Last year we started this report by saying: “what a year huh…” 

Looking back, nothing changed.

Geopolitical and economical uncertainty still looms over, budgets aren’t what they used to be, and AI is intertwining with our daily lives more than ever.

This year, we surveyed over our readers again who were awesome enough to participate in this survey (thank you so much) and we managed to get the pulse of the industry heading into 2026.  

What we found paints a complex picture. From freelancer struggles to salary concerns, here’s what the data reveals about where marketing stands right now and where it’s headed.

Key Takeaways

🔵 Freelancer marketers are polarizing fast – Nearly 65% of freelancers report either fewer clients with less money or fewer clients with more money. The middle ground is vanishing, forcing solo marketers to either position as premium experts or risk getting squeezed out.

🔵 AI is now table stakes – 52% of marketers use AI daily, up from 41% last year. It’s no longer experimental—it’s expected. But 39% say the output quality is often lower than human work, creating a “sea of sameness” problem.

🔵 Email still reigns supreme – Nearly 90% of marketers say email will deliver the highest ROI in 2026, crushing paid social, SEO, and even emerging channels like GEO. Unlike algorithms, you do own your list. 

🔵 Tracking confidence has collapsed – Only 32% of marketers feel confident measuring ROI amid cookie deprecation and signal loss. Two-thirds are operating with partial blindness, forcing a shift toward first-party data and incremental testing

🔵 Budgets and salaries are frozen – Over half (53.5%) expect flat budgets in 2026, and 55% of marketers aren’t happy with their current salary. The “growth at all costs” era is dead and efficiency and profitability are the new north stars.

Section 1: Budgets and Salaries

For marketing freelancers, the work situation is worse today than it was before

Let’s start with the lone rangers, who’re living a feast or famine scenario: 

The data reveals a fascinating split:

• 32.4% of freelancers have fewer clients and earn less, indicating a tough market where work is drying up for many.
• An equal percentage (32.4%) report having fewer clients but earning more. These marketers are effective and have likely raised rates or retained high-value accounts. 
• Only 17.6% see no change, showing stability is quite rare.
• More clients and more money (8.8%) is rare. 

Stratification: The “middle class” of freelancing is disappearing. 

You either position yourself as a premium expert, fewer clients, more pay or you get squeezed out by budget cuts and perhaps AI commoditization.

If you are losing clients, don’t panic-pitch to fill the gap. Pivot to “productized services” like a flat-feed audit pack so you can stabilize income without needing a long-term retainer.

Most marketing teams stay the same

For most marketing teams, it was “new year, same headcount.”

If you were hoping for a hiring spree to lighten your workload, the numbers might be a bit sobering. 

Nearly 45% of marketing teams remained exactly the same size compared to last year.

While stagnation is the dominant theme, there is a glimmer of growth. 

About 30.4% of teams added 1–10 people, showing that some companies are cautiously expanding their capabilities. 

However, only a tiny fraction (4.8%) went for aggressive expansion of 10+ hires. 

On the flip side, 20% of teams actually shrunk, meaning 1 in 5 of you are likely doing more work with fewer hands.

The Crew’s opinion: Stability seems to be the name of the game. Companies are prioritizing efficiency over headcount, likely waiting for clearer economic signals before committing to expensive talent acquisition.

What you can do: If you can’t hire, automate. Audit your current team’s bandwidth and identify repetitive tasks that can be offloaded to tools (or AI) to prevent burnout in a stagnant team structure.

Compared to last year: According to last year’s survey, the teams are shrinking more this year (20% vs 12.5%), but also some teams are seeing more growth compared to last (35% vs 22%). Last year, the teams have mostly stayed the same (65%) while there’s been a lot more shake up this year, which adds to the feeling of volatility in the industry.

Marketing performance is more or less the same year over year

How happy are the bosses? 

Well, let’s just say nobody is popping champagne, but nobody is flipping tables either:

When asked about client or executive satisfaction regarding marketing ROI and operations, the largest group (42.8%) said things are “more or less the same” as last year.

However, the news isn’t all beige. 

• A very healthy 42.1% reported doing better than last year.
• Only 15.1% admitted that operations were not as satisfactory as the previous year.

This means that for over 80% of marketers, performance is either holding steady or improving, which is a solid win in a tough climate. 

What we think: “Same” isn’t bad when budgets are tight. Marketers may successfully maintain results even as channels get more saturated and expensive.

To move from “same” to “better,” focus on perceived value. Don’t just report on metrics; report on how those metrics solved a specific business problem for your executive or client.

Budgets will also stay almost the same

Bad news. CFOs are not likely to open the floodgates this year. Don’t hold your breath. 

The data for projected 2026 budgets mirrors the staffing trends perfectly. The majority (53.5%) expect their budget to remain almost the same (less than 10% change).

