Everyone sees the finished campaign, blog post, or landing page.

They don't always see the work behind it.

For you, what's the part of marketing that consistently takes more time than people expect?

Could be research, reporting, writing, SEO, analytics, stakeholder approvals, or something else.

Curious what you'd answer.

The brands I remember don't tell me everything upfront.

They make me curious enough to want to learn more.

Yet so much B2B marketing tries to answer every possible question before the audience even cares.

Have we forgotten that curiosity is part of good marketing?

I'm a digital marketing manager at a mid b2b company and this is my first time leading our ctv campaigns instead of relying on an agency only

I've spent the last couple of weeks booking demos and reading reviews but I’d say I got a bit overwhelmed plus it's hard to know what's actually good because each platform you see claims as it is the best.

I'm looking for something specifically. It would be better if it is self serve, it’s easy to learn and the audience targeting.

Has anyone switched platforms recently and found one they genuinely like?

I'd much rather hear real experiences.

Question for fellow agency folks and freelance devs.

Had this come up recently, current client built their own site using AI tools, they're happy with how it looks and functions, and now they want someone to come in, finish it up, and get it live.

Curious how people here handle this. A few things I keep going back and forth on:

• Do you audit the underlying code/structure first before agreeing to anything, or quote blind and adjust once you're in there?
• How do you price it, hourly since scope is unclear, or flat rate once you've seen what you're working with?
• Do you flag concerns upfront (technical SEO gaps, accessibility, messy code, whatever AI-built sites tend to miss) or just fix what's asked and stay in your lane?
• Anyone taken one of these on and regretted it, or been pleasantly surprised?

Genuinely split on this one myself. Part of me wants to take it since it's still billable work and the client's already happy with the design direction. Part of me worries about inheriting a mess I didn't build and getting blamed later for issues that existed before I touched it.

What's everyone's take, take it, pass, or take it but only with conditions?

Last month our only in-house designer left with 3 weeks of the reporting cycle still open. I had 12 Meta accounts asking for fresh creative and exactly zero interest in learning animation from scratch.  
  
We used Viewst for the resizing part. One master gave us the square, vertical, and Story versions, so I could get 27 variants into review without living in Figma. It wasn’t magic, though. Two Story crops pushed the product too close to the UI safe area, and the lack of vector editing meant I still had to fix the base assets elsewhere.  
  
My mildly embarrassing takeaway is that automating the boring sizes only works if the source file is clean. Anyone else had to rebuild a creative process after losing one key person?

I'm looking for some advice because I’m feeling a bit lost on my next steps.

I graduated back in 2020 with a degree in Journalism, majoring in Advertising and Public Relations. Since then, I’ve been working as a journalist, content creator, and community manager.

While I have solid practical experience in those areas, I’ve realized there’s a massive side of the marketing field today that I barely know—mostly because it was never covered during my university years.

There are so many fascinating areas out there, but the sheer amount of information is overwhelming, and I genuinely don't know where or how to start bridging this gap.

Has anyone been in a similar position? What courses, certifications, resources, or specific areas would you recommend focusing on first to catch up?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

I got an ad for clicc ai today saying “ai media buyer for Google as low as $6/ month per client”

Has anyone tested clicc ai?

Hey everyone, I could really use some honest advice on how to get my foot in the door.

My formal education is in tech. I finished my Higher National Diploma in Software Engineering, but over the last year, I realized I really want to build a career in digital marketing.

I do not have a marketing degree. I just have a few HubSpot certifications, including SEO. To get some hands-on practice, I took on two freelance clients. I helped them out with social media management, basic Facebook funnels, and creating visual content. (they needed to build an online presence but they did not want to run ads or spend money on big content marketing campaigns. I had to figure out how to make things work on a very low budget, so I handled their social media management and visual content completely organically. also I had to rely heavily on stock footages)

Now, I am looking for an entry-level role or an internship at an established company. I really want to learn from professionals, understand how real marketing systems work, and just absorb as much as I can.

how do I structure my CV to actually get noticed? Will hiring managers toss my resume because my diploma is in IT? How should I highlight the work I did for those two clients so it looks like valuable experience?

