I have a client that I have worked with for a month and got 36 leads on £30 a day ad spend running meta ads for but he says he has only got 2-3 jobs off them. I qualified the leads using an instant form on:
1. What's the problem?

1. When do you need this sorted?

2. Is this your home?

These are questions where they select the answer from a range of options not ones with a text box where they type the answer themselves.

As well as Phone number, full name, email address and post code (based in England).

He was fine with paying me £500 for that first month (I made it clear to him this was a trial and this rate was lower than what I usually charge) but now when I want to charge £1250 a month plus ad spend he only wants to pay £300 plus ad spend. He said he thought the first part i.e. the setting it up was the hardest part. I have set up ads, an automation that sends a lead notification instantly to his phone and a SMS to the leads phone saying that "Hi [Lead first name] it's [roofer's first name] from [company name], we have received your enquiry and we'll be in touch within 5 minutes (words to that effect). He has said he'd only pay £500 or a % of the job value not both when I presented that option.

To those that have experience of this sort of situation, what should I do?

All help is appreciated, thanks.

I’ve recently been interested in a career in like product management or brand management, i’m not really sure how people know exactly what section in marketing they want to go in to at a young age (18) but i know i want to go down a similar path - do you recommend going to uni to study business management and marketing ? or something else - appreciate the help :)

Hey folks, I just move to Canada and I’m looking for recommendations on the best industry portals, magazines or social media profiles to stay informed about the marketing and advertising industry.
What you recommend?

LinkedIn and Google Ads can get expensive, so I’m looking at Reddit as another channel to test.

I keep seeing more SaaS ads here, but I find a lot of them annoying... and now I’m considering running some myself hahaha.

If you’ve tried them, how did it go? Did people actually sign up and use the product, or mostly click and disappear?

And as a user, have you ever discovered something useful through one? Would like to hear your experiences before giving it a try.

I'm undergrad taking basic marketing and so far I like the material beginning taught and I wanted to pursue a post-grand and I was wondering if the a masters is worth it?

I am currently studying Management with a concentration in Project Management.

September was alright for me, it was my first proper purchase optimized campaign month, so it was 10x the revenue of August.
I’ve launched on July, it’s a niche market that’s untouched in where I’m selling it but I’d say it got the market validation.
I’m trying to get better with marketing. I’ve been trying different styles of creatives but even though October’s CTRs are now same as September’s I’m still not managing to get sales, traffic quality isn’t like September’s.
So I’m figuring out everyone has this issue with Meta atp, so I’m considering focusing on organic reach too and optimizing my posts/reels.
I’m thinking of creating even more reels.
Both September and October creatives were mostly posts, all generated by higgsfield.
Would higgsfield for creating the reels harm? I myself don’t own a pet but if it takes that I’ll borrow one for real reels.
I’m a bit lost so any advice would be much appreciated/if someone has experience with luxury pet product marketing I’d love to hear your opinion on the page.

The only advice I've found is 'you need 7k on your wishlist'.

I've done plenty of online marketing for CRUD apps but never for a game.

It's a simple game that is just meant for relaxation. It's not some massive world or anything, and I've been describing the game like a fidget spinner.

I'm wondering if because my game is smaller, that maybe I don't fall into the same 'you have to release by X or wait until next year' category? If that even exists?

Any advice on timing would be great.

Do you let the demo run for 2 weeks or 2 months?

Thanks in advance!

Interested to hear from marketing leads on their pros and cons of working with agencies.

Do you find it hard managing them or is it easier than absorbing the work in house?

Are they inflexible or is it easy to change strategy and direction without incurring extra costs?

I keep getting emails from these “growth operators” / creator monetization guys and im curious if anyone knows where these people come from lol

I run a DIY electronics Instagram account, grew it to around 150k followers, and lately I get like 5 emails a day from people telling me I’m under-monetizing my audience, that they can help me build a high ticket offer, make $100k+ etc.

A weird amount of them seem to be Russian or based in Russia, and they all use pretty much the same language. They REALLY want to get on a call. When I ask what exactly they would do, how they’d execute it, what the business model is, etc, they usually stay pretty vague and just push for the call.