For those seeing movement, the arrow is pointing mostly up, but gently.

23.9% expect a 10–25% increase, while only a lucky 5% are seeing a 25–50% bump. 

Significant cuts are rare, with less than 4% facing a reduction of over 50%. Basically, the purse strings aren’t loosening, but they aren’t being strangled either.

What this means: This budget flattening suggests that the “growth at all costs” era is officially dead. Companies are now optimizing for profitability and efficiency and are forcing marketers to justify every new dollar requested.

Since you likely won’t get a bigger budget, audit your “lazy money.” 

Cut the bottom 10% of underperforming ad spend or tools and reinvest that cash into experimental channels without asking for a raise.

Marketers are not quite happy with their salaries

Exposure and cool AI tools won’t pay the rent. 

The mood regarding compensation is… lukewarm at best.

The majority of marketers (55.3%) explicitly said “No” when asked if they are happy with their current salary.

While 44.7% are satisfied, having over half of the industry unhappy with their pay is a red flag for employers. 

The reward-to-effort ratio is off. This dissatisfaction likely ties back to the earlier charts showing increased responsibilities without a matching increase in compensation. 

The Crew’s Take: Inflation has likely outpaced raises for many. When you combine stagnant budgets with high pressure to learn new tech (AI) and manage more channels, the paycheck starts to feel a little light.

If a salary bump isn’t an option due to budget freezes, negotiate for non-monetary perks that reduce burnout: remote work days, flexible hours, or a personal development budget.

Most marketers expect salaries to stay the same

The financial forecast for personal income is looking a bit flat.

Mirroring the company budget trends, personal salary expectations are stagnant. The largest group (42.8%) expects their salary to stay basically the same (less than 10% difference).

A third of respondents (34%) are hopeful for a slight increase (up to 10%), which is essentially a cost-of-living adjustment. 

Only a lucky 10.7% expect a significant raise (20%+). On the dark side, 2.5% fear a decrease or losing their job entirely. It’s a “keep your head down and hold the line” kind of year.

Is stability an asset? The days of massive salary jumps for jumping ship might be cooling off. Employers are retaining talent rather than bidding war for new ones. 

To break into that 20%+ raise category, you need to tie your work directly to revenue. 

Try to prove yourself as a revenue generator. Even if you’re a marketing manager, document exactly how much money your campaigns made the company to justify the ask.

Section 2: Performance, Tracking, and Trends

Marketing performance for Q4

Ah, Q4. The time of holiday rushes, end-of-year burn, and… surprisingly static budgets?

It seems the “use it or lose it” spending spree might be a myth this time around.

Despite the typical Q4 hype, 57.2% of marketers said their budget for the quarter was basically the same as other quarters.

Only 13.2% saw a moderate increase (10–25% higher), which likely accounts for holiday pushes. 

Interestingly, a nearly equal amount (12.6%) actually saw their budgets go lower by 10–25%. It seems that for many, Q4 was just another quarter on the spreadsheet rather than a grand finale.

What we see: The lack of a universal Q4 spike indicates that seasonality varies wildly across our B2B-heavy readership, or that businesses are spreading their “push” moments more evenly throughout the year to avoid high CPMs.

Actionable Tip: If your Q4 budget is flat but competition spikes (raising ad costs), shift your focus to retention.

It’s cheaper to upsell existing customers during the holidays than to fight for expensive new clicks.

Only a Third of All Marketers are Confident In Their Tracking

With cookies crumbling and privacy walls going up, the “crystal ball” of marketing attribution is looking a bit foggy. 

Actually, for many, it’s just a magic 8-ball saying “Ask again later.”

Confidence is shaky at best. The largest group (40%) feels Neutral/Unsure about their ability to measure ROI amid signal loss.

Even more concerning, 29% are explicitly not confident (combining “not at all” and “not very”). On the bright side, 32% express some level of confidence, but only a rare 8% feel “Very confident” thanks to robust first-party data. Essentially, two-thirds of the industry is operating with partial blindness.

The era of “perfect attribution” is dead. Marketers who are “Unsure” are likely realizing that their old dashboards don’t match reality anymore.

The few who are confident have likely pivoted to first-party data early.

Stop relying on platform-reported ROAS as the single source of truth. Implement “triangulation”: compare platform data with backend sales data (CRM) and run incremental lift tests (turn ads off/on) to see the real impact on your bottom line.

New year trend: brand building takes the stage

For years, brand marketing was nice to have, first to be cut when budgets got tight.

Turns out, this isn’t a luxury item anymore. That era is over:

A dominant 42.1% of marketers plan to increase investment in Brand Building / Upper Funnel activities in 2026. Other than that:

• Performance / Bottom Funnel growth is only half with 21.4%, 
• Customer Retention is at 17.6%
• Only 8.8% are prioritizing product or service innovation
• 10.1% expect their budgets to shrink overall.

