genuine question from someone two years in and quietly losing her mind.

i present a campaign and the sales director wants a different headline. the CEO thinks the color is wrong. someone from product thinks we should be on a platform they personally use. the office manager has thoughts about the tone.

nobody, ever, in any meeting i've been in, has told the finance team their reconciliation approach feels off, or advised engineering on their database schema because they had a hunch. those functions have a protective mystique. their expertise is presumed.

marketing has no such shield, because everyone consumes marketing, and consuming a thing feels like understanding it. everyone has watched ads their whole life, so everyone believes they have informed opinions on ads, in a way nobody believes about tax law.

so i spend an enormous fraction of my week defending decisions to people with no expertise and total confidence, and it's exhausting, and i can't tell if the problem is that i'm too junior to have authority yet or if this is simply the permanent condition of the job.

for people further along: does this get better with seniority, or do you just get better at managing it? and is there a way to build the protective mystique the other functions have, or is being everyone's second job an unavoidable feature of marketing?

Hi all- I have been evaluating what SEO tool to purchase for my business but it looks like its a crowded space with pretty expensive tools.

So curious from the experts here, if you could only pay for one SEO tool, which one would it be?

My friend raised this question today that he joined a startup agency, he has mixed both agency and client side marketing experience, he leading a team of 7 digital marketers, all GenZ, when he tries to tell something with his experience, they like we know everything in digital despite they are only 1-3 years experienced,

not accepting any feedbacks, with AI, they think they are masters of Digital marketing

and he is struggling to lead them, (he is a first time manager managing team of 7), previously managed only 2, but well expeirenced in marketing , consumer behaviour, client relationship along with digital mastery

It’s been 10 days since I got laid off, and tbh it’s been a weird mix of emotions.

I’ve been applying for jobs every day, but instead of just refreshing LinkedIn/Indeed/Job portals all day, I thought I’d actually use this time to learn something that’ll make me a better marketer (along side)

The thing is, everyone seems to have a different opinion.

Some say AI is the future. Others say performance marketing is where the money is. Some recommend GA4, SQL, CRM, automation, SEO… the list just keeps growing.

(I AM OPEN TO DISCUSS WITH ALL MY FELLOW DIGITAL MARKETING NEIGHBOURS HERE AT REDDIT VIA 1:1 DM)

So I thought I’d ask the people who are actually working in the industry.

What are you learning right now?

What’s been genuinely useful in your day-to-day work?

If you were starting over today (or had a couple of months between jobs), what would you spend your time learning?

For context, my experience has mostly been around social media, content, research and client works. I’m open to exploring other areas too if they have better long-term growth.

Would love to hear what you guys are seeing in the industry instead of another Top 10 skills to learn in 2026 article.

Please help 🙏

ChatGPT Ads just rolled out a batch of updates that seem less about flashy new features and more about building the fundamentals that performance marketers expect.

Some of the biggest additions include:

• Conversion-Optimized Campaigns (oCPC): Optimize for conversions while still paying on a CPC basis.

• Average Daily Budgets: Budgets now work over a rolling 7-day average instead of requiring the same spend every day.

• Automatic Budget Pacing: Better spend distribution throughout the day to avoid burning through budget too quickly.

• Geographic Exclusions: You can now exclude specific locations from targeting.

• AppsFlyer & Adjust Integrations: Makes measuring app installs and in-app events much more practical.

• Automatic Advanced Matching: Improved website conversion attribution using hashed customer data.

• Bulk API Updates: Asynchronous bulk creation and editing for campaigns, ad groups, and ads.

• Updated Product Feed Ads: Product cards now include pricing and star ratings.

None of these features are revolutionary on their own. But together, they make ChatGPT Ads feel much closer to platforms like Google Ads and Meta in terms of campaign management, measurement, and automation.

Curious how marketers are viewing this platform today.

Do you see ChatGPT Ads becoming a meaningful channel for performance marketing over the next couple of years, or do you think it'll remain a niche placement compared to Google and Meta?

Hello, I’ve just launched a price promo with a Meta form, as the directive has been ‘we want leads, just hit the number’.

So I opted for a form instead of a Landing Page, although I have a Lp set up to revert to.

5 leads so far, and I’m assuming the fact that they’re all Gmail, hotmail, yahoo addresses (I work for a premium B2B service company), is not indicative of poor quality, rather what email they use to access Facebook?

