Why is marketing so hard right now? | Live with Jake Kitchiner @BCMU

Marketing feels harder than it should right now. Bigger targets, tighter budgets, AI expectations, more noise everywhere… and somehow it’s still “why didn’t that email get opened more?” 😅

In this episode, Emma and Ruta sit down with Jake (co-founder of ChannelCrawler) to talk about why marketing feels so brutally difficult in 2026 — from both sides: founder brain and marketer reality.

Marketing confession of the day:
 Jake thought he was resetting a SendGrid API key… and it turned out to be a phishing scam. Cue password resets, broken automations, and a serious “I thought I was tech-savvy” moment.

We get into:
 ✅ Why marketing has always been hard — but budgets and expectations make it feel impossible now
 ✅ The AI noise problem: more content, less quality, less attention
 ✅ Founder syndrome: “I’ve got a great idea” vs the roadmap (and how to push back)
 ✅ How to communicate marketing properly to sales and leadership (and stop the magic lead tree fantasy)
 ✅ Why more traffic doesn’t mean more revenue (and why conversion can be the real priority)
 ✅ Picking your path: channels, trade-offs, and committing without panic-sweating
 ✅ Lead quality vs lead volume: why 50 MQLs are not all created equal
 ✅ A practical tool to protect focus: OKRs and “what are we dropping to do this?”

If you’ve been asked to do more with less, explain your existence in every board meeting, or compete with a tidal wave of AI slop — this one’s for you.

Like and subscribe for more Blame It On Marketing episodes.
 Drop your biggest “marketing is hard right now” pain point in the comments.

#B2BMarketing #MarketingStrategy #StartupMarketing #ConversionRate #MarketingLeadership #AIinMarketing

