How customer success operates in the marketing industry

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work in customer success (CS) for a company within the marketing and advertising industry?

Whether they’re operating inside product-led organizations serving marketers or within marketing-focused businesses delivering services and solutions, CS professionals in this space work with customers who are performance-driven and commercially focused.

Often under pressure. They’re measured on pipeline, conversions, revenue, engagement, and brand impact – and they expect your product to help them deliver.

What is this data based on?

Every year, we publish a new edition of the State of Customer Success Report, a comprehensive study of the CS function based on insights from practitioners. The report explores the current CS landscape, compares findings to previous years to identify trends and changes, and addresses key questions across a broad range of topics relevant to customer success professionals.

For this article, we’ve narrowed the lens to responses of our 2025 report from CS professionals whose companies operate in the marketing and advertising industry. The goal is simple: paint an honest picture of what the work looks like, what the role demands, and where it’s headed, using only what respondents told us.

Years of experience working in customer success

One of the most striking patterns in this segment is experience.

Most CS professionals in the marketing and advertising industry tend to have more than 15 years of experience in customer success roles. Compared to industries like IT and services, or computer software, which tend to yield a more varied pool of candidates with a broader spectrum of tenure, this segment skews more seasoned.

That truly matters because experience molds the shape of the role. When you have 15+ years in customer success, you’ve likely seen more than one model of CS, or experienced it within startups and enterprise orgs.

You’ve lived through shifts in tooling, org structure and expectations. You’ve navigated customers through strong economies and periods of stalled growth. You’ve probably had to make sense of what "value" really means – not in theory, but in the messiness of dealing with real accounts made up of real people.

There’s a supposition that marketers and advertisers can be demanding, but not always in a straightforward way. See, what you’ve got to appreciate is that their work is hyper visible. Their results are public. Their KPIs are tied to revenue, pipeline, awareness and conversion. When things go well, it’s celebrated. When things go poorly, it’s scrutinized to the nth degree.

So, it’s not at all surprising that the people thriving in these CS roles are often the people who have been doing this a long time. Yes, tenure can be a sign of resilience, but it can also be a sign of complexity.

The role of AI in customer success in marketing and advertising

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming part of customer success everywhere. But for CS professionals working within the marketing and advertising industry, the story isn’t “AI has transformed everything.” It’s a lot more nuanced than that.

When asked about AI’s role in their day-to-day work, respondents described a mix of experimentation, practicality, and limitation. AI is being used, but mostly as a support layer rather than a core system.

Here’s what that looks like in practice, based on respondent answers. Many CS professionals described using AI for daily efficiency and assistance, including:

Cleaning up emails
Pulling reporting statistics
Day-to-day efficiencies
Idea generation
Market research
Filtering through and personalizing responses to customers based on previous interactions
Research
Identifying churn trends
Monitoring usage
Meeting notes

In other words, AI is used where it can save time, reduce friction, or speed up the repetitive tasks

Now, that’s not nothing. It’s useful; it can be a real quality-of-life improvement. But in the same breath, it’s also telling that most of these use cases sit at the edges of the workflow – drafting, summarizing, scanning, formatting and supporting. Helpful? Yes. Transformative? Not quite yet.

A tool, not a system

Several respondents framed AI’s role as small or minimal:

“A small role. Mostly for email and some research.”
“Very little. We use Gemini to support us minimally.”
“Minimal.”
“Just using it for meeting notes, but I would love to incorporate more AI in my day-to-day life.”

One response captures the central tension especially well: CSMs may use AI daily, but “it’s not integrated into systems systematically,” so its impact stays limited – and there’s a desire for more, particularly “for automation and proactive tasks.”

That word “systematically” is doing much of the heavy lifting there, because the difference between occasional AI use and meaningful AI leverage lies in integration.

It’s the difference between a tool you open in another tab and an embedded capability that changes how you operate. Respondents are clearly pointing to that gap.

Where customer success wants AI to go next

While current usage leans tactical, some respondents expressed interest in broader applications:

Leveraging agents for assistance in daily tasks
Forecasting
Risk playbooks
Automation to drive expansion
Support bots
Content management (still being explored)

The pattern is consistent: people don’t just want AI to help them write faster. They want AI to help them see earlier, act sooner, and scale what works.

And that’s exactly where customer success can benefit most because the work is often both high-touch and high-volume, with constant change and constant context-switching.

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Monetizing customer success

Monetizing customer success (A.K.A. charging customers for a premium level of service) is one of those topics that always sparks debate. And in marketing and advertising, that debate appears alive and well.

The results here are split 50:50. Half of CS professionals report that their organization does monetize customer success in some way. Half report that they don’t.