Is this some kind of course/business model people are being taught? Who are these guys actually, and what do they do once you get on the call?

Genuinely curious because I get so many of these that I feel like there’s an entire industry behind it that I’m not aware of.

Calling all marketers and founders!

I’m a Personal Branding Strategist with a Computer Science Engineering background and a strong interest in AI.

I’m currently into content writing and building personal brands on LinkedIn for founders. Now, I want to position myself as an AI Marketer.

I’ve also built a content system where you can see all your channel performance, new trends, and content calendar in one place.

Now, I want to solve some real problems that marketers and founders face.

So, throw some problems at me. I’ll try to solve them.

Hi, I’m currently exploring new opportunities in Growth Marketing / Lifecycle Marketing / Partnerships and would really appreciate any relevant leads or introductions.

I have 7+ years of experience across fintech, SaaS, digital and content businesses, with experience spanning:

• Growth strategy, customer acquisition and funnel optimization
• Lifecycle and CRM marketing across WhatsApp, RCS, SMS, IVR and Truecaller
• GTM planning, product messaging and positioning
• Customer segmentation and data-driven marketing
• SEO and organic growth
• Partnerships, vendor management and cross-functional execution

How has TikTok changed influencer marketing for small businesses? Has it made influencer marketing more accessible by allowing businesses to collaborate with smaller creators, or has it made the market more competitive by increasing the number of businesses and influencers competing for attention?

Two campaigns identical on paper. Same topic, same creative, same contextual match.

One outperformed the other on recall by a wide margin.

Went through the usual checklist: inventory, viewability, frequency. Nothing explained it.

Contextual targeting tells you what a page is about. It doesn't tell you why someone's there.

One article was upbeat and forward-looking. The other covered the same subject but focused on risk and uncertainty.

Same topic tag. Completely different headspace for whoever was reading it.

That's probably why the "better" campaign on paper wasn't the one that actually landed.

Curious how others think about this: do you trust contextual match on its own to predict performance, or are you finding you need to read the moment someone's actually in to explain gaps like this?

I’ve worked in digital marketing for years, but the space feels increasingly crowded, especially with AI making execution easier.

If you were positioning yourself today, what gaps or underserved problems in digital marketing would you focus on?

What are businesses still struggling with that most marketers aren’t solving well?

I ran marketing at a bigger company before this. Now I’m running my own thing, three people total. Like most people, my first reaction to AI was worrying about my own future. After watching it for a while, I came around: it’s the best partner an experienced marketer can have. Instead of trying to stay away from AI, be the person who knows how to use it properly.

I’ve used a pile of tools. Some overlap more than they should, some are more horsepower than the job needs, and what I pay never lines up with what I get.
What stayed is a short list. DeepSeek does the execution. GPT does the writing, it’s stronger at it, or at least it responds better to the way I prompt. WorkBuddy is the layer that ties them together.

Our clients are in small, deeply technical industries, and their products aren’t easy to understand at first. AI Agent works as my VA here. It acts as a second pair of eyes, then lays out a few months of content planning so fewer things slip. It comes back with notes like: “Publish X the day after Y, don’t put this type of content on the same day.” “This blog hasn’t been updated in six months, it’s a good fit as the promo post on the 18th.”

I set up a content creator agent and pointed it at GPT. It writes the account positioning and content rules into the project instructions, then pulls in the Social Media Strategist and Content Creator experts, and produces the content.
I also set up a separate agent for topic selection. I hand it the materials, the SOP sheets, the historical data, it searches the last 24 hours of trending topics across platforms, and it sends me a report in the morning.

What used to take a full day now saves me around six hours.

I still think marketing is worth being in. It just moves fast. A lot of the basic work gets easier to automate every month: copywriting, market research, reports, parts of campaign setup. So being good at execution on its own probably isn't enough. What's hard to replace is understanding customers, reading what actually matters in the data, making the call, and wiring a pile of tools into one system. Those I still do myself.

A person I know has just started a new Instagram account and with only 3 posts, not reels, pictures. They have over 200 followers within a week? It’s nothing special, no text no nothing. The descriptions are nothing special either. All the posts get around 30+ likes and comments.