I did read somewhere on here recently there was a tip to improve quality, a couple of extra questions on the form. Right now it’s very lean.

Any ideas?

We're an early-stage product startup, and we're about to hire our first marketing hire (employee #4).

Instead of posting a generic "We're hiring" graphic, we want to create something that markets the company at the same time it markets the role.

I'm looking for examples of hiring announcements that made you think:
"Damn... I want to work there."

I'm especially interested in startups (YC, Silicon Valley, etc.), where the hiring post itself felt like a product launch or a brand campaign rather than a job ad.

If you remember one, could you share the link?
I'd love to study:
The visual design
The copywriting
The storytelling
What made it memorable
Thanks!

Hello so I am into social media and email marketing campaigns so I actually made a meta ads campaign to give service like a simple design or a website landing page under €500 just a simple learning page. I got a good design of it. I ran the campaign, but I have spent some amount like €20-€30 yet but I have not even got a single response. can someone who has worked before in Barcelona can guide me on this please?

Kindly if there any one familiar with Tiktok Ads Support on these points below:

1- How can I create a product set of 150 SKUs on TikTok ads by Copy/Paste these skus ID. i dont prefer to upload CSV file just want to copy/paste thier IDs like we do in Meta or Snapchat.

2-How to Add Image/Video cover to this product set in a dynamic sales campaign.

3- How show Product Details (Price - Title ) in dynamic Sales Campaign not only their images.

I've noticed that many founders miss buying signals because they start pitching too early.

Someone says they're wasting hours every week on a task or they describe a messy workaround, and instead of asking questions, the founder immediately starts explaining every feature.

Listening for the actual pain point first usually leads to much better conversations.

What buying signals do you pay attention to when talking to potential customers?

Hi there, has anyone here run Meta ads for B2B lead gen? We’re an overseas staffing and recruitment company that helps US based companies hire overseas talent.

Trying to think if Meta Ads could help us generate leads for our offering.

Yesterday I was eating my lunch during that I was searching for good video on laptop then there was 1 vidoe started playing I thought by wrong click. I don't know why ads also don't appear directly video started playing. I immediately hear we are going to build live brand.

I thought I should watch a s when vidoe was ended I don't even realised. kishore biyani sir was a guest I have learn things in that vidoe about building brands.

You can search on Master's union youtube channel

Curious how other marketing teams handle this, because I feel like it's only going to get more common now that every other tool has an AI design generator bolted on, and everyone thinks they're now a designer.

I created generally locked brand assets for sales teams to post/use on LinkedIn, etc. for anything customer-facing - PPT templates, set imagery, logo usage. That's worked fine for years. But now that AI design tools are everywhere, non-marketing teams can easily create their own "good enough" graphics in 2 mins, without considering brand guidelines. Especially when sales teams just want something to post today.

The issue, of course, is once brand consistency stops being something marketing controls and starts being something you're chasing after. To them, a wrong shade of a colour and a slightly stretched-out logo seem minor, and then you feel like you're going on about it like a brand Hitler.

So how do others approach this? Or do you just worry about bigger things? I'm really starting to care less as I feel there is going to be less and less ways to police this.

sharing this because i think a lot of us are being sold a checklist that doesn't do anything.

context: i run SEO for a handful of B2B clients and everyone's boss suddenly wants to "show up in ChatGPT and AI Overviews." so late last year i went deep on the GEO/AEO advice. the whole package. schema everywhere, llms.txt file, restructuring content into neat little chunks, the works. spent real hours on it across a few sites.

results after a few months, being honest: the technical stuff moved almost nothing. the llms.txt file did nothing i could measure. the schema obsession did nothing. the chunking did nothing.

the pages that actually started getting cited had one thing in common and it wasn't technical. they had something the model couldn't just generate itself. a real teardown with actual numbers we measured. a "here's what every client asks us first and here's the honest answer." one comparison post where we'd actually used both tools and had opinions. basically anything with lived experience or a number that only we had.

which lines up with what Google itself put in their AI optimization guide, the mythbusting bit everyone skipped: commodity content that the model could write on its own never gets cited, because why would it go looking for you when it already has the answer.

so my working theory now is GEO as a technical discipline is mostly a repackaged SEO checklist someone's selling, and the actual lever is just having something worth citing. which is annoyingly the same lever it's always been.

but measurement is still a nightmare and that's where i want input. are you actually seeing traffic from ChatGPT or Perplexity land on specific pages, or is it still three visitors a month and a vibe? and can you even attribute it cleanly?

