Marketing Ops Overload

If your marketing team spends less than half its time on creative work, you’re not making the most of your most valuable resource.

You’re likely suffering from marketing ops overload.

The Problem: Ops Eats the Day

Over the last decade, marketing operations has matured. From martech stacks to attribution dashboards to CRM automations - the function has expanded fast. In large enterprises, this has meant clearer delineation between operational and creative roles. Ops teams run the machines. Creative teams make the stories.

But in small and mid-sized companies - especially in B2B SaaS and fintech - those roles are often collapsed into the same people.

Your marketer builds the campaign strategy and formats the landing page.

Writes the blog and pulls the performance report.

Plans the video and resizes it for 9 platforms.

All of that takes time. And increasingly, it’s time spent not creating value - just formatting it.

In 2024, most SME teams manage upwards of 9 marketing tools, spend over 20% of their week on admin, and use only a third of their tech stack’s capabilities, according to the 2024 Marketing Technology Landscape by ChiefMartec.

That’s a system problem, not a people problem.

Creativity Is the Competitive Advantage

This matters because creative effectiveness remains the biggest driver of marketing performance - as shown in The Long and the Short of It by Binet and Field.

It’s what cuts through.

It’s what gets remembered.

It’s what builds advantage over time.

Yet just 23% of B2B marketers say they spend most of their time on creative work, according to the latest B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks from the Content Marketing Institute.

That’s the paradox: the part of marketing that drives the biggest return is the part most teams are too busy to focus on.

And when the team’s time gets squeezed, quality is the first casualty.

Marketers default to:

• Churning out deliverables that look like progress
• Writing content that fills the calendar, not the gap in buyer understanding
• Pushing half-finished campaigns because there’s no buffer for refinement

So you end up with a high volume of output - and very little impact.

A Structural Trap for SME Teams

One-person marketing teams know this tension well.

They have full control, immediate feedback - but never enough time.

Enterprise teams have time and resource - but get slowed by hierarchy and silos.

SMEs sit awkwardly in between.

They have small teams and big ambitions.

They chase step-change wins - launches, rebrands, land grabs - because that’s what the board wants to see.

And because each team member owns a slice of ops, no one has full visibility of how their time is being used.

The result is a kind of structural myopia:

• Creative tasks are deprioritised because they’re less visible
• Deliverables become proxies for progress
• Ops quietly expands to fill every available gap

By the time leaders notice, it’s too late.

The team is burnt out.

The work feels generic.

And the best marketers are looking elsewhere.

So What’s the Fix?

You’ve only got two real options - increase the resource, or reduce the workload.

But to do that effectively, you need to reframe where value is actually created.

1. Outsource Ops, Not Creative

The default approach in many SMEs is the opposite: outsource creative, keep ops in-house.

It’s how agencies have sold marketing services for decades - and it still works for big brands translating a central message into polished campaigns.

But for digital-first B2B companies - where authenticity, agility and subject-matter depth matter more - it’s a mistake.

No external partner knows your customers, product nuance, or internal politics like your team does.

You don’t just need content.

You need insight, voice, timing - the stuff that makes marketing work.

That’s why the new model is inverting:

• Keep core creative in-house - your team owns the strategy, message, and value creation
• Outsource repeatable ops tasks - formatting, scheduling, publishing, tagging, CRM data hygiene

Not because ops doesn’t matter - but because your marketers’ attention is your scarcest resource.

And most of the operational backlog requires little to no domain expertise.

The 2023 Efficiency Report by Wrike found that teams spend up to 30% of their time on repetitive tasks like formatting emails, resizing assets, setting up automations, and building reports.

This work can be scoped, trained, and handed over.

Your team’s creativity can’t.

2. Reduce Volume to Protect Quality

Not every team has the budget to outsource.

That’s fine - but then you have to reduce the load.

And that means making peace with publishing less.

Your team’s job isn’t to hit a post quota.

It’s to create value that cuts through - and that takes time.

A decent blog post can be written in a day.

An excellent one might take a week.

If you’re not giving your team that space, don’t be surprised if everything feels average.

What does that look like in practice?

• Pair every deliverable with a quality metric

  Not just output. Track impact.

  If a campaign’s rushed and underperforms, take that as a sign to do less, better.

• Cut the crap

  Most SMEs don’t need 12 channels.

  Rand Fishkin makes the case for focusing deeply on just a few - the ones your audience actually uses.

• Give your marketers time to think

  Creativity isn’t slow. It’s fragile.

  It breaks under pressure, and it doesn’t happen in Slack between meetings.

  Harvard Business School research shows that time pressure can significantly hinder creative thinking.

Protect it.

This Is a Leadership Problem

If your team is stuck in ops overload, it’s not because they’re not trying hard enough.

It’s because they’re caught in a system that rewards visible activity over actual value.

It’s your job to change that.

That might mean:

• Justifying a VA to take admin off their plate
• Halving your blog cadence so the team can research properly
• Saying no to yet another platform that adds more setup than payoff

The goal isn’t to do less marketing.

It’s to make space for better marketing - the kind that moves people, not just metrics.