of the platform changes with paid channels. But owned channels are different. Right? They they allow you to capture the value of what you pay for in those channels, by building relationships in the space that you can control. Right? So email and SMS, as Jillian mentioned, are particularly important owned channels, they they can really achieve a lot of impact. They can be automated so that makes the lift a little bit easier and they can be highly personalized. And that makes them really effective in driving value for our clients. So, what I tell marketers is, you definitely need to be considering your channel investment and making sure you have the right balance between owned and paid that will allow you to extract the most value from the owned channels through your paid channels. I totally agree. And as much as we might wanna think that that fast moving media landscape is the core barrier to our performance, the data suggests a bit differently. So when we asked marketers about their biggest challenges, there wasn't a single standout issue. Instead, teams described a whole stack of constraints. Their obstacles to improving marketing performance included lack of time and bandwidth, challenges collecting and analyzing data, executing and optimizing on their content, and difficulty measuring the effectiveness of that work. So really, they're kind of pinched in every direction and don't even know where to begin. Yeah. And I think, Lexi, when I look at this slide, it really shows the complexity of the landscape. These obstacles fall into all areas of the marketing process and the marketing value chain. So planning and execution, planning and strategy are on this slide, creative and execution are on this slide, as are media and measurement. All of this has evolved so rapidly, and marketers are having a hard time keeping up. Exactly. As those things have evolved, it's definitely hard for marketers to keep up. Think that's a pain point that we all feel. But to kind of alleviate that pain point, mid marketers are leaning really heavily on technology, on martech. So technology helps to fill in the gaps, and it does some of that heavy lifting and alleviates some of those time and pressures that marketers are facing. But actually what we saw in our report is that that's a really important thing for them. 61% of mid market marketers use four or more platforms as a part of their Martech stack. And this was especially true for b to b firms, as you can see here on the slide. They're much more likely to have seven or more Martech platforms as a part of their stack since they kind of tend to have a more complex business model, longer sales cycle, those types of things. And what this technology does is it really amplifies marketers' strategies. For example, we saw that it drives experimentation. We observed a correlation between the number of Martech platforms used in a marketer's tech stack and the team's commitment to experiment. As you see on the slide here, companies that had one to three Martech platforms tend to get dedicate less of their budget to experimenting. So half of them dedicate less than 20% of their budget to trialing new strategies and tactics. But in contrast, the companies that use four or more platforms consistently dedicate more budget to testing and experimentation. 70% of them dedicate more than 20% of their budget to trialing new strategies and tactics. Yeah. And Lexi, this is where it's really about seeing teams striving to work smarter, not harder. Rather than simply just repeating tactics, organizations need to optimize. MarTech channels and MarTech tools really enable the ability to optimize more efficiently. And I just want to take a quick pause here. It has come to my attention that the poll earlier was not live long enough for you all to respond. So we're going to put that up right now for you so you can answer that question. And then, as I said, we'll get to those later in the presentation. And with that, Lexi, why don't you continue to tell us about how MarTech tools really increase efficiency? Yeah, so you had said that that drives experimentation, and experimentation is so important. As marketers experiment more, they're able to kind of adjust and tweak and make sure that their work is really working. And so as a result, that drives performance. And this is huge. We found that teams that lean on martech and AI are more likely to report that they outperform their competition. So marketers with Martech platforms with using more Martech platforms were 11 points more likely to rank themselves ahead of their peers than those who use fewer martech platforms. And we saw the same trend among companies when it comes to AI and where AI has been really widely adopted. They felt like they were stronger performers as well. So in other words, technology doesn't just improve the efficiency of the work you're doing and do that heavy lifting, it also creates a competitive advantage in terms of how you show up in the market. But still, what we found is that most marketers aren't actually capitalizing on that advantage. The reality is that there's really a stark gap when it comes to mid marketer's current ambition versus their actual capability. So in our study, we found that 98% of markers agree that AI can improve effectiveness. That's near unanimous. And yet, it also ranked as the number one capability concern when it comes to specialties in their teams. And the reason why it's a concern can be seen in this chart. What we found is that AI adoption remains very broad. Everyone's trying to get their foot in the door there, but it's still really shallow. So very few marketers have actually adopted AI at a really deep level. Most have only adopted minimally or partially leveraged it. So that adoption remains really, really low. And this is one of the central problems that our marketing equalizer report aims to solve. It's really a missed opportunity for the mid market and it's something where we see they believe in the promise, they know that it exists, but they haven't actually been able to achieve it. The principal constraint on achieving that promise of AI for marketers is pretty clear. It's that mid marketers feel that they lack the skills and the knowledge to be able to embrace AI fully. So what's holding teams back isn't always budget, although we do feel those