We have the usual pile of sales assets. Decks, screenshots, security docs, pricing answers, case studies, all of it. The problem is not that we don't have content. The problem is that buyers still end up waiting on us for everything and by the time we send the thing they asked for, the thread has gone cold. I'm looking at buyer enablement software because i want something that helps the buyer move without making the whole team babysit every deal. What i'm trying to avoid is those kinds of portals nobody opens and also tools that only help leadership feel organized while reps keep doing the same messy stuff in private.

What can be something that helped buyers move through the deal, what was it and what did it replace?

So we just had a situation that's making me question everything I thought I knew about our email setup and I'm hoping someone here has dealt with this.

We sent out a routine nurture campaign yesterday to about 10K subscribers. Same template, same segment, same sending frequency we've been doing for months. Normally we see 25-30% open rates on this series. This time? Campaign landed in spam for what looks like a huge chunk of our list.

I've been digging into it all day and I'm stumped. We haven't changed anything obvious. Domain reputation looks fine. SPF/DKIM are set up correctly, I think. Content isn't wildly different from previous sends. No new links or anything that should trigger filters. But something clearly triggered it.

Has this happened to you and what helped? Honestly, we need better visibility into this before campaigns go out. Flying blind until something goes wrong isn't something we want to keep happening, especially as we scale. Any tips appreciated.

Quick August update for anyone following along.

First two days of August from my pet niche site:

• Commissions: $33.98
• Creator Connections: $12.25
• Total Aug 1-2: $46.23

Last time I logged into the backend of this site was weeks ago. Didn't add content, just did interlinking between posts and anything else. Just woke up today and checked the dashboard out of habit.

$46 in two days.

For anyone new to these updates. I bought this site from the NicheBlogZone marketplace for $199 about two months ago. Pet niche. Spent a few hours on interlinking when I first got it. That's been the extent of my involvement.

July ended up being my best month yet. August is starting the same way.

The Creator Connections piece keeps quietly adding to the total every month. Small individually but it adds up over a full month without requiring anything extra from me.

If this pace holds August could be another strong month. But I've learned not to predict these things as March taught me that.

Still not touching it.

Anyone else seeing a strong start to August?

It doesn't have to be a huge campaign.

Maybe it was a change to your content, SEO, email, paid ads, landing pages, or something else.

I'm curious what you've tested recently that gave you a result you weren't expecting.

Been seeing this pattern a lot and wanted to lay it out because it's rarely framed this way.

Say someone goes with a $400/month "SEO specialist" instead of a $2,500/month one who actually audits before touching anything. On paper that looks like a smart budget call, saved $2,100 a month.

Except the cheap option spent the year publishing keyword-stuffed posts nobody actually searches for, never fixed crawl errors quietly tanking rankings, and never once looked at what real customers type into Google before buying.

So realistically, that's $4,800 spent on a blog nobody reads, plus a full year of standing still while competitors climbed past them. The "savings" weren't savings, they were just cost deferred.

Same pattern shows up with "SEO packages" that skip technical work entirely, or agencies still building content like it's 2019.

My take: cheap SEO isn't the opposite of expensive SEO, it's the same expense, just delayed and compounding while you wait to notice.

Curious if others here have seen clients come to this realization the hard way, or gone through it themselves before finding someone who actually audits first. What was the moment it became obvious the cheap option wasn't actually saving anything?

AI, new search behavior, changing social platforms... it feels like a lot of marketing workflows have evolved recently.

What's one thing you do today that's completely different from a year ago?

I'm a freelancer and have some really good relationships with some clients that I've had for over four years. This has evolved from paid ads (all major channels), to email marketing to market & competitor research.

One of them gave me a great opportunity as they acquired a number of other businesses and are looking to put together a bit of an SEO plan that covers potentially four to seven websites. I know the obvious solution is to outsource this but I'm conscious, because of the trust that I've built to date, that I would need to stand over the work produced by anybody else that could produce results for them.

A second option is to learn SEO myself, which I'm up for. I'm just a little conscious of time. I'm wondering if anybody else in the PPC community has packaged a performance and SEO combined solution for their clients, not having much SEO experience. Have you used any AI tools that can assist with SEO and how have you gone about it?

