Nearly a third (31 per cent) of UK marketers say they’re struggling to differentiate their brand amid growing competition and a rise in AI-generated content.
That’s according to new research from Optimizely, which surveyed 100 UK marketers to uncover the top challenges marketers are facing as we head into 2026 and how they plan to overcome them.
While brand differentiation ranked as the #1 challenge, others include maintaining consumer trust and engagement (26 per cent), scaling personalisation effectively (24 per cent), budget cuts (22 per cent), slow senior decision-making (18 per cent), and proving ROI (11 per cent).
Faced with these challenges, marketers are being forced to rethink how they operate and find new ways to keep customers engaged as complexity rises and budgets shrink.
Looking to the year ahead, 41 per cent see better integration of AI with marketing tools as their biggest opportunity, while over a third (34 per cent) are prioritising the creation of more consistent and engaging customer experiences. A further 30 per cent plan to streamline workflows to save time and resources, with others turning to experimentation (28 per cent) and real-time data (25 per cent) to enhance campaign performance and decision-making.
Encouragingly, the research reveals that despite the pressure they’re under, marketers have made measurable progress in improving customer perceptions year-on-year (YoY).
According to Optimizely’s latest consumer research, customers are 6 per cent happier with the personalised emails they received in 2025 than in 2024. Satisfaction with website personalisation has also increased from 59 per cent to 62 per cent. These improvements show that a focus on optimisation and consistency is starting to pay off, though the findings suggest there’s still some work to do to bring every channel to the same standard.
“Marketers today are under a huge amount of pressure to stand out in a market that is oversaturated, and they’re often doing so with limited budgets and stretched teams,” said Tara Corey, SVP of Marketing at Optimizely. “That’s exactly where optimisation can make a real impact. The more marketers can bring their content, AI, and experimentation into one seamless workflow, the more marketers can shift from chasing attention to creating lasting impact.”
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