budget pressures and pinches. Right? But the bigger thing is the confidence and the capability to actually step up and embed these things into the organization. So Mary Anne, I'd love to hear your perspective on this as well. How do your clients, you work with these mid market clients every day, how do they express this gap and this hesitation? What are kind of some of the misconceptions or anxieties that you hear most often? Yeah, Lexi. So when we're working with clients, we're working with leadership and we're working with teams. And so we hear these types of hesitations all the time. But it usually sounds a little different depending on where you sit in your organization. So when I'm talking to leadership, their concerns are about making the right investment. Is this the right LLM? Is this the right kind of tool? Is this the right kind of AI? Generative, predictive, whatever, right? And they want to make sure that whatever they're implementing, that their team will be able to use it effectively. They don't want to adopt the wrong way, so to speak, or put money into something that their team can't implement. On the team side, it's much more of a personal fear. Things like, Will AI replace me? Or What if my company invests in a tool and I can't figure it out? How does that reflect on me or my role? And always, there's the concern of, Does this mean that AI is going to replace those empty seats we're trying to hire for, and now I'm just going to end up with more work? So, the reality is that a lot of these fears are really unfounded, but they are very human. And because AI represents change, change will always bring some anxiety to humans. So, I see the real opportunity here for organizations is to just acknowledge that these concerns exist and build literacy and confidence gradually. Give your teams the space to learn and experiment without the pressure of getting it perfect right away. And I will say that from our side, this is where the right partners come in. So whether it's the Martech provider or an agency like ours, it's our job as the providers for these companies to help them implement the tools to address the pain points and make their daily work easier, but also help them shift the mindset from fear to empowerment. Because by doing that, that's where AI adoption really takes place and can grow within an organization. Yeah, I love that answer, Mary Anne, because AI really is a more complex issue than just tools that we're using. There's the organizational level, there's the individual buy in, and then there's the capability. So it really is complicated. Right? So now that we've mapped the terrain, I wanna shift our focus from the limitations that we have to actually starting to build that leverage. So next, we're going to introduce you to the marketing equalizer framework, and this is about making AI a strategic priority for helping your organization unlock growth. But we often there's one thing I want to note at the top of this is is we often think of AI as an enabler to help us produce more. But you have to consider both quantity and quality. So we have to ensure that we shift our mindset to focus on AI actually improving your marketing effectiveness, not just the efficiency with which you produce. I think that's such a great call out, Lexi, and such a great distinction. The core strategy, your core marketing plan, has to be rooted in effectiveness. It's got to work. So if effectiveness isn't the starting point, AI will just become you pushing out more. So it's when it's rooted in that effectiveness that AI can accelerate or amplify your existing strategy so your existing strategy works harder, and the reach of your marketing efforts extends even further. Exactly. So that means we have to keep the fundamentals of marketing growth in mind when we're thinking about how we incorporate AI in our work. Because the fact is, AI can actually solve for many of mid marketer's constraints. AI can either augment the work that we're doing so that that's where it's acting like an in house specialist that you can turn to, or it can automate tasks so there it's acting like extra headcount to help increase the capacity that your team has. And sometimes it's doing both of those things at the same time. Yeah. And when you look at this slide right here, there are so many options. And so the challenge is really, well, where should I start? What should I prioritize? And then how do I build my confidence in using AI over time? Because for many teams, that overwhelm is really real. So that means AI becomes something that needs to be solved all at once, or conversely, something that you just experiment with randomly or in an ad hoc way. And I think for the mid market, both of those approaches come with risk. Your time is limited. Your resources are limited. So you can't afford any wasted time, any wasted effort. So what we're seeing through this research is that the most effective teams actually approach AI as a structured journey and not just a tool that they need to start playing with. Exactly. And that brings us to the marketing equalizer framework, and this framework does exactly that. It introduces a structured road map for marketers to begin to deepen their AI journey. So for the rest of the session, we're gonna deep dive into this framework so that you can walk away with some practical steps to begin to implement at your organization. And you see the framework outlined here. It outlines four key stages. The first is impact. So that's looking at what marketing problems if we solved would actually improve performance for our team. The second is readiness. So are we actually set up in our data, in our tools, in governance, in skills to really act on this and leverage it. The third is adoption and that's when we look at who actually owns this and how do we start to build momentum without overwhelming the team. And then finally implementation and that's where we look at where can AI be applied to start to drive measurable results right now. And together, these form a really practical roadmap in which each step embeds a strategic and sustainable approach to AI embedding. And what I really love about this framework as we were developing it in partnership with Lexi is that it's designed to give guidance, but it's also not designed to be one size fits all. This is a customizable