Marketers are taking on more work with less budget and no increase in pay as the sluggish global economy continues to hurt teams, reveals our Career & Salary Survey 2025.
The old adage of more with less is becoming an unfortunate pattern as a slow economy and an ever-increasing remit is forcing marketers to find new ways to find efficiencies irrespective of role and size of business.
Marketing Week’s exclusive 2025 Career & Salary Survey reveals that more than half of marketers (54.9%) are being asked to do more with less and without an appropriate increase in remuneration, up sharply from 40.1% last year.
It shows an unfortunate pattern – though perhaps not a surprising one – as marketers take the brunt of cost savings in businesses struggling for growth. Our survey shows that only 24% of the more than 3,500 marketers surveyed have not seen their remit grow without an appropriate bump in salary. For many, it seems, more with less has become the new normal and a challenge to be met.
‘It’s destabilising and unsettling’: How to manage teams faced with delivering more with lessOur data shows the pattern holds true irrespective of the size of the company with 58.6% of marketers at larger businesses (those with more than 250 employees) saying they’ve seen their remit increase in the past 12 months – and a little over half (50.5%) of SMEs (those with less than 250 employees) indicating the same.
This is true as well in B2B (52.4%), B2C (58.4%) and those businesses with a mixture of the two (54.8%).
Seniority also plays its part in the pressures that marketers are under. The data shows it is CMOs and those in the most senior marketing role at the company who are most likely to report seeing an increase in responsibility without an appropriate bump in pay – with 60.1% indicating as such.
This is closely followed by those in a senior manager or manager role at 56.9% and a little under half (48.4%) of junior members of staff are also feeling the brunt of higher expectations.
Burning out
More with less, of course, encompasses more than just making your budget stretch further, it is also the expanding expectations for marketers in their job remit.
Marketing Week has reported extensively on the challenging job market that exists for marketers, with many telling us about the elongated interview stage process, a lack of feedback and job roles being pulled at the last minute.
Add on top the added pressure of needing to fulfil multiple different specialisms in one single role and it is little surprise that marketers feel the need to stick in-role even as the pressures increase.
‘Local action’: How should leaders fight burnout in their teams?But this can lead to burnout – as we’ve reported on in the first wave of data from our Career & Salary Survey. We found that marketers have often felt overwhelmed (58.1%) and undervalued (56.1%) over the past 12 months. With half of respondents (50.8%) experiencing emotional exhaustion during the past year and 48.2% admitting to a lack of enjoyment in work that used to engage them.
Marketers, then, are having to find ways to push back and fight for budget – as well as make what they have last longer. As former RS Group CMO Jon White told Marketing Week last year, it is important that marketers fight back and protect critical areas of the business.
“We’ll do the same with less. More with less is a really dangerous place,” he told us. “When you’ve been around long enough, you know not to overspend in the good times, and not cut too deep in the bad times.”
Marketing Week will be publishing an analysis of how marketers can make more with less work for them, alongside other exclusive reporting from the 2025 Career & Salary Survey, including in-demand skills and the changing face of recruitment.
