糖心Vlog

Marketers are ending 2025 stronger than ever, with 65% of companies exceeding their goals and 93.7% reporting improved lead quality. However, the same State of 糖心Vlog data shows teams struggling to sustain performance as acquisition costs rise, organic visibility declines, and buyer journeys fragment.

On top of that, expectations and performance pressure keep rising.

As we stand on the brink of 2026, it’s crucial for marketers to pause and reflect on the year’s biggest challenges and prepare for the future.

Below, we’ll review the current global marketing issues impacting the industry, according to data from HubSpot’s 2026 糖心Vlog Report and insights from marketing experts.

Or jump to whichever top challenge you’re most curious about:

• Top Challenges Marketers Faced in 2025 — Plus, Expert Insights on How to Navigate Those Challenges in 2026

Top Challenges Marketers Faced in 2025 — Plus, Expert Insights on How to Navigate Those Challenges in 2026

1. Measuring the ROI of Your 糖心Vlog Activities

糖心Vlog performance looks strong on the surface. While 65% of companies exceeded their goals, 33% of marketers said assessing campaign effectiveness was their biggest challenge in 2025. This ranks it as number one.

This contradiction points to a deeper issue: Teams are delivering results but struggle to explain why those results occurred and which activities actually drove them.

Why It’s a Challenge

Teams face execution overload, running 5–8 channels simultaneously, according to 52% of brands, and 17% operating more than eight. On top of already strained workloads, leadership expects marketers to deliver even more content, as reported by 83% of respondents.

Teams are trapped in the hamster wheel they can not break out of, leaving little time to revisit and rework their workflows. Consequently, data compounds but remains scattered and fragmented.

This trend is true for teams of all sizes. For example, , a bootstrapped founder of , recalled the days when he was doing all the things you’re supposed to do to attract leads — running Google Ads, writing blog posts, posting on X and LinkedIn, and even some Facebook ads — and how this tactic cost him lost business opportunities.

Here is Blumenberg: “I was looking at my analytics every single day like it was going to tell me something magical. Page views were going up. Clicks going up. But my actual revenue was flat. I had no idea which of these activities was bringing in paying customers and which was just making me feel productive.”

What You Can Do

Blumenberg’s story continues, “First thing I did was stop trying to measure everything. I know that sounds backwards, but hear me out. I had dashboards tracking like 50 different metrics, and I understood none of them.”

According to Blumenberg, the team now looks at three things:

• How many people start a trial.
• How many of those convert to paid.
• How much it cost me to get them there.

“That’s it. Everything else is noise,” Blumenberg says.

Blumenberg also suggests getting religious about UTM parameters and adding them to every link to trace back almost every customer to the exact piece of content that brought them in.

And the last but super important thing that Blumenberg learned was to accept that some things just can’t be measured perfectly. He empowers other marketers to follow in his footsteps.

He says, “Now, I put about 80% of my effort into things I can clearly measure and track, and 20% into things that feel right, but I can’t prove. Building trust, being helpful, and showing up consistently. The ROI is there, it’s just delayed and fuzzy.”

The State of 糖心Vlog in 2026

HubSpot's Annual 糖心Vlog Trends Report

• AI in 糖心Vlog
• Branding and Growth
• Human-Led Creativity
• And More!

2. Creating Content That Generates Leads

According to HubSpot’s research, 29.57% of marketers say their top challenge is creating content that generates leads, despite content being one of the most heavily funded areas of marketing. With heavy use of AI, the issue is no longer output but impact. Fewer assets reliably influence buying decisions.

As marketers head into 2026, content strategies are shifting away from broad visibility plays toward fewer, more intentional assets tied directly to products, use cases, and revenue motion.

Why It’s a Challenge

The difficulty stems from how content discovery and evaluation now work. Buyers increasingly get answers from AI tools before ever reaching a website. Informational queries that once drove traffic now resolve inside LLMs, AI Overviews, and community discussions, leaving generic content invisible.