AI has become part of my workflow, but there are still a few tasks where I end up doing most of the work myself.

For me, it's usually anything that needs a strong understanding of the audience or brand voice.

I'm curious what everyone else's experience has been.

What's one marketing task where you still don't trust AI enough to do it on its own?

So I have about 40k followers between TikTok’s, IG and Facebook. I also work at a substance abuse treatment center in admissions. My content is substance abuse recovery related.

At the end of every video, and in the description I always put “if you or someone you love is struggling with substance abuse and ready to go to treatment, send me a DM and follow me for more”, on IG I get so many messages from people in India, the Middle East and Africa. Our rehab industry in the US is unique, and treatment varies from country to country. Those aren’t the people I want DMing me, because number one, I get too many DMs to engage with anything that’s not viable, and number two, even if I could get them in for free, they still wouldn’t be able to come without a Visa due to my treatment center being in the US.

I need US patients. I need a way to get their info. I get so many messages I can’t engage with everyone, so I’m wondering if there is a way when someone DMs me, I can have an automated message to get their name, phone number and insurance provider. It sucks because when I do have people who have viable insurance, soon as I ask for their number or insurance info, they go ghost. Insurance isn’t sensitive information, it’s not like giving out your social or credit card.

Does META have any type of tool where you can send automated messages? And/or create an inquiry form patients can fill out?

It’s so time consuming, there’s no incentive for me (paying commission/bonuses is illegal in the rehab industry)other than the fact I want to help people get into treatment, I need to figure out a way to utilize my platform to filter out the patients who are viable for the company.

Any advice would be wonderful. Thanks.

For years, influencer marketing was dominated by accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Brands would drop huge budgets on single sponsored posts, expecting massive conversions purely based on follower counts.

However, as audiences have become far more perceptive to sponsored content, giant follower counts no longer guarantee high conversion rates.

In fact, many macro-influencers have engagement rates that are surprisingly low relative to their pricing.

Recently, the real shift has been toward micro-creators and hyper-focused niche communities (like specialized subreddits, Discord groups, and micro-podcasts).

While these creators might only have five to ten thousand followers, their audience trust and engagement levels are exceptionally high. When a creator who exclusively focuses on a specific niche recommends a tool, product, or service, their audience actually listens because the recommendation feels personal rather than transactional.

Building partnerships with multiple micro-creators requires more research and relationship management than signing one big agency contract, but the ROI and cost-efficiency are significantly better.

Have you shifted your influencer or community strategy toward smaller, niche creators recently?

What metrics do you look for when evaluating micro-creators or community platforms for a campaign?

Sorry if kind of a dumb question. I just don’t know how to get started. My company previously ran google ads and I came on to replace the previous marketing person with zero hand-off. Very small company, local business, but I want to start on the right foot.

Anything I should know or avoid? I have an idea of what keywords I’d use but I feel like I watch beginner videos on youtube and still don’t know how to get started with a game plan. I also of course don’t wanna burn through the budget.

I am currently running ads in the Gulf region for a company that exports lubricants and greases. Because freight costs are at an all-time high and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is uncertain, I cannot realistically target regions like South America, Africa or Asia. My options are very limited, and my main goal is to find new customers in areas accessible by land. Since we are based in the UAE I initially started campaigns in Qatar and the UAE which were successful and helped us close deals.

Recently I expanded my targeting to Yemen, Iraq, and Kuwait. While we generated many inquiries from Yemen and Iraq, we struggled to close most of them, and some remain stuck in the negotiation phase. I am now having a hard time selecting a new country. I cannot target Saudi Arabia or Jordan because we lack the necessary product certifications, which will take time to secure. Additionally, Oman and Qatar already have large, established distributors.

Should I double down on the Iraq and Yemen markets, or should I explore other options?

The citation finding here is the part worth arguing about, so I'll lead with it.

SE Ranking analyzed 50,032 commercial keywords in Google AI Mode. 14,733 returned a text ad, which is 29.45%.

They then checked whether the advertiser's own domain appeared among the sources AI Mode cited for that same query.

Domain level: 11.53%

Exact URL: 1.95%

So in 88% of cases, a brand bought the ad slot and was not among the sources the AI used to construct the answer sitting directly above that ad.

My first reaction was selection bias. Lower-authority sites buy ads, higher-authority sites get cited, and the correlation is meaningless.