Transcript

0:00

So, Jake, could you please kindly introduce yourself? So my name is Jake as it says on the screen. I'm the co-founder of Channel Crawler, which is a website that helps you to find YouTubers that you would want to sponsor. So if any of you do influencer marketing and want to get onto YouTube, please buy my tool. Is that good marketing? think so. You can tell Jake is wants in sales, can you? And we are also going to be talking about with Jake because Jake is both in the marketing game and also a founder of a company. So we're to talk about why marketing feels like it's so fucking difficult right now. And obviously, Jake, can offer both sides of that argument, I think. So but before we get into the topic, we always like to start with a marketing confession. because I think, you know, we're, are very much used to seeing people online talk about how great everything is, especially on LinkedIn. So we like to talk about negative shit to start with. So Jake, confession, something you fucked up recently. Yeah, so I muck up a lot of things all of the time. So one thing, I recently started trying to code and deleted three days of work from the whole team, which was really good. But in a marketing sense, actually, SendGrid and me have a lot of arguments all the time. Is anybody a SendGrid user here? No. OK, fine. For good reason, it seems. But anyway, they send me an email to say that there is a change happening with my API key, and I need to reset it. And I'm really frustrated by this because SendGrid are obviously always giving me a frustrating experience. So I go on to SendGrid and I try and find what's happening with the reset key and I'm speaking to their customer service. No one has any idea. I'm getting really frustrated. And it reminds me of my dad. He has like a really, really short temper. And I'm just sat there in the office like hitting the table like, why won't this work? Can't do it. Anyway, turns out it was quite a well executed phishing scam. So I have given them quite a few of my details. And I constantly get uh authentication notifications coming through and working through changing a lot of passwords. And I also managed to break a couple of automations at the same time by trying to reset the API key. So good for me. Thank you. Yeah. I always like it when someone who you think is going to be tech savvy falls for a phishing Thank you, yeah, I did feel quite foolish. It happens to the best of us. It's a good phishing scam. It's to business. It seems like an appropriate thing. I get it. I don't know if everyone in the room feels that way, but it does feel like marketing has been a bit hard lately. I want to say lately, mean, like two years now. uh Mixture of things depends on what business you work in and what sector you're in, but it feels like everyone wants you to do more with less budget or no budget. uh Bigger targets, we're all selling to enterprise now for some reason, even though we never did that before. ah And every board meeting is basically people nitpicking at your stats and being like, well, why didn't you make that email get open more? um So we want to discuss that. Obviously, we know kind of what the economic background is and we can't get away from that. But Jake, what does it feel to you that marketing is really hard right now? Yeah, so my first job was about 16 years ago, and marketing was about one third of it. And at the time, all the tools that we had were a fax machine. That was literally how we used to communicate with customers. Dodgy website connection and no ability to change said website before web flow and anything like that. You had to get five day approval to get anything changed. And so all of the mechanisms that you had were with current customers and trying to send them more, you know, print things and then do events and go to those events and try and activate customers through them or find good lists outside of the other pages to cold call. And so I remember then that marketing was really hard and then I spent the rest of my life in sales and marginally entertainment as well for a different period of life and just forgot actually like marketing has actually always been really hard. Like it's one of those things where we need to get the exact right person. just at the time they need something to come to our site and fill out a form and then we've converted them as a lead. And actually that's a really difficult thing. And especially for a company like us as well, we're actually relatively a new category as well. So now we need to not just let them know that we exist, but also this problem exists and there's a thing for it. So I think marketing has always been hard, but is anybody here not in marketing? uh One person. I think sometimes we just see marketing or I used to see marketing and go, oh, this looks pretty easy actually. Just make a logo, put a PDF together, send it out to a few people. What's the problem? It'll be fine. And then founded this company and we're attached really fucking hard. Like really hard. And I think one of the biggest problems of why it's so hard is when you get into a great time, like just after COVID. There's loads of funding going around. Everybody's happy. Let's spend on this tool, that one. You've got a tool, you've got a tool. Everyone's happy. Super times. But now it is a bit tighter and everybody's expected to do more with less and everybody's expected to use AI. So then the budgets become tighter and the number of leads become smaller. And the first people you go and look at are the revenue generators, which for the large part, that first through the door new business is marketing. You create that lead and then sales go and convert it. So when it gets into a difficult time, if everybody thinks they can do your job, And also you're the one that's like the first point of where somebody comes through the door and it's starting to go down. you know, suddenly put your tin hats on because they're coming for one place in marketing. dear. Yeah, I definitely feel that. think also one of the other things is, think you've, you've, we talked about just there, the sort of like the fact that everybody's expecting AI to be able to fulfill a lot of the stuff that we do day to day. But then what that is also creating is a hell of a lot of shit, noise everywhere. So what we're seeing is more and more email, more and more social, more and more everything, but the quality of that has gone down. So therefore you're fighting for people's attention and as human beings, I don't know if you saw the other day, but IQs are dropping, attention spans are dropping. So it's just getting harder and harder and harder to even just get in front of people, capture their actual attention and then effectively market to them because the quality of the content is dropping in a lot uh of places, not