How to Get More Marketing Resources

After every podcast interview, I always ask my guest the same question. It's become a ritual. Most of my guests are heads of marketing—people who are deep in the trenches, dealing with the day-to-day challenges of growing brands. My question is simple: “What’s the biggest headache or problem you're facing right now?”

The number one response, time and again, is this: a lack of resources.

But here's the thing: ‘Resources’ means something different to everyone. Depending on the company, the marketing team, or even the individual, ‘resources’ can take on many forms. For one team, it’s a lack of budget to run campaigns. For another, it’s not having the right people to create content. For someone else, it’s a shortage of time, data, or internal support.

So many marketing teams are struggling to do more with less, and it's frustrating. That’s why I wanted to write this article—to explore what ‘resources’ really means in the world of marketing and to break down what teams need to succeed.

We’ll dive into different types of resources—people, budget, technology, time, data, content—and how each plays a crucial role in hitting goals. We’ll also discuss how to maximize the resources you have, and how to advocate for more when you need them.

If you’re in marketing, you know the constant push to do more with less. Let’s tackle these challenges head-on and turn that biggest headache into something manageable.

Human Resources: The Strain on People

When marketers talk about lacking resources, often what they mean is not having enough people. Marketing is a team sport. Without the right mix of talent, it’s almost impossible to keep up with the demands of modern marketing efforts.

Marketing teams today need people with specialized skills—content creators, designers, data analysts, social media experts, SEO specialists. The list goes on. Each role plays a part in executing marketing initiatives that are strategic, data-driven, and creative.

The Importance of Human Resources

Specialized skills are the backbone of a strong marketing team. You need great writers to tell your brand’s story and talented designers to make your visuals stand out. Developers ensure everything works seamlessly, and analysts monitor performance.

When there aren’t enough people, even the most skilled individuals struggle to keep up. This creates a vicious cycle. There’s no time to do the strategic work that could make marketing more efficient because everyone is stuck putting out fires.

A fully-staffed marketing team allows for creativity, strategic thinking, and the bandwidth to focus on projects that drive growth and innovation. Without adequate human resources, marketing initiatives fall short. Tasks pile up, important projects are delayed, and the overall quality of work suffers.

Human resources provide the foundation for impactful marketing. Having the right team in place is essential for reaching both short-term and long-term goals.

How to Make the Most Out of a Smaller Team

1. Focus on work that has the biggest impact and eliminate activities that lead to mediocrity.
2. When people are spread across too many projects, quality suffers. Concentrate on fewer, high-value projects and let your team put their best effort into the work that truly matters.
3. Utilize fractional talent, agencies, and freelancers for specialized gaps.
4. Instead of hiring full-time, using external resources helps tackle high-priority projects that need specific expertise, without overcommitting your budget or overwhelming your team.
5. Assess which activities drive the most value.
6. Not every campaign or project is mission-critical. Sometimes focusing on fewer but higher-impact efforts is the best way forward.
7. Consolidate roles where possible—but avoid overburdening team members.
8. Automate repetitive tasks wherever possible to free up valuable time. Tools that streamline workflows, automate email campaigns, or provide quick performance insights can help reduce manual work.
9. Keep your team focused on creative and strategic tasks.
10. Build cross-functional skills within the team by training team members to handle multiple facets of marketing—such as teaching content creators the basics of SEO. This creates a more flexible team.
11. Ensure flexibility to allow your team to pivot as needed without losing momentum.

How to Get More Human Resources for Your Team

Marketing leaders must also advocate for more resources. Making a data-backed case to leadership is key.

Frame the conversation not as “we need more people,” but rather as “here’s the value we can create if we invest in our team.” Use specific metrics to demonstrate the impact. Show how additional headcount could lead to more campaigns, better customer engagement, or a stronger brand presence.

Illustrate the risks of being understaffed. Missed opportunities, slower response times, and reduced creative output all impact business goals. Show how these factors affect revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

Provide concrete examples of how additional team members would directly contribute to both team efficiency and business success. Align these needs with company-wide goals to highlight the strategic importance of investing in the marketing team.

By emphasizing both the potential gains and the costs of inaction, marketing leaders can make a compelling case for increased headcount. Securing more human resources isn’t just about making life easier for your team.

It’s about positioning marketing to be a true driver of business growth and success.

Financial Resources: Budget Challenges

The second most common challenge for marketing teams is budget. Whether it’s running ads, producing quality content, or investing in technology, money is always at the core of getting things done.

The Importance of Financial Resources

A sufficient budget is crucial for executing successful marketing strategies. Without adequate financial resources, campaigns are limited, quality suffers, and opportunities are missed.

