This is a follow-up from a post I saw here recently and many others regarding "is marketing still wort it", "is the marketing profession becoming saturated?" etc etc., mostly being driven by the influx of AI tools and their adaptation.

My opinion is the complete opposite.

99% of post you see throughout every marketing, sales, tech related sub on Reddit over the last few months/year has been one of two things:
- AI slop posts - "im genuinely curious about what you think guys, and did I mention, I am just so genuine and so so curious"
- People complaining about how Claude or GPT or whatever else is not bringing them results.

People are buying into the hype that these LLMs are the answer to every problem known to man, yet they will sulk and complain day in day out about poor performance, then turn around and tell professionals their work isnt worth the price "because Claude can do that".

At the end of the day, anyone can write paragraphs upon paragraphs of ripped copywrited information from a few sources online, and tell you your opinion is correct, reinforce your thoughts no matter what, but in reality, we are seeing the effects of what that actually does, and that is give terrible results, and an almost psycosis inducing level of ill informed self confidence.

Your AI output is only as good as the direction and the knowledge you put into it.

For experienced marketers getting disheartened by all of this, just understand that 99% of these people are high on their own supply, spreading BS in the hopes of swindling a few people over the internet to pay them for AI slop.

We are in the in-between (adaption) period where people will try (and lie about) anything in order to make money. Your experience cannot be replicated, and your skillset will stand to you. These AI tools will extend your knowledge and skillset, making those who actually have experience much more valuable than what are essentially scammers flooding the internet with sensationalized claims and surface level explanations.

Keep on keeping on, your golden era is only starting.

I see lots of bloggers, youtubers, and businesses linking to linktree from their profiles when they also have websites. Why not just link to their own website with a page that lists all their links and get the additional traffic and possible conversions from their own website?

Had a client come to us panicking because a competitor started showing up in ChatGPT instead of them for their main service query. Gut reaction was to rewrite the homepage immediately.

Glad we checked first, because it would've been a wasted week.

Ran the same query 5 times over 3 days across a few engines. Turns out on Perplexity they were still showing up fine. Only ChatGPT had swapped them for a competitor, and it wasn't because their content was bad, it was because the competitor had a more recently updated Google Business Profile and a fresh local news mention. Two things a homepage rewrite does nothing for.

The bigger thing I learned digging into this: there's a real study (2,398 queries tracked daily across ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini/Google AI Mode for a week) showing 69% of the sources behind a typical AI answer change overnight. That's just normal churn built into how these things work, not a sign anything broke on your end.

So before anyone here panics about "losing" an AI citation, worth checking:

1. Run the query 5x over 3 days on the engine where you used to show up
2. Also check Perplexity, it holds sources the longest so it's a decent control
3. See who's filling your old spot. Different name each time = ignore it. Same competitor every run = that's real, go fix it

If it is real, the fix order matters too. Freshness on the specific page first, then making the answer more directly quotable, then cleaning up entity consistency (NAP, GBP, directories) across the web. Do it backward and you waste the earlier work.

Anyone else tracking this stuff regularly? Curious what tools people are actually using to monitor citation presence weekly instead of just eyeballing screenshots.

I've definitely had a few marketing ideas that looked great on paper but completely flopped once they were actually put into practice. Sometimes you spend days planning something, expect people to love it and then... nothing. 😅

Meanwhile, something you barely expected to work ends up bringing the best results. I'm curious about other people's experiences. What's one marketing tactic, idea or strategy you were sure would work but ended up being a complete disappointment?

And did you figure out why it failed or are you still wondering what went wrong?

Hi guys, I’ve decided to start posting on Reddit because I think I have some genuinely useful things to share, especially for people in the B2B advisory space. Specifically, I help healthcare companies hit their growth milestones by connecting them with growth capital partners. I’ve been in the space about a year and collected 100k in retainer fees in year one, and I’m on pace to match or exceed that in year two.