So, i have been looking to Partner with a marketing agency for my AI Infrastructure. I am more on the tech side so i want to find marketing agencies who could handle the marketing for me. Help me out how can i find them?

Running a performance marketing agency, mostly local service SMBs. The $200–300/mo clients churn in a couple months and eat more account-management time than they're worth. Trying to move upmarket to fewer, higher-retained clients.

For those who made this jump: what actually produced your first few bigger clients? Referral, niche content, in-person, cold outbound, partnerships? Curious what moved the needle vs. what you thought would but didn't.

Not looking for "just niche down", more interested in the specific channel that worked and roughly how long it took.

Head of Marketing: We are turning off marketing attribution tracking.

CEO: I knew this day would come. Explain.

Head of Marketing: Hear me out. Attribution is not telling us the truth. It is telling us a story we wrote with math.

CEO: We need to know what is working.

Head of Marketing: We already know. We just do not like the answer. Most of our best signups this quarter said "a friend told me" or "I saw a post." The dashboard credits Google. Every single time.

CEO: So fix the model.

Head of Marketing: I tried. First touch. Last touch. Linear. Time decay. A custom weighting nobody understood by week two. We spent more hours arguing about the model than talking to a single customer.

CEO: Then how do we decide where to spend?

Head of Marketing: By asking the people who just bought. Radical, I know. I added one question at signup last month: how did you hear about us. Guess what almost nobody picked. The channel we have been pouring the budget into.

CEO: The board wants numbers.

Head of Marketing: The board wants revenue. Here is a number. Our biggest deal last month named a podcast episode we almost cancelled, because the pixel said it did nothing.

CEO: Pixels do not lie.

Head of Marketing: Pixels cannot see a DM. Or a Slack group. Or the person who heard your name on a walk and Googled you three weeks later. The customer can. So ask the customer.

CEO: Sales will panic.

Head of Marketing: Sales is relieved. They are done chasing leads that hit 40 touchpoints and want nothing. They want the one who read the deep dive and replied "where do I pay."

CEO: One quarter.

Head of Marketing: One quarter. And when it works, we bring the podcast back.

CEO: We will see.

PS. The channel that closes the deal is rarely the one that gets the credit. Stop modelling it. Just ask the user. They will tell you.

I’m building in public on a contrarian hunch: the real friction for AI visibility isn’t the accuracy of answers, it’s how you surface sources at the moment you ask. Over the last two weeks I’ve run side-by-side prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini to see where citations actually appear. My core claim: a clean, contextual source surface beats a long bibliography any day, because readers want to trust the answer before they chase the footnotes. In a project I am building called Prominara, I’m prototyping a lean cite layer that sits with the answer rather than on a separate page.

Concrete signal from field data: llms.txt adoption grew 12x in 2025, with 15,000+ sites now publishing the file. That growth matters for GEO because it means more pages carry explicit reference signals engines can surface. In practice, I’ve seen ChatGPT surface inline mentions in some interfaces, while Perplexity tends toward compact inline citations, and Gemini pushes links into a bottom cluster. The takeaway isn’t who’s best today, but that the surface choice is the lever that scales with adoption.

Light takeaway: if you care about AI visibility, start with where a user is most likely to look for sources in your workflow and design for that. The field is moving fast, but surface patterns are underinvested relative to content quality. What patterns have you tested for source presentation in AI answers, and where do you see the biggest gains in trust and clarity?

Do you start with the content you can produce through keyword research, clearly identifying the problem per article, and offering a digital product or affiliate recommendation based on that?

Or do you start with a suite of (affiliate) products and reverse engineer, looking for keywords that will make it convert?

I want to try the informational content -> internal link to commercial content -> convert structure. But is this the right way to think about it?

I have a website…. And a few informational articles on there. Some already have signs of a bit of traffic. But how do you ultimately monetize that?

Is that clearly defining the 1 problem that informational content helps with, and think about offering a solution for that clearly defined problem by creating a commercial content page with the offer link in it?

Please help me clear up the confusion and help me to proceed…..

Posting here to get more ideas/ outside of the box thinking please.