This is worth pausing on, because a clean split like this usually indicates that the industry hasn’t settled on a dominant model. It also suggests there are strong arguments on both sides.

On one hand, marketing and advertising work often feels like a premium experience when done well. Customers want expertise, guidance, best practices and a strategic partnership. It can feel natural to package and price that.

On the other hand, CS is frequently positioned as part of the core promise – the thing that ensures customers actually get value and therefore stay long enough to renew, expand and advocate. If it’s monetized poorly, it can introduce friction or confusion about what’s included and what isn’t.

Key responsibilities

If you want to understand a customer success role, don’t start with the title. Start with the responsibilities.

In organizations in the marketing and advertising industry, the most common responsibilities are:

Retention
Adoption
Value realization
Strategic customer engagement

That combination matters because it points to a CS function that is neither simply reactive support nor merely relationship management It’s a function focused on outcomes.

Interestingly, respondents indicated that customer success enablement and implementation are not typically responsibilities in this segment. That detail matters too.

Now, of course, we need to look at our survey participant demographic here – a healthy mix of positions of all seniority levels from CSM to VP. But what this suggests is that CS in marketing companies may be less about technical onboarding ownership and more about ongoing value delivery and strategic engagement once customers are live. Food for thought.

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Responsible for revenue growth

Customer success has historically been described as a retention function. But in marketing and advertising companies, it appears much more commercially tied.

70% of CS professionals in marketing companies report being responsible for revenue growth.

That’s not a minor responsibility. It changes how the role behaves. When CS owns revenue growth, customer conversations are different. There is more pressure to tie activity to outcomes. More attention on expansion opportunities. More need to quantify value. More internal partnership with sales and leadership.

It’s also a clue about how these organizations view customer success: not as a cost center, but as a growth lever. That doesn’t mean CS becomes sales. It does mean CS becomes commercial. (Spot the difference?)

And to be completely candid, that can be either energizing or exhausting, depending on the systems, support and structure around the team.

Internal barriers for CS professionals in marketing and advertising

The external pressures of marketing work are one thing. Internal friction is another. This dataset includes a clear set of recurring barriers that CS professionals in marketing companies face.

Cross-functional communication

Cross-functional communication issues show up repeatedly. CS professionals cited challenges with communication and alignment across departments, along with “competing priorities within departments with a lack of focus or input from people with direct knowledge.”

When customer success is close to the customer but not consistently included in internal decision-making, misalignment grows. And when misalignment grows, CS ends up doing more translation work – between teams, between goals, between priorities.

That, of course, takes time. Like most schedules of CSMs and CS leaders, time isn’t something that appears in abundance – it’s pretty scarce.

Constantly battling for CS to be taken seriously

In our State of Customer Success 2025 Report, one response states it plainly: “Constantly battling the strategy and need for CS internally.”

That points to a deeper challenge than process; it points to perception. If leadership doesn’t understand or value customer success, then CS will often be positioned as support rather than strategy, even when the work clearly impacts retention and growth. And when CS is treated as a “nice-to-have,” the function spends energy justifying itself rather than improving outcomes.

Increasing workload and inefficiencies

Workload came up, along with “too many internal inefficiencies” and “complex processes.”

This is a classic problem: as customer bases grow and expectations rise, CS work expands. Without systems, integration, and clear processes, the load becomes heavier without becoming smarter. And in marketing environments, that pressure can spike quickly.

Product and user mismatch

One respondent captured an especially sharp barrier:

“Tech people built a platform and want to stay techy when it's real users who don't understand tech the way they do. Tech should adapt to the layman and not the other way around.”

This isn’t just about product design, but organizational empathy.

CS ends up bridging the gap between how a platform was built and how customers actually operate. When that gap is wide, CS has to do more education, more workaround-building, more expectation-setting, more damage control. It’s doable. But believe us when we say it’s hard.

Leadership understanding, tooling, and funding constraints

Additional barriers include:

“Leadership team that doesn't understand or value customer success.”
“Systems and tool integration and priority for CS specific tech.”
“Overall company funding (VC funded).”

Taken together, these point to a familiar CS reality: customer success is expected to drive retention and growth, but doesn’t always get the structural investment needed to do it efficiently.

That tension is not unique to marketing. But the pace and commercial pressure of marketing can amplify it.

Closing thoughts

If the data here points to anything, it’s this: marketing CS professionals are doing meaningful work – often with significant responsibility – and they’re doing it in environments that demand both strategy and stamina.

If you’re considering a CS career in this industry, or you’re already in it and trying to make sense of why it feels the way it does, this snapshot offers a grounded starting point: what the role tends to include, where the pressures come from, and what practitioners are actively grappling with right now.

A deep dive into a customer success career in the marketing and advertising industry