everywhere. So I think it's a combination, isn't it, of that economic situation, the stuff you all describe, Jake, and then also just the volume of crap. that we're up against. So from your point of view, Jakes, obviously, like you say, you run a, you run a business that is all about kind of marketing and working with influencers and YouTube. And on the flip side, you also have to do marketing yourself. What is one of the ways that you think that as a founder, you're trying to be supportive of marketing, but maybe not necessarily hitting the mark? Yeah, time to reflect. I am one of those excited people that go, I've got a great idea, which anybody that's put together a well-executed marketing strategy will know that that usually is the opposite of what you've all agreed and aligned on and is what is going to drive the business forwards. And so I definitely know in myself that I get very excited about this new thing or something that we could try. Yeah, it doesn't quite sit alongside what we're already doing and how we already generate some of the right customers. But obviously, I also know that comes from a really good place. Like, I want the business to do well. I want us to be able to do more with less. And I want us to be able to do more in marketing. But I also know that sometimes uh virtually or physically, people do want to punch me through the screen. So sorry to them. Full disclosure, do some channel crawlers marketing and literally two days ago Jake and I had a conversation of Jake's like, hey, should we be working on these things? And I was like, hey, are they in the roadmap I put together last week? No, okay. We're not doing that then I guess. Yeah, the conversations have become shorter now. Before they were like, oh, we can... I was like, no, no, this is what we're doing. That's obviously a very difficult situation. for you guys, it sounds like your relationship is good enough CEO to marketer to able to handle that. If people listening are like, I can't have that conversation with my CEO. What's everyone thought? What are your thoughts? What'd do? Yeah, okay. So I think of the CEO in terms of like different stages of a business and who they are. So we're a small startup and the founder is also the CEO. And if the founder is a CEO, especially in a startup, they'll have lots of ideas. They've probably done some marketing themselves. So they think that they can do it and have great ideas. And that's a different conversation from the CEO who's going from maybe scale up to more towards enterprise or startup into that scale up mode. who have probably been brought in because they've done that before and they want to see things that actually will go on and scale the business. And hence, like you say, they're going to take them to that enterprise point from being a startup scale up and making that change. And they want you to make that with them. So even if you don't have direct access to the CEO, whether it's through your CMO or somebody else, it's just about trying to understand exactly what are the business aims and where are they coming from. And then all of the marketing team being really aligned on actually what are we doing to go and achieve those business goals, especially as they transition and especially in a tougher economic market. Because I think one of the things that marketing are actually the worst at doing, and I experienced this from a sales point of view, is actually saying what they're doing and why they're doing it. And you would be so surprised at how little people in other revenue teams know. So here's a good example. So put up your hand if you know how SEO would be scored. Try that in a sales room. And I just literally just mean how it scored. Not like all the little things that make up of it, but like zero to 100, how many people know that that's how it scored? Because I think what people are kind of waiting for is this magic lead tree to be shaken and all these leads to start dropping through. But we know that that's not what happens and that's not how it exists. And especially as people try and move from a stage of seed to startup scale of enterprise, you're targeting a different set of customers. And it's much easier to sell to those people if They know who you are and you're in their day one potential options. But salespeople don't think like that. All they think about is, where is my lead? So the more that we can actually do to communicate, this is how we're going to generate leads. This is what we see as our best channels. This is why we see it because based on the target persona that we're trying to reach. And that's not just reaching as many people as possible, which is another argument that we're through to have. Doesn't mean that magically more people on your site is more conversion. And that same thing will go all the way through to the CEO. So understanding the true business goals, how you want to get there. And it might be that you have to do that via proxy. It might be have to do it via proxy for your specific role in marketing. It might be that you do it for the whole marketing team. But the more that you can get them on board with that conversation and the timeline that it's going to take to move them from X to Y, the more they'll be on board with it in the sense of, okay, when you want to make a change or when they want to make a change that doesn't fit in with that, then you've got a lot more collateral to then say, push back, which is why our conversations are a lot shorter now because Ruth has shown me all of that map and gone, well, here's the way. And I'm like, OK, maybe we won't get on TikTok then. And I think just to like... make what Jake said super duper practical. If you're not using some sort of goal setting methodology in your team, it's going to be really hard to push back because then your work seems just a theory of things coming in and out. So something like OKRs, you've never used them, objective key results, super, super, super good at basically being able to push back on because you can agree all of those things with whoever your manager is and then be like, OK, you want me to do this new thing. So which one of these things do want me to take out? to replace that with. I think, yeah, having something like that to just really um formulate what you're working on is really helpful. Then in those tough conversations, which hopefully you won't have to have, but it's a good backup there. What do you say, Jake, that the disconnect between what marketers are doing and the rest of the company is kind of the big disconnect between marketing and everyone else? Yeah, that's definitely the way that I've always felt it. When I got my first sales manager job, I used to cry a little inside when the marketing team would say just at the end, and we're going to do this for brand awareness. I'd