Thoughts from B2B Ignite 2025: Let’s think about the marketer’s experience

Gaps were a common theme at this year’s B2B Ignite. Gaps between marketing efforts and revenue. Gaps between what the c-suite expects of its marketers and what they can reasonably deliver. And a yawning chasm between what marketers hoped their role would entail and how it actually ended up.

If there ever was a time when it was easy to be a marketer, now certainly isn’t it. We didn’t need a conference to tell us that – but B2B Ignite did give us one of those coveted spaces to sit down and talk it out. To unpick some of the shared challenges that bind B2B marketers together in all sorts of different sectors and organisational setups. Now it’s about taking those conversations and converting them into actions. The tricky bit.

The messy truth of marketing complexity

The tricky thing for marketers is that the shape of each challenge is always shifting. So ‘overcoming’ really becomes ‘constantly navigating’. There’s no way to lock down a perfect combination of tools, because requirements and capabilities aren’t static (and there are more than 14,000 to choose from). Other stakeholders are always asking for different slices and comparisons of data. And so on for every different responsibility that marketing has found itself with over the years.

And that’s a lot of responsibilities. The marketing function has come a long way from being the ‘colouring-in department’, as Karla Wentworth from Intermedia Global affectionately called it. “[It’s] now the single most complex department inside any modern organisation, because we connect to so many things and so many people,” she said during her afternoon keynote.

That session, Unstacking Marketing: Behind the curtain: The messy truth we’re all pretending doesn’t exist, introduced a concept that, in hindsight, is so incredibly, obviously important – the marketer experience.

Marketer experience – or MX, for those who prefer a neat initialism – is a lot like the more-familiar customer experience (CX). Organisations are constantly investigating how they can keep customers satisfied and make their interactions as easy as possible. Teams should be doing the same for their marketers, looking for ways to get rid of friction and cut complexity in workflows, so marketers can actually be productive and enjoy their work. Because more interesting and effective ideas come from people who have the space to really think.

Simplicity isn’t always simple to achieve – but it’s so important

So what does better MX look like? On reflection, some of the other sessions I attended at Ignite 2025 touched on similar ideas.

Jade Tambini, of B2B Jade, had a rallying cry for simplicity in her session, Why marketers aren’t getting results: The B2B marketing gap. She talked about how the chaos – ‘carnage’, even, to quote one of her beleaguered in-house friends – of managing everything in marketing leads to worse performance. The more channels, campaigns, and metrics you have on the go, the harder it becomes to do any one thing well.

“I really want us to reflect on how much of the carnage and chaos could actually be controlled if we were able to learn the mindset to step up and change things, because complexity kills creativity,” she said. “The more things you’re doing, the more new tools we bring in, the harder it’s going to be to make them work.”

Karla noted this too, previewing an upcoming study into MX from Intermedia Global. It includes a few hair-raising figures, like the fact 71% of the marketers surveyed said they didn’t have time to do anything creative, because they were too busy troubleshooting technology. And no wonder, when 60% of their time is spent managing their tools and processes.

From an MX perspective, simplifying your marketing plan is a no-brainer. A straightforward strategy that’s grounded in a few reliable content types, useful metrics, and helpful tools leaves room for creativity. It means you can build a clearer picture of what works, without having to unpick all the intricacies of how your prospects navigate through nine different channels to reach you.

And it means you can create practical processes that make content production, prospect nurturing, and measurement easier to manage. So you can shrink that 60% to something that doesn’t make you feel like you’re turning up at work everyday to do 16 different jobs.

Especially in the age of AI for absolutely everything, the first question in a planning meeting is often “what can we add?” But it might be more useful to ask “what can we remove from the equation?”

Sometimes the simplest fix is letting someone else take it off your plate

Of course, a simpler strategy might be hard to achieve in a large organisation, where huge numbers of moving parts come with the territory. But even small changes to the way you operate – like, say, outsourcing your content writing to expert copywriters – can ease the pressure.

Though we’ve never called it MX, improving marketers’ experience has always been one of the cornerstones of the way we work at Radix. We have our own tried, tested, and efficient processes that turn goals and ideas into great content. And it’s all curated to take the pressure off our clients.

The most productive partnerships we have with marketers are the most honest ones, where they feel like they can tell us exactly what gets in the way of their plans. The more we know, the more we can help. A bit of content ideation here, a few hours revitalising an old run of blogs there – whatever helps make the engine run.

The most sobering stat from Karla’s research is that 92% of the CMOs in the study said they’d have considered a different career if they knew being a marketer would end up so complicated. If that’s not a crystal-clear motivator for stronger MX, I don’t know what is.