This is a sign of a change in strategy. When acquisition gets harder, competition fiercer, and performance channels saturate, brands go back to the only real moat: mental availability. 

You can’t outbid everyone forever, but you can out-position them.

Actionable move:  If your roadmap is still 80% performance-driven, rebalance it. 

Ringfence a portion of budget for brand work that compounds: distinctive creative, consistent messaging, and channels that build memory, not just clicks. 

Performance converts demand. Brand creates it.

Email tops the ROI lists

They’ve tried to kill it a thousand times. Slack was supposed to replace it. Social media was supposed to bury it. Yet, email still stands.

The cockroach of the internet, surviving all digital apocalypses and still delivering:

When asked which channel will deliver the highest ROI in 2026, nearly 90% of our readers said email marketing & automation are taking the crown. That’s a landslide.

It significantly outperforms paid search (~72%) and SEO and paid social (~55%), while  the shiny new toy, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), is already ranking impressively high, sitting just below in-person events. 

Traditional “awareness” channels like YouTube Ads and CTV sit at the bottom, likely because their direct ROI is harder to prove than a clicked email link.

You don’t own your social followers; you own your email list. That’s your ultimate safety net which is also cheap, direct, and algorithm-proof.

What can you do: If email is your highest ROI channel, stop treating it like a spam cannon. 

Segment your list by behavior (clicks, purchases) and send fewer, highly relevant emails rather than blasting the whole database.

Authenticity and data analytics are top priorities for marketers

We thought the future belonged to the “Prompt Engineers,” but it turns out the future still belongs to the thinkers. 

If you can’t strategize, the robot can’t save you.

When asked about the most critical skill for 2026, these are the results:

• Strategic thinking and planning took the #1 spot with 27%.
• Data analysis (21.4%), proving that making sense of the numbers is still more valuable than just generating them. Like in this report, for example.
• Surprisingly, AI prompt engineering came in last at 15.7%. This suggests that marketers view AI as a utility to be learned, but not a standalone career path. Deep Creative & Storytelling (18.9%) remains a strong priority, balancing out the analytical side.

AI levels the playing field for execution, making strategy the new big differentiator. 

Anyone can generate a blog post now; the value lies in knowing why you are posting it and who it is for.

Don’t upskill your team on “how to use ChatGPT” Upskill them on business logic and data literacy. 

The best AI prompters are the ones who understand the marketing fundamentals behind the prompt.

Marketers’ big concerns are evenly spread out

What keeps us up at night? 

It’s not the robots taking our jobs, it’s the economy taking our budget.

The biggest fear for 2026 is the ongoing economic climate (26.4%). Marketers are clearly worried that external financial pressures will squeeze their budgets dry. 

“Too many marketing channels to handle” (24.5%) follow closely, confirming the burnout trends we saw earlier. 

Interestingly, AI making positions redundant is the lowest concern at just 10.1%. 

Marketers seem confident they can coexist with AI, but they are terrified of cautious customers (22.6%) who are less willing to open their wallets. 

The anxiety is external. Marketers trust their skills (and their AI tools), but they don’t trust the market conditions. 

Since you can’t fix the economy, fix your efficiency. 

Focus on “recession-proof” marketing: high-retention activities (like email) and low-cost organic channels to reduce reliance on paid ad budgets that might get cut.

Which Ad Channel Gets the Most Bucks

The “Duopoly” isn’t going anywhere. 

While we love to talk about TikTok trends and Reddit threads, when it comes to actually spending the budget, we stick to the big guns.

Google Ads and Meta (Facebook/Instagram) remain the undisputed heavyweights. The chart shows massive chunks of blue and teal  for these two giants.

TikTok is present but clearly receives smaller slices of the pie compared to the big two. 

Native Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Reddit are largely ignored by the majority, with huge gray bars indicating “0” spend for most respondents. 

While marketers experiment with new platforms, Google and Zuck pay the rent. 

It’s a flight to safety. When budgets are scrutinized like we’ve seen, marketers pour money into the platforms with the most mature attribution models and predictable results.

Contrary to this opinion, we’d advise not to put all your eggs in the Google/Meta basket, or one algorithm change can kill your year. 

Allocate a strict “test budget” (e.g., 10%) to a tier-2 channel like Reddit or LinkedIn to build a backup acquisition source. And who knows, maybe you hit the jackpot. 

Section 3: AI Usage

Remember when we thought AI was just a fun toy? Well, the toy has become the toolkit.

The adoption rate here is staggering. 52.2% of marketers use AI tools every single day.

If you add in the “few days a week” crowd (26.4%), you have nearly 80% of the industry relying on AI as a regular part of their workflow.