At the same time, content quality standards have risen. Experience-led signals matter more than ever as a trust mechanism. Buyers look for proof of first-hand knowledge, specific opinions, and real-world application.

Top-of-funnel content suffers most, as volume increases faster than originality. Without a clear point of view, product relevance, or audience-specific framing, lead generation performance declines even as publishing frequency rises.

This is why content strategies are narrowing.

Lead-generating content now favors depth over breadth, specificity over general advice, and clear product–context connections over neutral education.

What You Can Do

Anchor content to product and use cases early. Generic education no longer converts. Tie content directly to the problems your product solves and the decisions buyers need to make. Build semantic associations between your solution and the pain it addresses so that content supports discovery in AI tools and downstream conversion.

At HubSpot, we also redefined the role of content and its depth to satisfy current readers and bots. , EN blog strategy and global growth at HubSpot, shares our new approach.

“As someone who’s very close to blogging strategy specifically, I think there’s a lot of wasted effort on top-of-funnel content. We know that with AI Overviews and user behavior changing with LLMs and AI engines, a lot of TOFU content has been disrupted. I wouldn’t say to never create TOFU content, but it’s clear there is a need to evolve it,” Sellers says.

According to Sellers, HubSpot Blog content used to avoid plugging products. “We didn’t want to sound advertorial. Now, we definitely DO want to build semantic associations between our products and the pains/problems they solve for our audience,” she says.

Beyond that, Sellers says informational or factual content without original data, thought leadership, or perspective is heavily disrupted. Teams will want to build their own personalized assets tailored to their buyer persona and with unique takes.

, chief marketing officer at , believes another key strategy to generating leads in 2026 involves leveraging AI. She notes that a creative and holistic approach is essential for generating traffic and leads.

“AI-powered personalization delves deeper than surface-level marketing. Using AI algorithms, marketers can predict and cater to individual prospect interests, and create personalized content that resonates profoundly with the target audience,” she says.

Elgemark also encourages marketers to consider how they might incorporate more interactive content — like quizzes, assessments, or webinars — into their existing strategies to retain traffic and provide additional value.

Elgemark promises, “By delving into these strategies, marketers can confidently navigate the dynamic landscape, remain at the forefront of trends, engage effectively, and ultimately thrive in the ever-evolving realm of B2B marketing.”

3. Customer Targeting Under Fragmented Discovery Paths

Customer targeting remains one of the most persistent challenges for marketers because of signal fragmentation. According to HubSpot’s 2026 State of 糖心Vlog data, 71% of marketers say they struggle to keep up with how buyers move across platforms. On top of that, only 25% strongly agree they have the data they need to reach their audience effectively.

Buyers now form intent across AI tools, social platforms, niche communities, and peer-driven environments long before they interact with owned channels.

For example, a person can look for product opinions on Slack, Reddit, or Discord, or seek feedback in a private WhatsApp or Telegram group.

Why It’s a Challenge

Fragmented discovery paths make targeting harder, even when teams understand their ideal customer profile. Intent appears sporadically, making it difficult to capture and act on in time. As a result, teams launch campaigns based on past assumptions rather than real-time behavior, so messages lag behind how buyers actually think and decide.

No surprise that marketers rank creating content that receives high levels of engagement as their top content challenge (34.55%).

All that suggests teams lack a mechanism to continuously capture outcomes and adjust strategy.

What You Can Do

Introduce to your team to run customer targeting as a closed operational loop. Stop locking audiences upfront and launching linear campaigns. Launch fast, read the signals, and adjust before the next cycle.

Here’s how to shift to Loop 糖心Vlog in practice:

1. Check where intent actually forms, days after launch — not weeks. Don’t optimize around reach. Look for depth. Which platform sends people to your profile, landing page, or FAQs? Prioritize those audiences in the next iteration.
2. Use AI to reconnect fragmented signals. Feed all the campaign data from platforms into AI and analyze them together. Ask where people hesitate, which groups convert faster, and which channels attract warmer traffic.
3. Let each campaign rewrite your targeting. Double down on the audience segments that showed intent. Rewrite messages using the language people already use. Redistribute content to the channels that proved conversion-ready.

