What do you believe is the biggest hurdle to marketing growth today? 

Budget? Bandwidth? 

I believe it’s speed, specifically, speed of iteration. Slow marketing cycles kill momentum.

In my years as a tech operator and investor, I’ve seen this play out time and again. It’s tough to create meaningful business growth when launching a new campaign takes weeks. 

I’ve developed my own theories about what makes a marketing team nimble. But theories aside, data is more compelling — and now we have it.

Recently, GrowthLoop partnered with Ascend2 to produce the 2025 AI and Marketing  Performance Index, a comprehensive report based on a survey of 300+ marketers. The goal: to understand what truly drives marketing effectiveness and how AI is reshaping the playbook.

The results echoed what I’ve long believed: high-growth companies move fast. In the survey, 54% of high-growth organizations had “fairly fast” or “extremely fast” marketing cycles, compared to just 28% for slower-growth companies. These high-performing teams had different priorities, too. They focused on leveraging real-time data and AI to generate insights and optimize campaigns. 

Accelerate marketing cycles to drive growth

So, how can your team build momentum to drive significant, lasting growth? The report surfaced five key habits of highly effective marketing teams.

1. Unify strategy and systems

From my time at Google to today at GrowthLoop, I’ve seen how slow, manual processes quietly kill momentum. The culprit usually isn’t one big roadblock; it’s a thousand small delays. 

The flipside is also true: by speeding up every little part of the process, efficiencies compound in a virtuous cycle — what we at GrowthLoop call compound marketing. 

In the survey, marketers were asked about the biggest barriers preventing their teams from moving faster. The top responses were telling:

• Delayed approvals and decision-making (40%)
• Manual processes and limited automation (29%)
• Dependence on other teams (29%)
• Siloed data (21%) 

These challenges share a common theme: inefficient workflows caused by fragmented systems. 

Marketing teams today must work closely alongside their data counterparts. CIOs and CMOs should be best friends. That means aligning on a strategy and system that provides marketers with self-serve access to data without compromising the key infrastructure maintained by the data teams.

Without this alignment, marketers will continue to sink time into endless back-and-forth. They’ll battle inaccurate customer data that’s spread across systems, slowing their ability to launch campaigns, leverage AI effectively, and ultimately drive growth. So break down those siloes — and get everyone on the same page.

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2. Unlock real-time customer data for marketers and AI

Effective marketing isn’t just about moving fast, it’s about staying nimble, testing, and iterating. And you can’t do that without accurate, real-time customer data. 

More than half (53%) of marketers surveyed cited data analysis and insights as their biggest bottleneck. And that number doesn’t surprise me at all. Many organizations I talk to face similar issues — marketers struggle to get their hands on usable data, and when they do, it takes time to analyze.

Whether it’s a marketer or an AI agent, the data they access must be centralized and accurate — a single source of truth in the enterprise cloud. This allows for real-time access, keeps sensitive data in place, and enables marketers to move more quickly from insight to execution.

3. Layer in AI to supercharge campaigns and compound growth 

There’s no denying the hype around AI. And the hype is deserved. But I’ve also seen companies get distracted trying to apply AI everywhere at once, rather than starting where it delivers the most value. 

The biggest productivity gains from AI happen when it turns data into real-time insights and accelerates campaign testing and iteration. Marketers still need to bring the strategy, the creative direction, and the instincts that resonate with customers. But a well-trained AI agent can test 100 different customer segments faster and more thoroughly than a person ever could. 

In our survey, marketers saw the greatest potential for AI in the areas that also caused the most delays:

• Data analysis (66%)
• Audience segmentation (44%)
• Personalization at scale (39%)
• A/B testing (33%). 

In fact, more than two-thirds of marketers reported plans to adopt AI in the coming year for insights, customer behavior predictions, content generation, and personalized journeys. The takeaway: don’t chase shiny AI demos. Use it where it drives real acceleration and compounds growth.

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4. Always keep a human in the loop and invest in AI talent

AI can do a lot, but I don’t believe it can fully replace the job of a marketer. Great marketing still relies on human intuition, judgment, and creativity. AI is most powerful when it augments marketers, not when it tries to replace them. 

Our survey backed this up: 86% of marketers agreed that human input improves AI performance. 85% said oversight is necessary. And only 15% felt comfortable letting AI operate with minimal or no supervision. 

To get the most out of AI, teams need marketers who know how to wield it. That means hiring for AI fluency and investing in training. In the survey, 44% of marketers said hiring AI-savvy talent was a priority, and 71% reported they were actively upskilling current teams in AI proficiency. 

Bottom line: AI is only as good as the people using it. Treat it as a capability to build, not a black box to plug in.

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5. Get execs on the same page

Every time a new technology raises productivity, it also raises expectations. That’s exactly what we’re seeing now. In the survey, 89% of marketers said they’re under significantly more pressure today to deliver better results in less time than they were two years ago. 

To succeed in this new environment, marketing teams need more than new tools; they need support. Integrating AI, speeding up cycles, and launching more personalized campaigns often require changes to budget, workflows, and even culture. These changes won’t stick without executive buy-in.

It also means executives need to dig in themselves; learn how to use AI in your day-to-day and get familiar with the tech. Walk the walk and talk the talk. 

But here’s the challenge: our data suggests that many executives believe marketing processes are working better than they are. Executives were more confident in the effectiveness of their marketing efforts than the team members executing the work. That disconnect creates risk. What’s needed is more honest dialogue between leadership and the folks in the trenches. Only then can companies adopt new tools, adjust strategies, and ultimately move — and grow — faster.

The new compound marketing playbook 

Faster marketing cycles mean faster growth. The question is how to build speed — and how to sustain it. As our survey suggests, real-time access to data is foundational. Marketing and data teams need to work in sync, enabling marketers to self-serve from a single, centralized source of truth in the cloud.

But access is just the beginning. The real gains come from what you do with the data. This is where AI changes the game. With the right tools in the hands of AI-savvy marketers, teams can generate sharper insights, smarter predictions, and highly personalized campaigns at scale. To get there, companies need to invest in talent and secure executive buy-in to align priorities.

Put it all together, and you're not just speeding up the marketing cycle — you’re building a flywheel for lasting growth.