Marketing leaders are running out of plays.
Kickstand can help.
Only 21% of marketing leaders believe their 2025 goals are realistic. The brands cutting through aren’t spending more — they’re showing up differently.
The pressure is real. The data backs it up.
We surveyed 200+ marketing leaders for the Q1 CMO Pulse. The story it tells is one most agencies aren’t equipped to address.
of marketing leaders rate their 2025 goal realism as excellent — meaning 79% don’t believe their plan is achievable.
Q1 CMO Pulse, 2026
B2B tech marketing leaders are already behind on plan heading into Q2.
Q1 CMO Pulse, 2026
are behind on new customer acquisition — the channel that suffers first when buyers stop responding to outbound.
Q1 CMO Pulse, 2026
Well-resourced teams are twice as likely to be significantly ahead of plan. The fault line isn’t effort — it’s resourcing alignment.
Q1 CMO Pulse, 2026
Two questions every MarTech
marketing team is trying to answer.
How do we drive brand influence?
Decision-makers in MarTech buying committees need as many as 80 touchpoints across media, peers, analysts, and original content before they form a preference. A blog post and a paid ad don’t get there.
How do we win findability in an AI world?
71.5% of people now use AI tools to search for information. If your brand isn’t documented, validated, and cited across the web, you’re invisible to the buyers asking ChatGPT or Perplexity “what’s the best platform for [your category]?”
Earned media still matters.
The map around it just got bigger.
Earned coverage is still the engine — and it always will be. What’s changed is everything that sits next to it.
The places where MarTech buyers form opinions today (superintendent newsletters, education podcasts, Substacks written by curriculum leaders, peer review threads, AI-generated answers) aren’t just “media.” They’re the broader knowledge landscape, and they’re what large language models pull from when a MarTech buyer asks AI for a recommendation.
A great earned-media program plus a strong presence across that whole map is how MarTech brands make the shortlist now.
Three things separate the MarTech brands that lead from the ones that don’t.
Consistency
Whether you’re trying to own mindshare, win share of voice, or build search leadership, consistent coverage is non-negotiable. One big hit doesn’t move buyers. Steady, layered presence does.
Validation
Competitor-free coverage in high-authority publications. Documented validation of your category leadership. Third-party signal that LLMs and skeptical buyers can both verify.
Originality
Original thought leadership and unique owned data. Our in-house research team — the same team behind the CMO Pulse — builds proprietary studies that give your brand a voice in conversations your competitors are commenting on, not leading.
MarTech brands we’ve helped
cut through.
Bazaarvoice’s EMEA PR program struggled with disjointed leadership across three regions, yielding minimal coverage at a moment when global competition was intensifying.
Bazaarvoice handed Kickstand ownership of EMEA strategy and oversight. We built foundational research and thought leadership specialized for each market so the brand could connect with regional media.
The Results
HubSpot faced an increasingly competitive market and needed to expand thought-leadership programming to further differentiate from the rest of the category.
Designed a multi-market global research study identifying the best startup cities, then powered it with owned blog content, organic social, and an interactive micro-site mapping the data behind what made each city great for innovation.
The Results
Although a well-established global brand, Indeed’s US program was leveraging economists and speaking to employers rather than job seekers themselves.
Kickstand built campaigns focused on media and consumer audiences Indeed had never spoken to before — executing a dozen-plus nationwide research studies on the POVs of workers and timing them to current events.
The Results
Seismic, a leader in the enablement space, needed to break through the noise in a crowded landscape and establish themselves as the single source of truth on enablement.
Kickstand surveyed revenue leaders across the US, UK, DE, and FR to quantify how enablement tech drives efficiency — and to surface the struggles of teams that don’t use it. The data proved the value of enablement and powered the launch narrative.
The Results
Built for how MarTech buyers actually decide.
PR / AR / IR
Earned media, analyst relations, and investor communications — sequenced so coverage compounds.
Research
In-house team builds owned data that gives your brand a voice in the conversation.
Crisis Comms
When something goes sideways: a calm, prepared partner who’s been there before.
Speaking & Awards
Get your executives on the right stages and your brand into the right industry recognition lists.
Social Media
Programs that amplify earned coverage and original research instead of running parallel to them.
SEO & Search
Search visibility built for the AI era — citations, structured content, and third-party validation.
Let’s talk MarTech.
Tell us about your team and what you’re up against. We’ll come back with a no-pressure conversation about what we’d do.
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