bespoke AI roadmap. It's a series of steps that help you develop that unique point of view that's tailored to your business, because you need to ensure that your AI journey is aligned to your actual business constraints, your actual growth levers, and the actual capability and capacity of your team. So our aim through this framework is not to provide hypothetical best case scenarios for you, but something custom that you could actually use to diagnose where you are in your AI journey and move forward. Exactly. I think that tailor made approach is so important because AI has to be applied strategically in ways that actually drive progress for your unique business. So diving into this first stage, that first stage is impact, and it's about identifying what are the marketing problems that we really need to solve here. Which ones, if solved, would most improve performance for us? Teams often just jump right into which AI tools should we use or which use cases can we use AI in. And this impact stage kind of forces a pause where you have to say, what actually needs to change here in order to move the needle? So this is where we recommend that you do a thorough audit of your current performance. Really look at what's working and what isn't working within your marketing, but also within your business. So even though we're all marketers here, make sure your audit is thorough and consider the different partner teams that you work with across your organization. So look at sales, look at products. They also have insights to add in terms of what are our biggest challenges. And then all of that auditing should give you a crystal clear picture on which challenges you need to break through to start moving that needle. Yep, and I think this is a great thing for us to consider at the top of the year when we're all beginning to implement our plans. We know kind of what our goals are for the year. Just take that pause and make sure that you're really crystal clear on what's not working that you need to kind of fix in order to get there. Because when teams get this right, that's when AI becomes a solution to a real problem and not just a distraction or an added extra thing where we already have limited time and capacity. So that's why that impact stage is really important. Then the second stage is when you start to look at readiness. And this is an area where a lot of teams tend to get stuck. But readiness really asks one simple question. It's where are we in our AI journey so far, and are we actually set up to use it in a way that's really strategic? So this isn't just about data or just tools. It's about the governance of your AI usage. It's about experimentation and your culture, team culture, and it's also about the team's confidence and skills in approaching this. So we've outlined where the mid market sits across key stages of AI maturity that you can see here on your screen. So let's start at the bottom. Only 3% of teams are in AI absent stage of maturity. So that means they've absolutely not touched the topic of AI. And that's because, as we mentioned, marketers are almost unanimous in their belief that AI is gonna improve marketing performance. We know that this is something we need to be paying attention to. But 15% of teams are AI emerging, so they might be tinkering or they're trying AI tools casually, but it's not actually a clear initiative that has any budget or organizational backing behind it. Where we see most marketers sit is in this AI applied stage. That's where 47% of marketers are. It's when they've kind of outlined that there's an effort need here and they're trying to use tools well. They've maybe done a couple of pilots, but they're mostly applying it on a task by task basis. So they might have found like one use case that really works for them or another use case that really works for them. But only 35% are at AI embedded, and this is where AI is actually leveraged as a systemized partner to the marketing strategy that has a clear initiative behind it. It has its own investment, leadership, and culture driving initiatives to it. So that's the area where we'd like to see more marketers, right? For something that's so important to our industry, only 35% of us really having a clear focus on it is kind of a tough place for us to be. So this is the stage where you have to actually map out where you are in your AI maturity and where you need to go. Yeah, Lexi, thank you for walking us through the results of our survey, but I'm really happy that I have the results of our poll. I know everyone was really excited to submit. Thank you so much for that. And so the room here today is actually a little bit different from our survey respondents. So as Lexi just said, AI absent in the survey was 3%, but about 15% of the folks in our webinar today are saying that they're AI absent. When it comes to AI emerging, in the survey, 15% said that they were AI emerging. 55% of those in the room today put themselves in that category. Then when it comes to AI applied, again, in the survey, 47%, as you can see on the slide, 10% of y'all in the room today are saying that you're AI applied. And then for AI embedded at the top, 35% in the survey and about 20% of you in the room today. Now, first of all, thank you so much again for submitting the poll. And these results are actually not surprising. And so we actually have a readiness checklist within the Marketing Equalizer report that you all can use, no matter where you are, to internally baseline your level of maturity. So this is now pictured on the slide right now, and this is just a quick preview. And what this will give you is a simple, structured way for you to evaluate your own foundation. This tool really helps you identify what that next stage of AI maturity should be for your organization. Obviously, there is a lot to fill out, and we don't want you to do that right now. So if you go to the Docs tab within Goldcast, you can complete this checklist after the webinar. And like Lexi said, it'll help you assess your AI maturity, help you map out the next steps for your business. And I think the biggest benefit here is that it's going to give you helpful language that you need so you can articulate where the changes need to be made. Yep, I love that tool. I highly recommend you get your hands on it because it'll give you a