The thing that matters most in B2B agencies is solving top of funnel, product-market fit, or what I prefer to call service-messaging fit. That means finding and testing offers within a specific niche or sector that generate positive responses: people interested enough to get on a call with you. You can find these offers by running a Claude session, asking the right questions, and doing the research. It’ll surface offers you didn’t know existed. I’ve built out fairly sophisticated prompts for this stage.
The mistake a lot of people make is reaching out to small businesses. There’s no reason to sell marketing services to a plumbing company in Los Angeles when you can sell the same services to PE firms or oil and gas companies. Bigger clients mean bigger retainers 15k on the low end, up to 100k.

Once you have viable offers, you take them to market. There are really only two ways to do this: cold email and paid ads. I won’t cover paid ads because I don’t use them; cost per lead is much higher than email.
There are plenty of vendors that provide Microsoft and Google Workspace accounts for sending. The part that matters is the angle. I don’t write emails like “If I could get you X to achieve Y, would you be interested?” I write them like “We work with a group of X looking for Y. I think there may be a fit with what you offer, open to a call?” I’ve tested multiple angles, and when you reach out stating that you already have what they want, the perceived value of the message goes up significantly even if you don’t have it lined up yet. I won’t go deep on the technical side of cold email because I’m not an expert, but following general best practices is enough to get your foot in the door.

My sales process has changed several times. The single biggest improvement to my prospect-to-signed-client conversion was integrating AI across the entire sales process, from first call to signature. If you don’t have domain expertise in an industry, taking transcripts from earlier calls and turning them into sharp, specific discovery questions completely changes how prospects see you. Asking smart, niche-specific questions makes a founder with 20–30 years of experience feel like you can actually bring something to the table. Ultimately the game is diagnosing a prospect’s inefficiencies and scoping solutions into deliverables they value enough to justify success fees and, more importantly, higher retainers.

This is a small slice of what I’ve picked up over the past year. Will be sharing more of what I know within this subreddit if anyone appreciates it.

Marketers running multiple ads across multiple platforms, how do you keep track of all ads running across different platforms?

Do you think there should be a shared memory layer which has all infos about all ads running across all platforms, which can surface what's working, what's not, and why, and on which platform.

Do you think if there's such shared memory layer, this would save effort and time to plan new marketing angles, and would you spend money to use it?

I run a small agency (9 people, handful of clients). For years the real bottleneck wasn't the work, it was me personally remembering who owes what to which client by when, then nagging people about it on WhatsApp until it got done.

So over the last year I built an AI ops layer for us. It lives on Telegram, not a dashboard nobody opens:

• You send it a voice note ("get the Riya proposal out by Friday"), it turns that into a real task with a deadline and an owner, no typing into a form
• It follows up on its own, on a schedule that actually respects working hours, and escalates to me if someone goes quiet for too long
• Paste in a meeting transcript, it writes the minutes, pulls out action items, and asks who they're for
• It knows which client is which and won't repeat something confidential from Client A's meeting when Client B asks

It's basically the ops coordinator I couldn't afford to hire when we were 4 people.

One thing I was stubborn about: the UI itself. Every task tool I tried (ClickUp, Asana, monday) has a learning curve before you can even see your own work, boards within boards, fields nobody fills in, a sidebar with 40 things in it. So I kept it deliberately minimal, you log in and it's just your tasks and your teammates' tasks, nothing else competing for your attention. Screenshot below.

I'm opening it up to 5 agencies/solo operators for free while I get real usage outside my own team. The only real requirement: you're actually juggling more than one client or brand relationship at once (single-project teams won't get much out of it, most of the value is in the "who's dropping the ball on which account" layer).

Not trying to sell anything here, genuinely want a handful of people who'll use it and tell me what's broken. Comment or DM if you want in, happy to answer questions in the thread too.

I’d love to hear from people working in global marketing at any level, from junior roles to leadership.