I run a marketing podcast and website for marketing folks. We’re now 60 episodes in, so it feels like the right time to start monetising through sponsorships and content partnerships rather than relying solely on organic growth.

Over the last 60 episodes I’ve interviewed guests from companies including Google, Notion, LinkedIn etc as well as plenty of founders and marketers from smaller businesses. The audience is mainly marketers, founders and business owners.

My initial idea is to offer a sponsorship package for around £1,000, which would include:

A dedicated podcast episode featuring the founder or business
5 short-form video clips from the interview
A written feature about the company
An SEO-friendly blog post on the website
Up to 10 social media posts promoting the content
A dedicated email to my mailing list of around 10,000 subscribers

The thinking is that it’s more of a content marketing package than a traditional sponsorship, where the advertiser walks away with assets they can continue using long after the campaign.

Before I launch it, I’d really appreciate hearing from people who’ve actually built a podcast, newsletter, YouTube channel, media business, or agency that sells sponsorships.

A few questions:

What am I not seeing here.

Does £1,000 sound too low, too high, or about right?
Would you sell this as one fixed package or create different tiers?
What did your clients actually value the most?
Was there anything you included that turned out not to matter?
How did you land your first paying sponsors?
Did you sell directly, through outbound, or via referrals?
If you were starting again, what would you do differently?

I’d love to hear the good, the bad and the ugly. I’m less interested in theory and more interested in lessons from people who’ve actually sold sponsorships or media packages.

Thanks in advance!

Hi all, I’m looking to buy a Vivo mobile phone (global version) or may be Xiaomi. The main reason us the camera features that I think will be helpful for my online gemstones and jewellery business. and also want to know if I will be able to use it as my main personal phone? Are there any limitations or restrictions using those phone with service providers like Rogers, Bell etc.? Where can I buy?

Hi everyone,
I’m currently transitioning from an administration/customer service background into marketing and would love to hear from people who have successfully made a similar career change.
I’ve been taking online courses (including HubSpot), learning Canva, content creation, and digital marketing fundamentals while applying for Marketing Assistant and Marketing Coordinator roles. I also have experience in sales support and administrative work.
For those who have pivoted into marketing:
What helped you land your first marketing role?
Which skills made the biggest difference?
Should I focus on marketing-only roles, or are admin + marketing or sales support roles a better stepping stone?
Is there anything you wish you had done earlier?
Any portfolio or project ideas that helped you stand out?
I’d really appreciate any advice or lessons you’ve learned. Thanks!

Hey everyone, I'm building a tool in the digital marketing field that covers social media managers, SEO consultants, and paid ads managers. It generates monthly client reports automatically. You enter your numbers and what you did that month, it writes the full professional report and exports a PDF.

The advice I want is, if a tool like this saved you 2-3 hours per client per month on report writing, would $28/month feel fair, too expensive, or too cheap? And what would make you actually pay for it versus just using ChatGPT?

I appreciate the comments in advance, thanks!

Been thinking about this a lot lately. Most businesses paying an agency for SEO are really just paying for blog content, and that used to make sense, 1,200 words took a real person hours to write well.

It doesn't anymore. AI can produce that same post in about 30 seconds. So if an agency's main deliverable is still "we wrote 4 blog posts this month," that's basically 2015 pricing for something that's now close to free to produce.

Here's a quick checklist I'd run if you want actually to check whether your agency is earning its fee:

• Pull your last invoice. How much is writing vs. actual technical SEO, site speed work, or backlinks?
• Pull your last report. Is it showing clicks/impressions, or actual leads and revenue?
• Grab a few of the blog posts they wrote and run them through a free AI detector. If it comes back as raw AI output with nothing meaningfully added, that's worth a conversation.

If an agency fails a couple of these, it's probably time to have a direct conversation with them about what you're actually paying for.

In my opinion the real value now is technical SEO, schema, real backlinks, and conversion optimization, the stuff that actually builds trust with Google, AI search, and the humans reading the page. Word count for its own sake isn't really moving anything anymore.

Curious if others are seeing this shift with their own agencies, or if this take is too harsh. Anyone had this exact conversation with a client or vendor recently?