more granular look at where your AI maturity is lacking and what areas would start to move the needle for you, Which really brings us to our next stage, which is adoption. And that is where AI moves from just being a theory into more of a set plan. So this is where you set the path for how you're going to level up from one stage of AI maturity to the next. So if you don't have leadership support and budget yet, let's start to seek buy in. If we don't have clear policies on AI risk or data use and transparency, let's get policies in place. If we haven't run AI pilots, let's start to run regular pilots, let's measure and report on them. If the team lacks confidence or is kind of resistant to the change, let's start to upscale and nurture that culture of experimentation and innovation. Depending on where you are in that AI maturity phase, there are different action steps that are outlined for you to take. They're all outlined in the report in-depth, so definitely use that as a resource as you begin to path your own map to maturity. But there are three key pieces of guidance that kind of apply broadly to every business, and the first would be to appoint accountable leaders in your AI journey. Jillian, I'd love for you to speak on why accountable leaders are so important, especially when it comes to AI. Yeah. I think what we found in the research and what we see every day with working with Mailchimp customers is that without a clear owner, AI quickly becomes everyone's side project and no one's actual responsibility. So an accountable leader really keeps things focused and aligned and actually moving forward. And it's really important to note that this leader isn't responsible for all the work, but what they are is the internal champion. They're ensuring that AI serves your strategy and not the other way around. Exactly, I love that because it can be kind of a fear or hesitation that if I'm the one in charge of AI, I've got a lot of work cut out for me, but it really is about being that champion. The second piece of guidance is to cultivate an experimentation mindset. This is something that, Mary Anne, when we interviewed you for the report, you really emphasized this. So, I'd love for you to share this with the group. Why is experimentation so important for these teams? Yeah, we believe that experimentation mindset is really important because testing is what builds confidence within an organization with any kind of MarTech tool, but especially for new ones like AI. It's for the marketer and for their leadership that you want to build that confidence. So what I love about the Marketing Equalizer framework is that it allows for measured adoption and implementation, something people can really work their way into. It allows a team to see results over time. And if you can see even small wins, you're going to build momentum. That momentum, especially with the leadership, as Gillian was talking about, a leader to sort of help nudge that along, it brings everyone, team and leadership, more comfortable leaning into more AI tools. And I think it's important to focus here that when we talk about a testing mindset, we need to emphasize that there is no such thing as a bad test. Every test teaches you something. You're going to run an experiment, and it might not deliver the great results you expected. But you know what? You've now learned what not to do next time. And it's that kind of learning and that kind of mindset for learning is good even if it doesn't work out that really helps teams to move from the hesitation with AI to real confidence in just trying things out. With our clients, that's a mindset that we encourage. And the best way for us to do that is we find small strategic ways where we can test AI automation, things with their existing workflows, things they're comfortable with. So I suggest that if you want AI adoption to happen within your organization, make learning how to use these tools approachable and manageable for your team, and make it very low risk so that they feel comfortable even if they fail. I love that. There's no bad tests because you're getting information from any experiment that you do. That's really important, an important mindset to have. And then finally, it's about packaging all of that up and taking a really intentional approach to furthering maturity. And this is about starting to actually design what your initiative for AI adoption looks like. Is there a specific onboarding that you need to do? Is there education that you need to do? What level of investment goes into it? Jillian, I'd love for you to share a little bit about, at the organizational level, why does there have to be a planned approach to AI? Yeah. I feel like, as we've talked about, there's just a lot of implications when it comes to the use of AI. There is a cost to the business. There is complying with data governance. There's ethics to consider. And then it is also bringing teams along in their knowledge and the development of the tools. So that's why it's just really important to think of AI adoption as more than just picking a tool. The reasons that so many marketers get stuck in the lower levels, as we saw in our interviews for this research, is that maturity becomes really complex. It's an organizational shift. It's not just saying, oh, I'm using this tool. So that's why it's structured progression. That really ensures you're covering your bases at every stage of the maturity journey no matter where you are. Yeah I think that's so important and it is that complex journey but it's something that when you have a plan for, if you plan to fail, what's the thing? If you plan to fail, you've if you fail to plan, you plan to fail and that's why you need a plan. So then if we were to move on to the next stage of our framework, that's implementation. And this is where you actually start to tie your AI usage to measurable outcomes for the business. And the key principle here is focus. It's about applying AI in areas where impact can be measured and improved over time. So I wanna turn back to you, Mary Anne. You work with these clients every day. Where have you seen this kind of focused implementation really move the needle for your teams? Yeah. Lexi, I'm gonna say that, especially in email marketing, but in general in marketing today, personalization is the thing that moves