A few things I’m curious about:

• What is your exact title?
• What does a normal day or week look like?
• How much of your work is strategy vs execution?
• How cross-functional is the role?
• What skills matter most in your position?
• What do people misunderstand about global marketing roles?
• I’m trying to get a realistic picture of how these jobs differ by seniority and company.

If you’re open to sharing, even a short breakdown would be super helpful.

About me: I'm applying to graduate jobs, and as we all know the market is tuff, so I’m trying to get a more realistic understanding of what global marketing roles actually look like in practice.

I do web work and local business outreach myself, and I originally built Webvidence to make prospecting less of a pain.

The idea was good.

The first workflow honestly needed work.

So we’ve been doing a ton of updates lately based largely on me actually using the thing.

The current prospecting flow lets me pick an area, work through local businesses, see useful findings from their websites, keep track of who I’ve already contacted and generate outreach based on what was actually found.

I can also switch between two approaches depending on the business:

Start a normal conversation first.

Or use the evidence and make a more direct pitch.

That little distinction has actually mattered quite a bit for me because I definitely don’t want to pitch every local business the second I message them.

The goal isn’t really mass cold outreach.

It’s making reasonably researched outreach fast enough that I can actually do it consistently.

If anyone here does local client acquisition for web design, SEO, marketing, etc., I’d be curious what your current process looks like.

Are you still finding businesses through Google Maps manually or using some kind of prospecting stack?

Disclosure: Webvidence is something I built.

I'm under contract-ish (deep diligence) on a small digital agency roughly $2M revenue, ~85% recurring monthly retainers, clients are mostly local SMBs (contractors, home services, real estate). Solid margins, long client tenures, good reviews. I come from operating home service businesses, not marketing.

The thing keeping me up at night is AI. About half the revenue is "SEO" retainers. I've read the AI Overviews / zero-click stats, and I get the argument that local commercial intent ("plumber near me") is safer than blog content. But I'd rather hear it from people in the trenches:

1. If you run SEO retainers for local businesses what's actually happened to your clients' organic leads over the last 18 months?
2. Are clients pushing back on price yet because "AI can do this"?
3. If you were buying an agency today, what would make you walk away? What would make you comfortable?

Not looking for validation, happy to hear "don't do it." Thanks.

I don’t think the best agency is necessarily the one with the biggest website or the longest list of services. I’d rather see how they approach a real business problem. Do they understand how a brand currently appears in Google and AI search? Do they find why competitors are being mentioned instead? And can they show what they changed and whether it actually improved visibility?

So instead of asking which agency has the best marketing, I’m more interested in hearing from people who have actually tested these services. So instead of asking which agency has the best marketing, I’m more interested in hearing from people who have actually tested these services.

I keep going back and forth on this.

Faceless content seems a lot easier to scale. You can batch-create it, outsource parts of the process, and avoid having to be camera-ready every day.

At the same time, I feel like people trust you faster when they can actually see your face, especially if you're trying to build a personal brand or eventually sell something.

For anyone who's grown an Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok account, did showing your face make a noticeable difference?

Or can faceless content work just as well if the content itself is good?

Running a Meta ads account for an ecom health product brand, breakeven CPA ~$100 (AOV ~$140, COGS+shipping ~$40/order). A few things I'm trying to figure out and would love input from people who've run larger CBO accounts:

1. I've got ~16 ad sets (5-7 Creatives each) live under one CBO campaign at $200/day total budget. Is that too many ad sets for the budget to properly find and feed winners? At what point does ad set count start starving performance rather than just testing more angles?

2. At $100 breakeven CPA and $200/day, I'm only getting 1-2 sales/day. Is that budget level even enough to get a statistically meaningful read on what's working, or is it just inherently going to be noisy until I scale further?

