Chilling tales from the B2B marketing ‘underworld’

“The old tech company stood at the end of Willow Creek Road, cloaked in darkness, its once-sparkling glass facade now cracked and hidden by cobwebs. As the wind howled and a slow chill settled into her bones, the marketing executive approached the doorway, tightening her grip on her CV. She had heard the stories—tales of laughter turned to screams, centuries-old secrets and strange occurrences shrouded in mystery.”

Okay, so that’s not exactly the type of chilling tale we’ll be discussing in this blog – the real terror is yet to come. The stories you’ll hear may be less fictional but they’re no less fantastical. From supernatural job specs looking for that so-called ‘Unicorn Marketer’ to clients with alarming expectations, there are few industries quite as terrifying as the marketing world right now. 

With ‘spooky season’ approaching, we reached out to our networks to discuss their marketing-related horror stories. And what we discovered was pretty unnerving.

So, in an effort to shed light on scarily unrealistic expectations of marketers in the B2B space, we share some creepy chronicles and explore the key challenges facing marketers today. Dare to keep reading? 

Beastly burdens: Are you burnt out yet?   

Chilling tale: 

“I was hired as a Demand Gen Marketing Executive for the UK with less than 3 years experience, with the vision that I would be a junior member of the team, guided by an experienced Demand Gen Manager. Fast forward 6 months and I’m still without a team lead or manager, managing all marketing strategy and execution for the UK and US. Yes, that’s content, paid media, social media, out-of-home marketing, PR, events, email marketing and sales enablement. On top of that, I was handling a £300k marketing budget and owning a revenue goal, sitting in C-Suite meetings reporting on marketing performance and navigating marketing through an IPO process (I had literally no idea what this meant).

Safe to say I was BURNT OUT and actually ended up signed off for a couple of weeks.

In all honesty, I wasn’t any good at this role. No wonder as I was being asked to be a Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Marketing, Marketing Manager and Executive all in one go – nonetheless – it completely destroyed my confidence for a good while.”

What this story tells us:

This story is unfortunately all too common in the marketing world with so many junior marketers thrust into roles beyond their experience level. The risk of burnout is high for marketers, especially when responsibilities far exceed their level of experience.

Companies shouldn’t underestimate the complexity of marketing roles and expect a junior employee to single-handedly manage comprehensive marketing strategies, large budgets, and revenue goals across multiple countries. This is the equivalent of hiring an apprentice plumber and expecting them to be able to design, build, wire and decorate a house. A full team of experienced professionals is needed.

Alongside creating more realistic job scopes, organisations must provide adequate support and mentorship for junior talent to prevent burnout – after all, 90% of employees who have a career mentor report being happy at work. 

For series A and B start-ups, the question is often: ‘With my limited budget, do I hire someone who can help me think strategically about growth or a junior doer?’ To avoid falling into the trap of hiring and overloading a junior marketer, then 6 months down the line being disappointed with the outcome of marketing efforts, or hiring someone so senior they don’t want to do any of the doing, we’d suggest partnering with a fractional marketing team like Codi. We provide both strategy guidance to help scale and grow your business and execute your marketing on your behalf.

For my next trick, exponential growth from thin air!

Chilling tale:

“I once took over a new account for pay-per-click (PPC) and was tasked with growing revenue by 50% whilst cutting budget by 50%…”

What this story tells us:

This impossible mandate highlights the common disconnect between business goals and marketing realities. Marketers cannot be expected to perform magic tricks and fuel exponential growth while working with a severely limited budget. Such expectations not only set marketers up for failure but also demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how marketing channels work.

Effective PPC campaigns require adequate funding to test, optimise, and scale successful strategies. Cutting budgets while demanding growth is akin to asking someone to sprint through sand. 

Instead, businesses must align their expectations with marketing realities, fostering an environment where marketers can realistically achieve goals and drive meaningful results.

Jack ‘the Ripper’ of all trades 

Chilling tale: 

“I was hired as a ‘product manager’ but I quickly found out the rest of the team was quite junior, and I was expected to be an expert in pretty much every marketing role you could think of, whilst also training up the rest of the team.