The “Never” crowd has shrunk to a tiny 5%. This isn’t just adoption; it’s dependency. The robot helper on your shoulder is no longer a novelty—it’s an intern that never sleeps

We’ve crossed the chasm: AI is now assumed knowledge on your skill list. Like knowing how to use a spreadsheet or email. The gap between users and non-users is widening fast.

If you are in the “few times a month” category, force yourself to open ChatGPT or Claude for one new task every morning, even if it’s just summarizing an email, to build muscle memory.

Where have marketers implemented AI already?

So, where is all this daily AI usage going?

Spoiler alert: The robots are definitely writing our homework.

The chart shows a clear dominance in text-based tasks. 

• Content writing and Copywriting are neck-and-neck for the top spot, with over 110 respondents each flagging them as their main AI use cases.
• Idea generation and Market/Competitive research follow closely behind.

Interestingly, while we talk a lot about “deepfakes,” Image generation and Video generation rank lower, suggesting that for most marketers, AI is primarily a text and data assistant right now. Customer support is currently the lowest on the adoption list.

Marketers are using AI to solve the “blank page problem” first. 

It’s easier to edit a robot’s draft than to write from scratch. The lower adoption in video suggests the tech isn’t quite “production-ready” for everyone yet. But it might be getting there.

Actionable Tip: Don’t stop at generation. Since everyone is using AI for copy, differentiating your brand now requires better editing and human curation.

Use AI for the first draft, but let a human polish the soul back into it.

The attitude towards AI is increasing 

There might be misconceptions about AI. Users don’t look like they’re threatened by it. Instead, we are rolling out the red carpet.

It turns out that once you get past the “Terminator” fears, having a digital assistant is actually quite nice.

The verdict is overwhelmingly positive. 

84.1% of marketers feel AI has improved their performance to some degree, specifically:. 

• 31.8% say it has improved performance significantly.
• The majority (52.3%) admit it has improved things slightly.

Only a tiny fraction of naysayers (1.3%) claim it made their performance worse. 

Now, check this out:

The overall sentiment score sits comfortably at 53 (Quite Positive). 

This suggests that while AI isn’t a magic wand fixing every problem overnight, it is undeniably lifting the baseline for the average marketer.

What we think: The “slight” improvement for the majority suggests AI is currently acting as an efficiency tool. It’s helping us run faster, but not necessarily changing where we are running.

To move from “slightly” to “significantly” improved, you may need to move beyond using AI for just drafting copy. 

Start using it for data analysis and pattern recognition, areas where it outperforms human speed by a mile.

The biggest AI obstacle? Lower output quality

Here is the wet blanket on the AI fire. 

While we love the speed, we aren’t exactly writing home about the brilliance. It seems the “quantity over quality” trap is real:

When asked to compare AI-generated content to human work, the largest group (39.1%) stated that AI content is often lower quality. 

This sentiment is reflected in the overall quality sentiment score, which dipped into the “Slightly negative” zone.

However, it’s not a total wash. A respectable 37.1% feel that AI content is similar in quality to human output. 

This split suggests that the quality you get depends heavily on how you use the tool and perhaps how high your standards were to begin with. 

Meanwhile, 11.3% still don’t use it for content creation at all.

Beware of the “slopification”: We are trading excellence for expediency. 

The danger here is the “sea of sameness”—if everyone uses the same average-quality inputs, we all end up with the same average-quality marketing.

Never publish raw AI output. Treat AI as a junior copywriter: give it a detailed brief, but always have a senior editor (you) polish the final draft to ensure it sounds like your brand.

Most marketers still haven’t budgeted GEO

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the new buzzword threatening to dethrone SEO. 

For now, however, most marketers are just watching from the sidelines with their hands in their pockets.

The chart shows a classic “wait and see” approach. Over half of organizations describe GEO as an “emerging focus area, but not formally budgeted yet”.

Only about 12-13% have actually put their money where their mouth is with a dedicated strategy and budget. Meanwhile, roughly 25% say it’s simply not a current priority, and a smaller group (~10%) plans to just cross their fingers and rely on traditional SEO.

Marketers know AI search is coming. But without clear ROI models or established best practices, CFOs aren’t signing the checks yet. 

We are in the “awareness” phase of this new channel, not the “adoption” phase.

You don’t need a budget to start preparing. Focus on structuring your data (schema markup) and answering direct user questions concisely in your content.

This “answer-first” format appeals to both classic SEO and new AI overviews.

New year, old concerns

Yes, the landscape is challenging.

Budgets are tight, teams are stretched, and the rules keep changing. But we do see a silver lining. Marketers are adapting.

AI is making us faster, email remains our most reliable channel, and those who focus on strategy over tactics might see some big wins.

The middle may be disappearing, but the opportunity to differentiate has never been greater. 

Stay sharp, stay strategic, and you’ll thrive.