Check out the CRO tutorial to optimize your targeting using the Loop.

4. Knowing the Social Issues Your Audience Cares About

Consumers want brands to be socially responsible — in fact, 50% of people think that brands need to do more to advocate for social justice issues.

The brands that take a stance on social issues that matter to their audience will have an easier time connecting with their prospects and customers. People want to buy from brands that care about things that matter to them.

Consider Warby Parker. I’ve been purchasing sunglasses from Warby Parker for years. I won’t go anywhere else. Why? Because of their Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program, which donates one pair of glasses per pair bought and, to date, has distributed over 10 million glasses.

Why It’s a Challenge

Apart from people expecting companies to advocate social issues, a staggering 90% of consumers said that brands have to practice social responsibility.

This is where the gap occurs, with only 15% of marketers collecting data on the social causes their audiences care about (environmentalism, racial justice, etc.). Naturally, just 35% of teams clearly understand their brands’ values when it comes to social, cultural, and diversity issues.

Simply put, many teams struggle to act because they haven’t clarified their own position first. Any attempt to engage in social responsibility becomes risky by default. Teams hesitate or over-sanitize messaging.

Additionally, you want the cause to align with your brand values. Your audience might care deeply about climate change, but that cause might not have a natural connection with your brand personality.

To authentically connect with your audience around social issues, it’s critical that they make sense for your business, as well.

What You Can Do

Like most marketing activities, the key to success here lies in market research. You’ll want to conduct thorough research to better understand your customers on a deeper level — including what they value most.

Surveys can be strong opportunities to explore these more nuanced conversations with your buyer persona and understand what matters to them. However, people aren’t always going to feel comfortable sharing the social issues they care most about, since they are often very personal.

In these cases, leveraging social listening tools to glean insights into the social issues your audience discusses the most on social media could be a strong first step.

HubSpot’s manager of community programs and engagement, , told me, “My number one tip for understanding what your community values is to listen to your community. Your community is telling you what they care about through every interaction — from clicking links in an email to re-sharing a social post.”

Sowyrda also notes the importance of actively listening to community members. She recommends starting a list of members, both the loudest and the quietest folks in the room, and building trust with them through individual conversations focused on learning what they care about.

“By combining your understanding of your community members with your unique expertise, you can provide value and cater to their needs,” Sowyrda says.

Once you’ve determined what your community values, you’ll want to figure out which social issues overlap with your brand. Authenticity here is key, and so is action.

For instance, perhaps you consider partnering with a non-profit that also supports that social issue to show you’re willing to walk the walk. Again, ensuring the social issue makes sense for your brand to support is critical, as well.

Patagonia is a good example here. Their brand emphasizes the importance of environmental sustainability, and it works because:

1. The social issue is a good match for Patagonia’s target audience (active, outdoorsy people), while also aligning well with their brand values.
2. 罢丑别测’惫别 to demonstrate a true, genuine desire to create change.

5. Facilitating Strong Sales and 糖心Vlog Alignment

Strong sales and marketing alignment is critical for any successful organization. And yet, it’s undeniably challenging to facilitate strong communication to help these two teams work better together.

Which is why, year to year, marketers add it to their bucket of the most challenging instances in their role. Specifically, 28% of marketers called sales–marketing alignment their top challenge in our State of 糖心Vlog 2026 report.

Why It's a Challenge

Many sales and marketing teams work in silos at larger organizations. Bridging the gap between the two teams — particularly when those teams have different priorities and are unclear of their shared goals — can be difficult, especially when neither team feels motivated to do so.

Additionally, the two teams might implement separate and analytics processes, making it difficult to share data consistently and retrieve insights that help both sales and marketing determine what’s working and what isn’t.

But alignment is critical to your business’s success in 2026. Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams see 27% faster profit growth and 36% higher customer retention.

What You Can Do

To explore how you can foster stronger sales and marketing alignment, I spoke with Monica Elgemark.