the needle. It has for years. It's gonna continue moving forward. And AI really helps us take that to the next level. AI helps us make personalization deeper, smarter, and much more accessible to small teams. We all want to use behavioral segmentation. AI can make it much more precise. Not only do you know who your audience is, but you know how and when they engage, and then you can use automation to serve the right content at the right time. In practical, let me talk what that looks like. So we work with a lot of B2B clients and, you know, most B2B clients that we work with do not have online ecommerce store data, right? That's the typical behavioral data that a lot us think of. But they have great valuable signals on the user as well as corporate purchase history or things like budgeting cycles, event attendance, website visitor behavior. So you have both corporate and personal. Right? And so, you can leverage AI to analyze that information and identify the Intent and Trigger so that you can create personalized follow ups that are very timely. Now, you could be doing something like promoting a relevant resource, prompting a demo, delivering some kind of tailored offer for exactly where they are in the Cycle based on that information, and that's really hard to do without the help of AI, especially for a small team. What we want to do as marketers is we want to have automated touch points, but we want them to feel human and relevant because they're based on real engagement patterns that we know of. And AI really helps with that. So, outside of personalization, list optimization becomes another big needle mover for us. So, I'm going to say, having been on a small team before I had an agency and as an agency where I work with small teams in mid market, breaking all the data that we have into these little actionable segments, it's always been time consuming. And if you're the generalist marketer and you're the single solo person on the team, or maybe just one of a few, typically that type of list optimization work falls to the bottom of your list, understandably so. It's so tedious. But with AI, you can automate the data analysis part of that work so that you, as the marketer, can focus on creative and strategy. That's the part the human needs to do. So what we find when you're leveraging AI for that part of the work, for the personalization and for the list optimization work, you're not just going to drive stronger engagement, but your team is actually going to be able to scale a lot better and focus your time on where it matters the most. Yep, I love that. And I think that optimization is so important that we're all honestly very often overwhelmed with our data, right? And one of the interviewees in the report, one of the experts we interviewed said that AI helps with seeing around corners when it comes to analyzing our data. And I think that's such an important use case for us. So as you see, as you embed these applications across different metrics, the impact starts to compound, and this is what can become a growth engine for the organization as multiple metrics with AI improvements come together to start to enhance overall effectiveness at a holistic level. And we talked earlier about how the mid market relies really heavily on paid channels and how owned channels might present kind of an untapped opportunity. And when AI is applied across the funnel, it can start to connect system. So it brings those paid channels, those owned channels, and the CRM together into one single growth loop. And, Jillian, this is a concept we had developed. I'd love for you to share how does this growth loop, a growth loop like this, actually work? What does that look like? Yeah, I absolutely love this framework. So you think about those different parts. Starting at the top, as you can see on the slide, we have paid. So that's where AI helps you discover the right audiences and acquire them more efficiently. And then moving down, arrow the in that circle is your CRM. So that's where AI helps you capture the signal from the audiences that you just acquired through paid and really organizes them into something that you can act on, because the action is really what's going to happen on the own side. So again, that's your email marketing. That's your SMS marketing. And that's where AI helps you turn the attention that you've captured into deeper engagement through an owned relationship. And that shows up through smarter content, personalization, as Mary Anne was just talking about, and optimized journeys. And so for mid market marketers, when AI is used across all of these areas that are on the slide in a really structured and strategic and measurable way, that's where you become positioned to unlock entirely new routes to growth, and then of course, the ever important revenue. Yes, the ever important revenue. Mary Anne, from the agency side, do you see clients really feeling a need for this type of holistic system? Oh, absolutely, Lexi. We talked earlier about the number of MarTech platforms that these organizations are using. And so, what happens when you have all of these different platforms in a mid market setting is that most teams are going to have limited visibility into the data that lives in these systems. So it could be a sales system, a CDP, some kind of customer service software database, and they don't have access into those. And that becomes a real barrier because you want to be able to access and leverage that data so that your campaigns aren't just generic, but are really personalized and can be a really effective communication for your audience. It's not that the other teams don't want you to have the data. Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, everyone in the organization wants the same thing. We want relevant, meaningful experiences for our user. Because we know that when the experience feels personal, and it can be consistent, it's going to build trust, and that trust will strengthen your relationship with your prospect or client, and that's gonna leave the lasting impression that leads to the purchase or the advocacy that you're looking for. So, where AI can really help is bridging those gaps. So, as a marketing team, if you can tap into the insights that used to be siloed in customer service or sales, or worse yet, with some manual thing that you had to download from a system and then you've got to upload and try to parse through yourself, right? Really, it's disconnected. And so, using AI, you can connect to these systems and at the same time not necessarily have to disrupt how your other teams are operating so you're not asking for favors that you can't return later. Yes, I love that. And it helps to bridge those silos that we all struggle with. Right? So that is the marketing equalizer roadmap. As you'll see, when these stages work together, AI stops being just a collection of tools that you're tinkering with and starts to be a functioning system for growth for the organization in which each stage compounds the next. And we only went light touch into the framework. There's lots to be learned from within the report within each of these phases, so I definitely recommend you check out the report in-depth to begin to apply these phases. Now, we've covered a lot today, so I'll close with four quick takeaways for you as you march into 2026. The first is the mid market landscape is challenging, but marketers are optimistic. We have lean teams, we have limited specialists, there's rising complexity across the landscape, and AI skill gaps. These are really shared realities and recognizing them is the starting point for overcoming them. These are not individual struggles for your team. This is the reality of the work that we do right now. And second, mid market marketers rely heavily on really short term digital channels, and so marketers have to ensure they have a really good balance of channels that they're leveraging across the funnel, not just looking at short term returns but long term growth as well. Third, the teams that win are the ones acting with strategy, with experimentation, with agility, and MarTech and AI are tools that empower teams to do those things. You can test faster, you can optimize smarter, and you can compete above your size whenever you're using these tools. And finally, the real gains from AI come from having a clear roadmap, one that focuses on the right problems, it addresses readiness, ownership, execution so that AI can actually drive effectiveness and not just efficiency for your team. Thanks so much for that recap, Lexi. I think, boiled down, the story here that needs to be a sounding board within all of your organization is really around the opportunity within that capability gap. We mentioned it at the top. 98% of mid market marketers believe that AI will improve their marketing metrics. That's basically everyone that we surveyed. That's huge. But yet, those are the same marketers that are also raising their hands and saying, hey, my AI expertise is a really big capability that we're lacking internally. As we saw today, even in the poll that we did here, most teams are still at the beginning of their AI journeys. But the marketers who act on this now, the ones that make the big strides, the ones that use that checklist to assess where they are, regardless of your team size, regardless of your budget, are going to be the ones that win. Now with that, I'm really happy to say that we do have some time left for q and a. We would really love, if any of you have questions, to please submit them in the Q and A tab in GoldCath. Just a quick reminder that when you do submit a question, your name will be visible to everyone participating today, and that by submitting a question, you're providing your consent for this. Now with that, let's start to dig into some questions. Marianne, I'm going to throw this first one to you. This is really about efficiency versus effectiveness. Effectiveness. So why do you think that so many mid market marketers really struggle to balance short term performance pressure and long term brand building? And when you think about the shift there, what needs to happen to rebalance for long term effectiveness? Yeah, Jillian, I think that there is a lot of pressure for teams today to hit short term numbers with their limited resources. And what that does is it pushes everything towards efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Right? We need more clicks. We need more leads. We need more volume. Fast, fast, fast. Go, go, go. And I get it. It's technology. I've been in tech a long time and that's sort of an expectation of technology. But the problem with that, you know, Marketing is a little bit Art and a little bit Science. And so on the Art side of what we do, that type of efficiency can crowd out the slower and more intentional work of Brand Building, of the understanding of your audience and of building list health because those are the things that really drive sustainable results. And so while we want fast, don't want to sacrifice. We were saying this earlier. We don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity. So for the mid market marketing team and for their leadership, we really need to shift our mindset that performance and brand are connected things. They are not competing with each other. It's not how well I could do it or how fast I could do it. It's how well I can do it with efficiency. So AI, again, it can be used with automation to help handle a lot of the repeatable tasks, the things that the data analysis, the parts that are very tedious for our generalist marketers to manage. It can do it much faster, much better. Give them speed there and let them take their time and use their creative energies to focus on strategy and story and relationship building, the things that take time that builds the quality of your program. I totally agree, Mary Anne. And just to chime in, I think that this efficiency versus effectiveness conversation is an industry wide challenge. The clients that I work with, whether they're one woman businesses or the largest organizations in the world, the biggest brands in the world, they struggle I guess a one woman business wouldn't have this struggle, but let's say a three woman business. They struggle to actually explain what marketing does and what their actual role in the organization is. And that sets false expectations for what we're able to do as marketers. And that's why, you know, we all have these pressures quarterly numbers, annual numbers, whatever it might be that the business is really putting heavy pressure on. What we have to do as marketers is say, there's a certain way that marketing works