Budget affects every aspect of marketing. Paid advertising, content creation, tools, and training all need funding to succeed.

Without proper financial backing, it's hard to stay competitive. The right budget enables growth through high-impact campaigns and innovation.

How to Make the Most Out of a Tight Budget

1. Prioritize marketing activities that provide the greatest ROI.
2. Analyze which campaigns deliver the best results, and allocate your limited budget there. Focus your resources on the tactics that will deliver the most meaningful outcomes.
3. Leverage organic channels.
4. Organic search, social media, and content marketing are budget-friendly options for reaching audiences. While they take time to develop, they can provide long-term value without large ongoing costs.
5. Repurpose existing content to extend its lifespan.
6. Instead of constantly creating new material, repurpose content into different formats. Turn blog posts into infographics, webinars into social posts, and whitepapers into podcasts.
7. Partner with other brands to share costs.
8. Collaborations can help stretch your budget further. By working with complementary brands on co-branded campaigns, you can reach a wider audience while sharing expenses.
9. Experiment on a small scale before making larger investments.
10. Test campaigns in smaller increments to validate effectiveness. Once a tactic proves successful, increase your budget to maximize results. This helps reduce risk and ensures resources are used efficiently.
11. Focus on building a strong community.
12. Community engagement can be a cost-effective way to increase loyalty and advocacy. Empower your customers and audience to promote your brand, reducing the need for expensive marketing initiatives.

How to Get More Financial Resources for Your Team

Advocating for a larger budget can be challenging, but it's crucial for driving growth. Start by clearly articulating how more financial resources can lead to increased ROI.

Provide detailed projections on how additional spending will impact growth metrics—whether it's brand awareness, lead generation, or sales. Present specific examples of campaigns where underfunding limited their potential and demonstrate how more budget would yield stronger results.

Align your request with business objectives. Show how marketing initiatives directly support company-wide goals, like market share growth or revenue targets. The more you can connect the budget request to the broader business vision, the stronger your case becomes.

Highlight competitor spending as well. Benchmark against industry standards to show how a lack of financial investment could lead to a loss in market position. Fear of falling behind competitors can be a powerful motivator for securing more budget.

Lastly, emphasize accountability. Show that you have a plan for tracking and optimizing spend to ensure every dollar is used effectively. Building trust in your fiscal responsibility can help sway leadership to increase budget allocations.

With a well-supported argument, marketing leaders can secure the financial resources they need to achieve impactful results and support business growth.

Technology Resources: Martech Stack and Tools

Another critical area where marketing teams often find themselves lacking is in technology resources. The right marketing technology, or martech, can make all the difference between a marketing team that is overwhelmed and one that is thriving.

The Importance of Technology Resources

Technology enables marketing teams to work smarter, not harder. It supports everything from automating repetitive tasks, tracking customer behavior, managing campaigns, and analyzing data to ensure marketing efforts are on target.

Without the right tools, marketing processes are slower, prone to error, and more labor-intensive. From CRM systems to email automation, analytics platforms, and design software—each tool plays a role in boosting efficiency and effectiveness.

When teams lack the right tech, they waste time on manual tasks, miss out on insights from data, and struggle to measure campaign success accurately. Technology resources are the backbone of a streamlined, data-driven marketing operation.

How to Maximize Technology Resources on a Limited Budget

1. Audit your current tools to identify overlaps and gaps.
2. Many teams have subscriptions to tools that perform similar functions. Conduct a martech audit to eliminate redundancy and ensure you’re only paying for what you actually use.
3. Leverage free or low-cost alternatives where possible.
4. Many powerful tools have free tiers or affordable options for smaller teams. Tools like Google Analytics, Canva, or HubSpot’s free CRM can provide substantial value without heavy costs.
5. Maximize integration between platforms.
6. Ensure that your martech tools are integrated seamlessly to share data. When systems work together, you save time and get a fuller picture of your customer’s journey.
7. Prioritize tools that drive revenue.
8. Focus your budget on tools that have a direct impact on lead generation and conversion. Make sure these revenue-driving technologies are prioritized over less critical features.
9. Train your team to fully utilize existing tools.
10. Often, teams only use a fraction of what their current technology can do. Invest in training to ensure your team is getting the most out of the tools you already have.
11. Consolidate to platforms that offer multiple solutions.
12. Use tools that offer several functionalities under one roof. For example, platforms that handle CRM, email marketing, and automation all together can be more cost-effective and easier to manage.

How to Get More Technology Resources for Your Team

To advocate for additional technology resources, tie your request directly to efficiency and ROI. Explain how the right technology can automate repetitive tasks, freeing up your team to focus on high-value activities.