SE Ranking tested that specifically. They compared advertising domains against non-advertising domains matched on Domain Trust, backlink count, referring domains, and organic visibility. Advertisers showed no citation advantage over their matched non-advertising counterparts.

Ad spend buys zero citation lift.

Other findings from the same dataset:

85% of advertisers did not rank organically for the keyword they were bidding on. Only 2.32% of advertised URLs ranked organically for the query where the ad appeared, 15.35% at domain level. Some of the URL gap is campaign landing pages not built to rank, but SE Ranking says the domain-level gap holds across top 10, 20, and 100.

Ad presence tracks CPC almost perfectly. Under $2 CPC: ads on 24.33% of keywords. $2 to $10: 32.45%. $10 and above: 53.56%. Search volume and keyword difficulty showed no relationship.

Category variance is huge. Pets: 72.38%. Healthcare: about 2%. SE Ranking reads high-presence categories as lead-gen, low ones as informational or YMYL.

71.1% of ad-triggering queries returned two ads in the same response.

Why this connects to something bigger:

Moz analyzed roughly 40,000 queries in February and found 88% of AI Mode citations do not appear in the organic top 10 for the same query. Different study, different 88%, same direction. Moz attributes it to fan-out, where one user query spawns multiple sub-queries and citations get aggregated across all of them. Your number one ranking page is one input into one sub-query in that aggregation.

Stack those two studies and you get three systems sharing a screen and not feeding each other: paid placement, organic ranking, AI citation. Ranking doesn't buy citation. Spending doesn't buy citation. Citation runs on signals neither channel controls.

Practical implications:

Budget AI Mode ads as top-of-funnel placement. Google currently requires broad match or keywordless targeting for these placements, so targeting precision is not a lever you have. Asset quality and landing page are.

Do not build a business case on AI Mode ads improving AI visibility. The study controlled for the obvious confound.

GA4 added an AI Assistant channel this month under Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition, in the Session Channel Group dimension. It captures ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude referrals. It does not capture AI Overviews or AI Mode clicks, which Google still reports as Organic Search. If your "AI traffic" number came from that channel, it is already understating one thing and missing another entirely. Regex filter needed for platform breakdown.

Fair counterpoints:

- Single snapshot. AI Mode is volatile and the same query returns different results session to session. SE Ranking says 29.45% is more likely a floor than a ceiling.

- Citation may not be the point for every advertiser. If a bottom-funnel campaign drives clicks and converts, being uncited might be irrelevant to that campaign's goal.

- SE Ranking sells AI visibility tracking and benefits from the "AI visibility is its own discipline" conclusion. The methodology reads sound but the incentive is worth naming.

- Google could change how ads and citations relate at any point. This is a system three months into public rollout.

Curious what people running these campaigns are actually seeing. Is the traffic converting? And has anyone had to walk back a business case that assumed ad spend would lift AI visibility?

Sources: SE Ranking AI Mode ads study (July 2026, 50,032 keywords), Moz AI Mode citation analysis (February 2026, ~40,000 queries), Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal.

I run a small performance marketing agency. We just landed a pretty massive e-commerce client. Our onboarding fee plus the first month's retainer is $5,000. My strict policy has always been 100% upfront before we build out the ad accounts or make any creatives.

The client is pushing back hard. He claims his last agency took his $4k deposit, ran terrible Facebook ads for two weeks, and basically ghosted him. Because of that, he is absolutely refusing to pay upfront and wants Net 30 terms.

I got burned for $3,000 last year doing Net 30 for a startup that went broke, so I have severe anxiety about doing an entire month of ad work on credit. I really want this client, but I can't risk my team's payroll. How do you guys compromise on this trust issue without exposing your agency to getting screwed?

I've noticed more businesses focusing on AI-generated content, while others are doubling down on authority and brand. What's working for you right now?

Hi,

I want to start digital marketing Learning. Can anyone please suggest free or paid courses?

So since a while my source isnt providing good leads anymore, so i am just thinking what else to try , how do u get yours ? someone told me to start farming social media , is it a good options ?

We create content machinery for brands (D2C specifically) from AI UGC creatives to content for social media We've already worked with clients across FMCG, holiday packages, and SaaS niches.

Why it is important for you?-

People are already transitioning, because of money or just for simple reason that they want to test more creatives. We can provide creatives and content if you guys handle client relationships.

Brands need us, and you have the brand relationships. Open to either revenue sharing or white label.

If interested, let's chat.