3. My actual customer base skews majority-male since launch, but the ad sets taking most of the CBO-allocated spend are women-targeted creative. Has anyone seen CBO favor a targeting angle that doesn't match your actual buyer base — e.g. optimizing toward cheaper engagement/clicks from an audience that converts worse? If so, did switching to ABO or manually capping spend on the "winning" (but mismatched) ad sets help?

For context, here's what the last few days have looked like at $200/day:

- Wednesday: $200 spent, CPM $78, CPC $1.79, 3 sales, 2.9 blended ROAS, 17 add-to-carts on 85 landing page views

- Thursday: $152 spent, CPM $85, CPC $2.36, 63 link clicks, 58 landing page views, 0 add-to-carts, 0 sales

- Friday (partial day): $145 of $200 spent so far, CPM $85, CPC $2, 6 add-to-carts, 1 sale

Same funnel/landing page across all three days, no site-side issues found. Just trying to understand if this kind of day-to-day swing is normal noise at this spend level, or a sign something structural needs fixing.

Happy to share more account details if useful. Appreciate any experienced takes on this.

I’m starting to think shipping fast is becoming less impressive.

You can build something decent in a weekend now. The problem is that 100 other people can too.
Or the entire world.

Then you launch and… nothing. Crickets.

No users. No traffic. Maybe a few signups from friends.

Feels like the advantage is moving away from “I can build” and more toward “I know how to get people to care.”

So digital marketing is the new superpower?

I heard you get customers on Gumroad. That’s why I wanna switch but I don’t know.

I’m a recent graduate and want an internship in marketing or advertising. I might not know a lot but i am willing to learn. I find it so frustrating how most people think a beginner should know how to make excellent copy or launch strategies. I have faced many ups and downs throughout my college life. I had little time to apply for internships as i started working in a call centre because my circumstances demanded it. But i left it and genuinely feel like this is the space i want to grow in. I am not even looking for jobs but just an entry level internship.

If anyone of you could help me, i would really appreciate it.

Hi Everyone,

Started a digital marketing business a couple of months ago based on a need for income and an opportunity to start with a supportive client who had been let down by their previous marketing team.

Obviously, starting from scratch, we've had to learn everything as we go, which I imagine has meant we've only scratched the surface.

One of our big projects so far has been implementing QR review cards to be handed out with every in-store purchase to try and bolster the reviews the business gets on Google. This has worked excellently so far.

We've also built a presence on TikTok/YouTube. I'm in the process of liaising with their website developer on rebuilding the site and making it more user-friendly for mobile users, which is over 74% of their web traffic.

I'm just wondering what some things are that I should be looking at next? I've registered the webpage on Bing, but a little unsure of what to do next after that. I'm planning on rewriting all product descriptions so they have more detail and are easily identifiable by Google's crawling system, which provides answers in the generative AI box.

I'm just looking for some tips, really. Thank you all!

Hi everyone,

I’m running into an issue. I’m trying to run ads for my client but when I went to login to my personal account (it’s been a few years) I noticed it was restricted..

A few years ago my account was hacked and the hacker used my ad account to spend almost $10k on my credit card. I quickly flagged it and disconnected the account.

I tried disabling the Facebook page the hacker attached but was not able to since they did not make me an admin on that page.. I had reached out to support but no response.

Years later I started a marketing agency and I have a client that wants me to run their meta ads. Since it’s been a few years already with the restriction there is no way to appeal. I can’t get a hold of Meta’s support humans just keeps taking me to a stupid chatbot.

What can I do?

Should I create a new personal Facebook account? If so, how do I avoid it getting flagged since Facebook does not want you to have multiple accounts.

What are some other solutions? Thanks in advance.

Looking for some perspective from people working in digital marketing, advertising, media and e-commerce — particularly in Canada, although I’d love to hear from people elsewhere too

I have 15+ years of experience across digital media, advertising, e-commerce and retail media. My background includes agency, client-side and ad sales/strategy roles, working across CPG, retail, insurance, QSR and e-commerce.

My most recent role ended a few months ago and I’ve been actively looking since.