Demonstrate the opportunity cost of outdated or inefficient tools. Provide examples of how current limitations are holding your team back—whether it’s lost productivity, missing insights, or time-consuming manual processes.

Highlight specific technologies that could solve these issues and project the impact. Quantify how much time could be saved, how campaign performance could improve, or how customer insights could be better leveraged.

Assign an owner. Make sure that you know who will own success and accountability of each and every technical tool you have in your stack. No owner = no accountability = no success.

Emphasize how technology investments are crucial for staying competitive. Marketing technology is constantly evolving, and the companies that invest wisely are the ones that lead the pack. Make the case that keeping up with martech is essential for maintaining a competitive edge.

Finally, show a clear implementation and training plan. Demonstrate how you’ll onboard new tools, integrate them into existing workflows, and ensure the team is well-prepared to use them effectively. This approach shows leadership that the investment will be well-managed and fully utilized.

Time Resources: The Unseen Limitation

Time is one of the most underrated yet impactful resources in marketing. Often, it's not just about what you have to do but about when and how efficiently you can get it done.

The Importance of Time Resources

Effective time management is crucial for marketing success. Without enough time, even the best strategies and resources can fall short. Campaigns that are rushed tend to lack the polish and strategic oversight needed to perform well. Time constraints can limit creativity, reduce the effectiveness of messaging, and ultimately hurt the outcomes.

Having enough time allows teams to conduct thorough research, develop creative concepts, test variations, and iterate based on insights. It ensures that campaigns are not only launched on time but have the quality needed to make an impact.

How to Make the Most Out of Limited Time

1. Prioritize high-impact tasks.
2. Identify the tasks that contribute most to your goals and focus efforts there. Not every activity needs to be perfect, but high-impact projects deserve your best attention.
3. Plan ahead to avoid last-minute work.
4. Proactive planning reduces the chaos of last-minute rushes. Set clear timelines for each project stage and stick to them as closely as possible.
5. Automate routine activities.
6. Automation tools can save hours of manual effort. Automate processes like email marketing, reporting, and lead scoring to free up time for strategic work.
7. Block time for focused, deep work.
8. Allocate blocks of uninterrupted time for high-priority tasks. Multitasking and constant interruptions can derail productivity, so designate deep work periods for your most critical projects.
9. Set realistic timelines and communicate them clearly.
10. Overpromising leads to rushed, low-quality work. Set realistic expectations for project completion and communicate these timelines to stakeholders to manage their expectations.
11. Delegate effectively.
12. Assign tasks based on skill sets to maximize efficiency. Delegating work allows you to distribute responsibilities, freeing up your time to focus on strategic initiatives.
13. Know when to say "no".
14. Sometimes things aren't worth your time. It's ok for you and your entire team to be empowered to say "no".

How to Get More Time for Your Team

Getting more time often means advocating for better prioritization and less pressure from leadership to deliver everything at once. Start by setting clear boundaries and educating stakeholders on realistic timelines.

Show how rushed work can lead to suboptimal outcomes. Present data on how taking more time for strategy, testing, and iteration has led to better-performing campaigns. If stakeholders understand the value of investing time, they may be more willing to give your team the space they need.

Provide detailed project plans that break down the necessary steps and time required for each task. Use these plans to advocate for extended deadlines or more flexible schedules.

Highlight the cost of rushing—whether it’s missing out on creative opportunities, errors, or a lack of thorough testing. Make it clear that the best results come from allowing the team enough time to do their work properly.

Lastly, advocate for additional team members if time is consistently a limiting factor. The more people there are to share the workload, the more time each person has to focus on doing their best work.

By treating time as a valuable resource and advocating for better management and expectations, marketing teams can ensure they deliver quality results without burning out.

Data & Insights: Flying Blind Without Good Data

Data is one of the most critical resources for modern marketing, yet many teams lack the insights they need to make informed decisions. Without good data, marketing becomes a guessing game.

The Importance of Data & Insights

Data drives nearly every aspect of successful marketing. From understanding customer behavior to measuring campaign performance, the right insights help teams make decisions that are informed and effective. Data can show you what’s working, what’s not, and where to adjust to achieve better results.

Without good data, marketing efforts are largely flying blind. Teams may invest in the wrong channels, use the wrong messaging, or target the wrong audience. The result? Wasted time, wasted budget, and underwhelming outcomes.

Having strong data and the insights derived from it also allows for personalization—a key driver of customer engagement and conversion. Knowing your audience means delivering relevant messages at the right time, something that is impossible without accurate and complete data.