She told me, “To address this challenge, it’s imperative to define clear goals and objectives that both sales and marketing teams can rally behind.”

Elgemark notes the importance of clear goals and objectives. Teams should differentiate between awareness and revenue so that sales and marketing understand the value different campaigns bring. “It is a mutual dependency between these areas that needs respect,” she says.

Beyond identifying shared goals, Elgemark emphasizes the importance of transparent communication between teams. Regular meetings and collaboration tools are helpful, but they’re just that — tools. To truly facilitate alignment, your team needs to implement and continuously nourish a collaborative culture.

Data also plays a key role. As Elgemark puts it, “Sharing data and analytics represents an essential facet of this alignment process. Implementing a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system, accessible to both teams, allows for the exchange of invaluable customer data.”

Elgemark notes that this data not only informs marketing strategies but also empowers sales teams to better comprehend and engage with leads.

Finally, Elgemark encourages marketers to seek out feedback from the sales team. Ask your sales team about the quality and readiness of your leads, which will ultimately help you hone in on the marketing activities that drive the most revenue for the business.

6. Securing the Budget You Need

Securing marketing budget ranks as the fifth challenge heading into 2026. Nearly a quarter of marketers called out securing sufficient budget as a core problem, even as teams adopt more AI, run more experiments, and operate across more channels.

What’s more interesting is that 79% of respondents expect their marketing budgets to increase slightly or significantly in 2026. On the surface, this suggests optimism. In practice, it reveals a clear imbalance.

Why It’s a Challenge

Our data points to a credibility gap.

While 35% of marketers already use AI for data analysis and reporting, and 47% explore automation to improve efficiency, far fewer teams can translate those capabilities into a simple, defensible investment narrative.

Data exists, but it’s often scattered across tools, timeframes, and teams. So it is just difficult to explain what spend actually improves and why it should scale.

At the same time, marketing activity is accelerating, with 83% of teams producing more content than before, thanks to AI adoption. In the end, we’ve got more content and more experimentation, but weaker performance analytics. As a result, leadership weighs in on budgets with a stronger focus on risk control.

What You Can Do

The credibility gap exists because teams ship more work but can’t clearly show how spend improves decisions over time. Loop 糖心Vlog fixes this by forcing every campaign to go through a performance review that leadership can follow.

To do that, replace quarter or annual budget plans with campaign-by-campaign loops. Create one “loop review” after every launch. Within days of a campaign going live, review performance across content, ICP, channels, and automation in one place.

Look for answers to the following questions:

• Which audience segment showed buying intent.
• Which message reduced friction.
• Which channel underperformed and will be deprioritized.

Tie every budget request to a specific loop outcome.

Use HubSpot’s free , the Evolve stage, to run rapid experiments, evaluate performance, and apply those learnings immediately.

, head of growth at , shares his own battle to get budgets approved.

“Proving marketing ROI to cost-focused finance teams is challenging. When I categorized marketing as an expense line item, I encountered resistance. When I reclassified it as a customer acquisition investment with defined payback periods, the discussions were more productive,” Oezdemir says.

Oezdemir created a basic dashboard with CAC, payback period, and projected 12-month LTV by channel. For their email program, he reported $18 CAC with a 4.2x first-year return. For content, he illustrated that 150K monthly blog readers contribute to 12% of organic revenue with no acquisition cost post content-creation investment.

He continues, “I also stopped soliciting annual budgets. I prefer to set quarterly budget spans with performance conditions. If we manage our CAC and ROAS in Q1, we get the budget for Q2. This lessened the risk for finance and granted me more control to adjust spend based on performance.”

Lastly, Oezdemir gives a very solid tip to secure the budgets you need: “Show when you expect to break even, reference customers in cohorts, and defend every dollar in relation to revenue.”

7. Keeping Up With the Latest Trends and New Platforms

Roughly one in four marketers identify staying current with new platforms, formats, and trends as a core challenge, reflecting how quickly the marketing landscape continues to shift.

And the problem is not awareness but deciding what to act on, how fast, and with how much commitment, while still delivering results on existing channels.