be like, why? Like what? Who are those people? We know that those leads that come through are rubbish. This was in actually in a B2C environment where we're trying to sell courses at between 12 and 20,000 pounds. So you need people with money in certain areas that are going to be able to afford that. And then there's a difficult conversation, can you get them to buy? And so when you're doing Facebook leads that convert 0.02 % in different regions of the world, they're outside mainland Europe and America. That's really hard for me as a revenue generating person that sits on a number that knows if I miss target twice, like I'm in a meeting where my job is on the line. And so when you actually go further into it though, and I worked with a really good marketing manager who showed me something different, they were like, okay, well, if we only use these strong sets of leads, that's 40 % of where your last three revenue number came from. What about this other 60 %? And this is how it all builds into it. And I was like, oh my God, you're a genius. We should work together forever. But actually, they just do what all other marketers do, which is build brand awareness, drive people through a funnel, and get them targeted at the right time when they're buying. But there's a couple of really good examples, actually, that I think of a lot is when we do things, knowing why we do them is often one of the most important things. So a great example that I like in sport, I'm not a rugby player myself, but New Zealand, as you can probably tell from the build, I break in half. But New Zealand are one of the world's greatest rugby teams for a very long period of time and they had a thing where they would clean the changing room after every single game. And the reason for that was to show respect to each other for their environment and what they do. So if you go and replicate that but your team are always late and they're rude to each other and they don't have respect, it kind of kills the idea of what you're doing it for. And a great example from today of people just following expecting an outcome to happen is we're trying to find this room. I'd actually already been to the room. and there's a few people laughing already. We're coming down the stairs, one person went to the toilet, 25 marketers followed him. We're all trying to do the same thing, but we don't know why we're doing it. We just follow that, well, that must be going the right direction. That's the way for us all to go. And it's just a really simple example that I thought of. was like, okay, we all know what we want to do, the outcome we're trying to drive. We think this is going to do it because we've seen somebody else do it, but actually it's not, because that doesn't work for us. Our outcome is not trying to go to the toilet. It's trying to find this room and do this. If only someone had just asked where the room was. I'd already been to the room. That was the worst part. I still followed them to the toilet. signage, whatever. Who needs that? Is there anything you think we should have talked about in this section, Jake? Because obviously we're talking about why marketing feels so hard right now. Anything else that feels hard for you right now? think, like you said, there's so much noise and there's so many channels that you can try. And a lot of them take a good period of time. Like I mentioned, SEO, that takes a long time to really build up and give Google, being whoever that, confidence that you are the right website for it. There's lots of noise about how AEO can make really strong changes, and you can do that in two to three weeks. There's a million social platforms that you can be on. Everybody should be at events. Everybody should be doing their own events. There's all of these different channels. And I think for... me, it's a little bit deer in headlights sometimes, if I'm really honest. There's all of these things that can all make a big difference and you have to choose a path and you have to commit to it you have to go for it. And at that same time, and this is with the customer persona that you go after as well, you have to cut out the others and you have to cut out those opportunities. That's a really good thing to do, but that also gives me high level of anxiety in my palms, literally start to sweat as you do it. And I think that's the hardest part is sitting down and having really tough conversations amongst ourselves and as a business is like, how do we go and get the right types of leads for us? Because even if you generate 50 MQLs each month, they're not all the same MQLs, right? They're all different leads that come through the door, and you might have targeted them all in different ways. And actually, you find one set of them is much better, and they're the ones you should focus on, rather than trying to drive the volume of others. Thank you, Jake. We are going to have to wrap up, even though it feels like it's just fizzled away in time. ah We usually record these for up to an hour. So me and Emma are like, we're just getting into it. we have time for Q &A, Greg? Excellent. yeah, five minutes for Q &A if anyone has any burning questions. I'd ask what your top priority is for marketing at the moment. What's your top priority for marketing? Yeah, so we have always been really good at driving traffic to the site that you're about to see in a moment's time, but our conversion rate is horrifically below the industry average and anywhere where we would want it to be. And that's because me as a marketing genius has always been like, let's just get as many people to the site as possible, and I'm sure they'll eventually convert and we'll make money. And surprisingly, that doesn't work. So the biggest thing that we're doing now is talking about how do we find the right type of customer and bring all of those people to the website and then have more interactions with them if they don't convert at that first opportunity because we don't really do a good job of segmenting the customer type or lead scoring or anything like that. So the biggest challenge for us now is saying how do get those right types of customers because it's not just about do they convert today. The other thing that we notice as well is they're also the most likely ones to stay for a much longer period of time. And we also have a platform where you can dip in and out of it to an extent as well, if you're just a small team with a small use case for sponsoring YouTubers. And so we're also looking for the types that want to stay longer because they're bigger teams, but also those people are happy to dip in and out rather than just the one hit wonders that we have so many of. So, is... So when we do the siloed pleases like the more ideas you've got the better like you know the heart the harsher you are the better that is for me.