and we have to champion that to the organization because what happens is they start to see us as kind of like a coin slot machine where if we put in this amount of money, we should expect to get this amount of ROI in this amount of time. What we need to do is tell them there's a broader investment story here where if you give us this investment over time, we can compound it into something that drives growth for the organization. I think that's a story that we kind of struggle to tell as marketers in our organization. In the AI space as well, it's something where we have to continue to look at that effectiveness story that things are going to take time to drive results. And that this isn't just a magic wand that you can wave but it's something that we really have to start to implement in a really strategic way. And when it comes to AI, I mean people say garbage in garbage out. We have to make sure that what we're putting in is really high quality. We're not just producing more of whatever we're doing because if we don't have the fundamentals right, we're not actually going to compound them into something that's going to drive really great effectiveness long term. I love that. Just a reminder to those in the audience, please submit your questions. We're here. We have about ten minutes left together. We'd love to hear from you. Our next question is actually centered on AI fear. And Marianne, you kind of alluded to this a little bit when you were chatting earlier, so I'll start with you. What is the most common misconception about AI that you're hearing from marketers or you're hearing from your clients, but then what is the reality? Yeah, I think that especially in the current market shakeups we've had recently, the most common misconception is that AI is going to either replace marketers, right? Like my job won't be here anymore because AI can do everything that I do. Or on the flip side of that is AI is going to magically do my job for me or from a supervisor. Don't have to hire. I can I can just have AI do this? But, you know, okay. AI is great. I love it. But it can do a lot in terms of accelerating like data analysis and testing and some levels of production, but it still needs humans to work for your brand the way you need it to work to build the messaging that's really going to resonate with your audience. Right? Humans need to set strategy. Humans need to define the KPIs for success. You can't plug that into AI and say, what number should we hit this quarter? You need humans for that. Right? Humans are the ones who bring authentic voice and empathy in the work that we do. And that's what really builds the bridge with your user, with your subscriber, with your customer. So, for me, and for the companies that we work with, we see the teams that are winning are the ones that are taking AI and using it for leverage by feeding it good inputs, clear goals, but also putting in guardrails. Okay? To make sure that it doesn't give you AI slop and that it's used in the right way. And again, the framework, the Marketing Equalizer framework does really help with that because it will help you build those guardrails. And remember that AI is not going to be a plug and play replacement for any human being. Right? It is going to be an assistant to the human to do the hard number crunching or the give me a whole bunch of test subject lines or something like that. And being able to take some of the tedious work that the generalist marketer just didn't have time for that. They know in their head like, wow, this would make it better, but they just don't have time for right now. I love that. Lexi, go for it. Yeah, I think we also just if you're like me as a marketer, in my daily life, I have a fear of technology. I'm not great at maneuvering my phone sometimes. And so I think sometimes there can be this fear or misconception that AI is as a tool something that's really complex and we might not have the IT skills to really leverage this thing. The fact is most marketers are feeling that way. Most marketers feel like they're behind in understanding what is going on with AI and that's because it's taken off at a pace that none of us were quite prepared for. And so we're not behind in understanding it. Everyone is trying to understand it for the first time. And the second thing is that the technology is not as far along as we might think. It's still very much in development. So this is actually the perfect time to be learning it because getting in at these more kind of beta stages when you're learning how to use it at the most fundamental level of what it is, as it grows into something that's more complex, as it begins to develop new features and applications, you will be ready to learn them one at a time rather than having to learn some huge ecosystem and beast that I'm sure that it will be in ten, fifteen years. And so I think a lot of it is just getting over that mindset of not being the IT guy and not really knowing how to use technology in that way and beginning to just say, I'm going to experiment with this thing that I know is a huge shift in the landscape and that's really important. Yeah. I love that. We actually we have a question coming in from Andrea or Andrea, and this is kind of related to a little bit of of what we just spoke about. So if you if oh, wait. That is sorry. I was planning to ask Anna's question, then I'll go to Andreas. Apologies. This is about skills. So what skills do marketers need most as AI becomes more common? Let's hear Mary Anne. Feel free to to jump in with your thoughts. I think curiosity curiosity is fundamental to marketing. Right? Like, we're the the in the industry landscape is shifting. It's something that we say every year for indefinitely forever, right? And so as marketers, we're constantly having to be agile, learn new things, etc. And so I think the curiosity to be willing to kind of pick up a new tool or try a new thing or read and learn and see what's going on is kind of the fundamental thing that's going to set out the people who really leverage this well and the ones that don't. Having that natural, genuinely driven curiosity to be able to learn the tools is really, really important. But I think also just knowing where the industry is and being able to match those two things up. This is something I heard from Sir John Hegarty this