How to Make the Most Out of Limited Data

1. Focus on the data you have.
2. Even if your data is limited, make sure you’re using it to its fullest potential. Start with the basics—web analytics, email engagement metrics, and CRM data—and find actionable insights there.
3. Clean your data regularly.
4. Dirty data leads to bad insights. Make sure your data is clean and accurate by removing duplicates, standardizing formats, and updating outdated information.
5. Leverage customer feedback.
6. Direct customer feedback is a valuable data source. Surveys, social listening, and customer support interactions can provide insights into what your audience needs and wants.
7. Prioritize key performance indicators (KPIs).
8. Identify the KPIs that matter most to your marketing goals and focus on tracking those. Trying to track everything will overwhelm your team; instead, prioritize the metrics that align with your objectives.
9. Use external data sources.
10. Supplement your data with external sources like industry reports, benchmarking studies, or third-party data providers. This can help fill in the gaps when you lack sufficient first-party data.
11. Develop hypotheses and run tests.
12. Use your limited data to form hypotheses, then run small-scale experiments to validate your ideas. A test-and-learn mindset can help you make the most of what you have while also gathering new insights.

How to Get More Data & Insights for Your Team

Getting better data often starts with investing in the right tools and systems. Advocate for platforms that provide deeper analytics or customer data platforms (CDPs) that consolidate information from various sources.

Explain to leadership how data directly impacts your marketing outcomes. Present examples where incomplete data led to poor performance, and show how better data could improve results—whether it’s more targeted campaigns, higher conversion rates, or improved customer retention.

Highlight the value of data integration. Make the case for integrating your existing tools to improve data flow and accuracy. When customer data is siloed, it’s hard to get a complete picture; integration solves this.

Show how data-driven decision-making leads to efficiency and higher ROI. Marketing backed by good data is inherently less wasteful and more effective. By emphasizing the connection between insights and performance, you can make a strong case for additional investments in data capabilities.

Lastly, advocate for hiring data analysts or data-focused roles if your team lacks this expertise. The right people can transform raw data into actionable insights, driving smarter strategies and better outcomes.

Content Resources: The Fuel for Marketing

Content is the fuel that drives modern marketing engines. From blog posts and social media to video and long-form guides, content is the primary means by which brands communicate, educate, and convert their audience.

The Importance of Content Resources

Without great content, marketing campaigns fall flat. Content is what attracts potential customers, builds trust, and nurtures leads through the sales funnel. It’s the reason people find your brand, engage with your messaging, and ultimately make a decision to buy.

Content not only drives organic search traffic but also helps convey the brand story, educate prospects, and support every stage of the customer journey. Well-crafted content is what allows marketing to connect meaningfully with the audience.

How to Make the Most Out of Limited Content Resources

1. Repurpose existing content.
2. Maximize the value of content by repurposing it into different formats. Turn a well-performing blog post into an infographic, a podcast, or a social media video.
3. Prioritize quality over quantity.
4. With limited resources, it's better to create fewer pieces of high-quality content than a high volume of mediocre content. Focus on producing content that provides genuine value to your audience.
5. Use user-generated content.
6. Encourage your customers to create content about their experiences with your brand. User-generated content can be authentic and engaging, while also reducing the workload on your internal team.
7. Leverage content partnerships.
8. Collaborate with industry influencers or complementary brands to create content. This not only reduces the resource burden but also helps reach new audiences.
9. Automate content scheduling and distribution.
10. Use scheduling tools to automate the publication of content across different channels. This saves time and ensures consistent content delivery.
11. Focus on evergreen content.
12. Create content that remains relevant over time. Evergreen content continues to attract traffic and generate value long after it is initially published.

How to Get More Content Resources for Your Team

To secure more content resources, start by demonstrating the impact of content on business outcomes. Show how content contributes to lead generation, SEO performance, brand authority, and ultimately, revenue.

Use data to illustrate gaps in your current content strategy—perhaps there are key topics that aren’t being covered or formats (like video) that are underutilized. Highlight how expanding content capabilities could address these gaps and improve performance.

Make the case for hiring specialized content creators. A writer, video producer, or graphic designer can elevate the quality of your content and make it more engaging. When advocating for additional hires, tie it to specific goals, like increasing organic traffic or improving conversion rates.

You can also argue for expanding freelance budgets or agency partnerships to help scale content production without needing full-time staff. Highlight the flexibility this approach offers in terms of scaling efforts up or down based on campaign needs.

Lastly, align content needs with broader marketing and business objectives. If your leadership sees content as a core driver of growth, they will be more likely to invest in the resources needed to do it right.

By effectively leveraging and advocating for content resources, marketing teams can ensure they have the fuel they need to drive consistent growth and engagement.

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