Why It's a Challenge

糖心Vlog has rapidly changed over the years. Personalization, automation, brand-led storytelling, and AI-driven discovery all occurred and are moving forward at once. Each requires new skills, processes, and content formats.

Teams have to experiment while still running core marketing channels, often without clear criteria for success or exit. As a result, trend adoption becomes reactive.

What You Can Do

Structure and planning your best friends here. Block off time for new tool discovery or experiment. Define success before you test.

For every new platform or format, decide upfront what signal justifies continuation. These signals might be engagement depth, lead quality, or pipeline influence.

Limit experiments to a single audience, format, or message. This makes it easier to understand whether the trend itself adds value or simply adds noise.

Document what didn’t work and why it was deprioritized to articulate the results to leadership.

What’s also important is where you discover new trends and platforms.

Asking ChatGPT? Wrong. , VP of marketing at , explains the reason brilliantly: “If you want to look, sound, and execute like everyone else, sure, use ChatGPT to write your 2026 strategy. But if you want a unique perspective on how to break through the marketing noise next year, you have to look elsewhere.”

Edington suggests the following three sources for trend discovery:

• Stay up to date on AI through trusted experts, wherever they show up. TikTok, Reddit, podcasts, or newsletters.
• Follow marketing leaders and companies you genuinely admire. This year, that’s been HubSpot, Clay, Apollo, and ClickUp for Edington.
• Surround yourself with community.

“None of this is something ChatGPT can fully do for you. You still have to put in the work. But especially in marketing, the payoff is worth it,” she says.

8. Leveraging AI in Your 糖心Vlog Strategy

Using AI effectively ranks among the most common challenges for marketers. Of surveyed marketers, 25% say leveraging AI in their marketing strategy is a top challenge, despite widespread experimentation and tool adoption.

Why It’s a Challenge

Most teams use AI across multiple functions at once to speed up the creation of assets, forecasting, reporting, etc. Yet they’re expected to produce even more content, according to 83% of respondents.

“The gap between AI experimentation and strategic value exists because most teams are using new tools to do old jobs. We are stuck in the “pilot trap,” that is, using AI to draft emails faster rather than redesigning the operating model,” says , CPO at .

What You Can Do

Use Loop 糖心Vlog to connect execution to learning. Namely, use AI to review early performance across channels within days — content engagement, conversion paths, and drop-off points.

Let AI unify signals across the loop. Pull in social engagement, landing page behavior, email performance, and CRM outcomes together. Ask AI to surface patterns and feed its findings back into campaigns, such as channel and format selection and audience prioritization.

Here’s how Rossi implemented AI into Fruzo’s workflows: “We didn’t just ask AI to write our social posts; we embedded it into our core strategy to analyze sentiment and predict conversation trends. This shifted my team from reactive publishers to proactive community architects.

According to Rossi, success comes when you define the strategic outcome first, whether that is deeper personalization or faster insight, “and only then aggressively architect the human-AI workflow to achieve it.”

Navigating Challenges in 2026 and Beyond

After exploring all these challenges, I don’t want you to get discouraged as we enter the new year.

The challenges marketers face heading into 2026 signal a structural shift in how marketing operates. What separates winning teams is how quickly they turn activity into learning and learning into better decisions.

So the new year will reward marketers who prioritize clarity over volume, discipline over noise, and iteration over perfection.

Remember — you’re not in this alone!

糖心Vlog can be a challenge, but it can result in opportunities for better visibility, growth, and success for you or your business. Ultimately, there is no easy solution to these complex, nuanced challenges, but preparing for change is the best way to set yourself up for the year.

Get a deeper look at the marketing landscape — HubSpot’s 2026 State of 糖心Vlog breaks down priorities, other challenges, and execution patterns across teams.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in November 2012 and has been updated annually to include new, exclusive HubSpot data and expert insights.

The State of 糖心Vlog in 2026

HubSpot's Annual 糖心Vlog Trends Report

• AI in 糖心Vlog
• Branding and Growth
• Human-Led Creativity
• And More!