summer. He's a really prominent ad man, really important figure, and he described AI as the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and said the person who invented the Gutenberg printing press was a technologist who wanted to create something that can print at scale. What happened after that is people in lots of different practices who weren't technologists learned how to apply it and thought of ways to use it to print this thing or that thing. And I love that example because I think that's what we as marketers have to do is look at AI. We're marketers. We don't have to be AI experts. But we have to understand what AI can do so that we can figure out how to apply it to marketing. So being a great marketer is going to be one of the key skills also in learning how to use AI for marketing, as simplistic as that sounds. I don't think that's simplistic at all, though. I think you're on the right track there, Lexi. And I would say that as marketers, one of the things we have to do, we have to be curious. We have to ask a lot of questions. So if you are handed something, sort of like, tactically, what do need to know? You need to know how to write a good AI prompt. A good AI prompt comes from asking the right questions. And just as you would sit in a meeting when you're handed something that has to done, they say, Okay, we need to build a campaign around this goal. You would sit there in the meeting and you would ask a whole bunch of questions from sales, from customer service, from biz dev, from whoever that you needed to get that information from to make sure you're building the right campaign. Well, if you're leveraging AI and you're asking it to help you with this, learn how to ask AI the right questions, build the right prompts, so it can help you build the right response for that. So whether that means list optimization, take my list, find this data, compare it to census pulls from the last census, blah blah blah. Would you do if you could ask all the questions and get all the right answers? Start doing that with AI. Be the marketer that you'd want to be if you had all the time in the world, and ask all the questions, and learn how to write it in a prompt that AI can receive and get you the right results. I love that. And I also think another layer to that, Mary Anne, is it's, yes, it is prompt crafting. But I also think it's understanding that what you get back isn't gospel, human intervention, human oversight, to make sure you're not falling into an AI slop hole, especially as you think about content creation and generative AI. It's really understanding that what you're getting back is just a first draft. AI is your brainstorm partner. It's your assistant. Don't just take it and run with it. Use all of the knowledge, all of the expertise, and all of your skills to partner with AI to be more efficient and effective. It looks like we only have time for one more question. This is Andrea's or Andrea's, which I said I would do a few minutes earlier, and this is a really good one. It's about justifying an increase in budget. So if you're a marketer that is looking to get more budget for AI tools, what do you say to your company's CEO? What are the key points that you would bring up as make that ask? So when we work with clients, they pay us to do stuff. And so I have to show measurable results, or they're like, what did we pay you for? So I've been doing this for a couple decades now, so I've learned how to justify my billing. And I will say that as a marketing team, you know, I would start with what are the tools you are currently using where there's AI in them, where you can use the AI in that tool because that doesn't necessarily cost much more. It might be just like a slight subscription increase or maybe not a subscription case. Maybe it's a time increase or maybe you have to bring in another pair of hands to help with that. But start using it within the tools you have so that you can show some results. And at that point, now you can start to expand your tool set. Again, look at the equalizer. Look at answer those questions for what results your leadership is looking for. And then say, Listen, if I have this tool, my expectation is I should be able to do this thing that we're trying to do better. Now, it may or may not work on your first shot, right? But buy yourself the time, as well as the tool, to learn how to use the tool right and get them to those results. It's all about the KPI when it comes to getting budget from leadership. I think in addition to that, show them the competitive gap that exists right now. Show them they've certainly heard how important AI is. We have the data in the report to show that it's under leveraged in your sector. And if you're the ones that win in that space, it's a huge opportunity. So I would outline that as well along with what Mary Anne said about the more granular use cases and that sort of thing. Yeah, industry benchmark, which we're providing through the report, and then also your own KPIs as well. Great way to close and unfortunately, because that's all the time we have left for today. So first, I want to give a big thanks to Maryann and Lexi. Super appreciate you sharing your insights and knowledge with your audience. It's been so great to collaborate on this work together. And another big thank you to our audience. Thank you for joining us today. We know you're busy. You spent an hour with us, so that's really appreciated, and we hope that you found it valuable. As a reminder, if you wanna go deeper into the content, if you want that checklist, the full Marketing Equalizer report is available in the docs tab in Goldcast. Check it out and download it. And then also, as a bonus for attending, we have some exclusive content today. So we've included our regional deep dive. As Lexi said, we surveyed marketers in The US, The UK, Canada, and Australia, and New Zealand, and we have individual localized views of the trends and opportunities within those markets. So please download those as well. The Mailchimp team is here to support you on your AI journey. So please contact our sales team at the link below if you want to continue the conversation with an expert. We'd be happy to chat with you. And on behalf of Work and Intuit Mailchimp, thank you again. We can't wait to see how you put these insights into action.