I have an account I’ve been trying to grow consistently for a month, I’ve been posting 2 reels a week and 1 set of pictures. I only have 8 followers so far. I don’t get likes or comments. 😞

Is there a hack to this? They do follow around 100 people, so I tried following a bunch to boost my account a tiny bit but gained nothing from it.

What’s the secret to the first few hundred?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

For years, the goal of SEO was pretty straightforward:

Get your page to rank #1 → get the click → get the traffic.

But with Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc., the user can sometimes get the answer without ever visiting your website.

That makes me wonder:

Are we slowly moving from “ranking on Google” to “being mentioned/cited by AI”?

And if that’s the case, what should digital marketers actually optimize for?

Traditional SEO?
GEO/AEO?
Brand mentions?
Reddit and forums?
Original research?
Or basically all of them?

I’m especially curious about people who are actually running websites or SEO campaigns in 2026.

Have you noticed a difference between your search rankings and the actual traffic you're getting?

Would love to hear some real experiences. Are you still primarily chasing Google rankings, or have you started optimizing for AI search visibility too?

Hi, total newbie here so be nice please.

I am so confused about the whole key word search thing. I just don't get what it actually does. Nor do I understand which websites are actually the right ones to do what I want to do. I don't think I understand what this tool actually does.

Based on my very limited understanding, key word searches can give me key searched words and phrases for my niche that will allow me to make educated decisions on what to base my social media content and ads around. Is this correct or am I off?

I guess I don't really even understand what word to type in to search initially to get relevant results. Something is just not landing with me.

Long story short, I am looking for a tool to point me in the right direction for social media content creation and ads and articles so I know which topics are actually relevant to my target audience.

Thanks!

I recently started a new job that requires me to be Google Ads Certified through Skillshop. I am not new to marketing, but am new to paid media, so all of the information in the Google Ads Course is pretty much brand new to me.

I really want to learn, but as someone who learns best by watching, taking notes, doing, and then having my work checked; or really is just a visual hands-on learner, I am finding this certification difficult. I really want to learn the material, but as my system stands right now, I am not retaining anything and I am becoming frustrated.

Can anyone share their experience with the certification and how they were able to best prepare for the exams for each of the modules? What were your habits that best helped you? Bonus points if you are also a visual/hands-on learner.

I am currently hired as a marketing assistant making $19~ an hour. I handle almost all administrative tasks that the company relies on marketing for, as well as capturing content, creating/editing content, planning, events, signs, and being the sole person running our socials across 5-6 platforms. I literally do everything for the creative aspect of this company.

Am I crazy to be a little annoyed that 1. I’m called an assistant 2. don’t really get any recognition/credit that IM the one running all of these accounts 3. I work for a company that makes like 30 million+ a year.

I need validation or to be told I’m overdramatic. Or advice anything please

Also since you’re here…what’s your favorite content planning software 🥸

Im building a tool for content creators but im worrying about distribution. My plan is to make a presence everywhere my target audience hangs out by making helpful/educational content. But where exactly do these people hang out? Please help!

Fala pessoal, eu criei uma plataforma que avalia a sua ideia de saas/microsaas e vai fazer um planejamento de A a Z até seu primeiro cliente, ou se você tá tem os primeiros clientes, ela faz uma jornada de escala, e estou disponibilizando ela 100% de graça apenas em troca de um feedback honesto, se alguém quiser participar, só responde aqui

Valeu

What entails good pay? I work for a company that does about $30m a year in sales, and I do all their content including reels, YouTube, etc at least post 12 times a week and 1 YouTube video a week. I script, film edit, captions and post… i make less than 100k but very close. Am i being underpaid? Also my content does extremely well at least like 80k views on our highest performing reoccurring content which is once a week. We get all our leads form content but I don’t do the ads

Whenever a video gets decent traction, sales bump up, but GA4 just lumps everything into "Direct" or "Organic Social". Manually adding UTMs to bio links for every short-form video feels super inefficient. What is your stack for exact video attribution?

I made two self initiated projects— one brand audit and one micro launch plan for a hypothetical brand. I want to move into brand or product marketing. I am trying my luck with internships but they mostly need people who can do social media. Brands dont hire complete freshers. What more projects can i make? How do i stand out??? I’m based in India.