After a couple of years things settled in a bit, and I ended up doing all things digital, while another member of the team took on design, and another took on brand. All sounds good, except that we also had to know each other’s jobs in case someone was on holiday. So, if the woman who managed design was off, I was expected to just jump in and know how to create banners and brochures! And if I was off, she needed to write blogs and social copy.

To top it off, we were managed by the Head of Sales who had no marketing experience whatsoever, who eventually got bored of us and passed us on to a junior sales manager. It was MAYHEM. Then I got made redundant – the end!”

What this story tells us: 

Often there can be significant disparity between job titles and actual job responsibilities. Being hired as a ‘product manager’ but expected to be a social media whizz and proficient in graphic design highlights how attractive job titles can often be used to mask broader, more demanding job scopes.

This is a problem we see all too often with start-ups in particular. While some level of versatility is important when building a team from scratch, a lack of clearly defined roles, responsibilities and boundaries can lead to extremely unrealistic expectations. 

The issue is that marketers do not have the depth of experience across all these areas. Nobody is truly good at all of these roles and that puts businesses in a vulnerable position. For example, if an employee isn’t skilled in design, you risk your brand credibility, or if they’re bad with ads (excuse the pun), you could be wasting a large chunk of money. In these environments marketers end up on a hamster wheel attempting to keep churning out tasks and therefore, aren’t spending time actually thinking about why they should be doing to add real business value.

As well highlighting the impact of misaligned management, this cautionary tale serves as a reminder that marketers offer highly specialised skills that must be recognised, valued and supported with an organisation. They should not be expected to repeatedly wear multiple different hats and take on the role of a ‘Unicorn Marketer’, as we like to call it. Would you expect a surgeon to also be a GP, a nurse and a physician at the same time? 

The ‘unicorn marketer’ doesn’t exist 

It may be ‘spooky season’ but there’s one mythical creature we can all do without – the ‘unicorn marketer’. This is the idea that one marketer can be a SEO specialist, social media and email marketing expert, high-level strategist and graphic designer all in one. 

And increasingly, the marketing industry is flooded with job specs asking for this supernatural being. One member of the Codi team came across a job description asking for a ‘Graphic Designer / Receptionist’ expected to welcome clients, process transactions, deal with customer complaints while at the same time being fluent with Adobe suite products and skillfully designing a wide variety of brand assets.

Codi’s founder and CMO, Louise, took to TikTok after reading a spine-tingling job spec looking for a marketing executive to implement marketing strategies and plans, create blogs and videos, manage multiple company websites, organise and attend industry events, prepare regular reports, track marketing performance and ROI – the list goes on. Not only is this a prime example of a business trying to cut corners and ask a junior employee to take on strategising and reporting, something beyond their experience level, but it’s also just a ridiculously long list of other responsibilities. Too much for one person to manage on their own. And if that wasn’t bad enough, do this, on an entry-level salary. 

And why are these examples a problem? Well, mainly ‘unicorn marketers’ do not exist. And if they do, expecting one person to manage multiple different channels, regardless of seniority level, is a recipe for burnout and growth-related setbacks. 

No Tricks, just treats: Alternative paths to the ‘unicorn marketer’ model

It’s time to murder the ‘unicorn marketer’ model. It’s Halloween after all. As we’ve learnt from these eerie anecdotes, expecting a marketer to excel in multiple areas, especially when they lack sufficient experience, can lead to high levels of stress, job dissatisfaction and unhappy employees. 

Companies should resist the temptation to make their marketers ‘jack-of-all-trades’ and should instead focus on building diverse marketing teams where specialist disciplines are celebrated, supported and given realistic job scopes. Unrealistic job expectations should be axed, allowing marketers to thrive in their areas of expertise while still maintaining broad awareness.

For Series A and B SaaS businesses, building a fully operational marketing function internally can be risky and expensive. That’s why stopping the search for a ‘unicorn marketer’ and outsourcing some marketing efforts is a much better option, whether that’s by hiring a freelancer to support existing efforts, employing a marketing agency or choosing a fractional marketing team with a pre-assembled group of experts, like Codi.