I’ve actually been getting interviews, which is what makes this a little confusing. I’ve had processes/conversations with companies across retail, healthcare, agencies, tech/platforms etc., and have progressed reasonably far in some of them.

But nothing has converted into an offer yet.

My salary continuance has now ended, so while I’m obviously motivated to get back to work, I’m also trying not to panic and jump into learning random tools/certifications just for the sake of saying I’ve “upskilled.”

That’s really where my dilemma is.

At this stage of a career, what skills are actually worth investing in?

Also, if you were in my shoes, where would you upskill: AI/automation, analytics/SQL, GA4, CRM, performance marketing, retail media, or something else?

Not looking for sympathy — just candid guidance on where the market is heading and what would actually make me more competitive.

There’s obviously been a ton of debate around AI content, but results at the local level seem like they’re all over the place…

We’ve seen some businesses that are scaling AI-assisted content and still seeing rankings and leads come through. But on the flip side, there are others rewriting a lot of it because the traffic or conversions just aren’t there.

So, for anyone working in local SEO, what are the numbers actually showing lately? Any real change since AI content became part of the mix? And what do you think the future holds in terms of Google getting involved?

27M from India, college dropout, currently working as an SEO Executive.

I have around 1 year of practical experience through internships and jobs:

3-month digital marketing course W 6-month digital marketing internship - mainly backlink building

6 months as Digital Marketing Executive - keyword research, WordPress pages, content creation, basic SEO, website building, and social media research

Currently 3 months as SEO Executive - keyword research, meta titles/descriptions, blog SEO, and Google Business Profile management

I’ve also managed to rank a page for a relatively low-competition keyword (1600 monthly searches).

The problem is that in every company I’ve joined, I’ve been the only person doing SEO. There’s nobody senior to learn from or review my work, so I’m worried that my growth is becoming limited and my knowledge isn’t deep enough.

My long-term goal is to become genuinely skilled in SEO and eventually get a remote position with an international company (US/UK/Australia/UAE, etc.).

If you’re an experienced SEO professional or hiring manager:

What would your roadmap be if you were in my position?

What SEO skills would you learn deeply?

What would you ignore or not spend too much time on?

What projects/case studies would you build?

How would you make yourself hireable internationally without a degree?

Which courses, websites, YouTube channels, or other resources would you recommend?

I’m looking for practical, honest advice, especially from people who have actually worked in or been hired for SEO.

Thanks!

I created my account just about a month ago and was able to get monetized after reaching the requirements.

I am SMM also and trying to explore and deepen my knowledge about it.

From my very first post until the end of August, my views were actually pretty consistent. Most of my Reels were getting around 50K–700K views, and I even managed to get 3–5 Reels into the millions.

Then I got approved for monetization. I completed all the required information and everything seemed fine.

But starting September 1, my views suddenly dropped HARD. 😭 Some of my new Reels are getting less than 3K views, which is extremely low compared to what I was getting before.

I haven't really changed the type of content I post or my posting strategy, so I'm confused about what could have caused such a sudden drop.

Could monetization approval have anything to do with this, or is this just a normal algorithm/reach fluctuation?

Has anyone else experienced something similar after getting monetized? I'd really appreciate any insight or advice.

Thinking about how marketers deal with fake reviews particularly when it is obvious that they are not from real customers.

One of my clients had a negative review from someone who could not be found in their customer database. It was reported but google did not take it down.

Would you continue reporting it and appealing then would you answer the review or would you concentrate on getting more reviews to balance it out ?

Had someone tell me last week, "honestly I don't know what I'm paying anymore, it's spread across too many subscriptions."

Doesn't seem like an isolated case. One tool for LinkedIn, one for email, one for data, an add-on for enrichment, each with its own price, nobody showing you the real total.

Do you actually know your all-in monthly cost? What channels are you running, how many accounts, and what's the real number, not the base plan price?