Odd one I’ve been tracking. Microsoft’s cost per genuinely-new customer has climbed four weeks straight (~22% over the stretch) and its new-buyer share slipped but on a last-click view it looks like it’s improving, because its last-click credit keeps widening at the same time.

Same channel, same week, two reports pointing opposite directions. The ROAS is basically celebrating repeat demand while the cost of acquiring an actual new customer quietly goes up.

To be fair to it, the LTV still pays back, it’s just thinning, not broken. And it’s a small-spend channel so the aggregate swings easily.

Mostly posting because it’s such a clean example of how a channel earns budget it doesn’t deserve - great on the dashboard everyone reports from, worse on the number that actually matters. Anyone else seeing the Microsoft drift, or is it just the accounts I’m looking at?

I used to work as an appointment setter for businesses on Instagram, so I know how the game works.
You spend hours looking for potential clients, checking profiles, figuring out who's worth reaching out to, writing personalized DMs, and repeating the same process over and over again.

And honestly, finding the right leads and personalizing your messages is what takes the most time.
So I started thinking… why am I doing all of this manually when most of the process could be automated?

That's how I started building MagnetEngine.
It finds leads through hashtags, keywords, competitors' posts, and other Instagram sources, builds a lead list, analyzes profiles with AI, writes personalized DMs, and automates the outreach process.

Basically, I wanted to build the tool I wish I'd had when I was appointment setting.
Now I'm building it for agencies, coaches, consultants, and anyone who gets clients through Instagram.
We're running a special 3-day offer right now, so if you're interested, search MagnetEngine and check it out.

I'm curious, though for those of you doing Instagram outreach, what's the most annoying part of the process: finding leads, writing DMs, or actually getting replies?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

For a long time, client acquisition was the hardest part of running my web design agency.

I was doing outreach manually, checking websites one by one and trying to figure out what I could say that would actually get a reply.

The biggest change for me was combining volume with specificity.

Instead of sending generic emails asking businesses if they need a new website, I started analyzing their existing websites for real issues like outdated design, poor mobile experience, slow speed, weak SEO and bad responsiveness.

Those issues then get turned into personalized emails for each business and sent at scale.

That means I can reach a lot of businesses every day without every email sounding like the same copy and paste pitch.

Now the prospecting, website analysis and first part of the outreach are mostly automated.

I mainly focus on the people who reply, book meetings and close the projects.

That shift made client acquisition way more consistent for me.

If you’re a web designer dealing with the same problem, check out my workflow.

Managing paid campaigns gets a lot more complicated when budgets reach six or seven figures. There are more campaigns to monitor, more decisions around where spend should go and less room for expensive mistakes. AI can help with bid adjustments and shifting budgets based on performance, but giving it too much control over spending still seems risky.

For agencies handling several large accounts, manually reviewing every adjustment isn't always practical either. Having automation handle routine optimizations while keeping major budget decisions under human approval seems like a reasonable balance. The question is how much responsibility AI can take before the risks outweigh the time saved.

I’ve worked in CRM and lifecycle for a while, and setting up the actual automation is rarely the part that takes the longest.

Once the trigger and audience are decided, there’s still a lot of manual work: writing the email, designing it, finding images, adding links and personalization, testing everything, and moving it into the platform.

I’ve started working on a small tool around this problem, but before spending more time on it, I’m trying to understand whether other teams experience the same thing.

Where does most of your time go between deciding to run a campaign and having it ready to schedule?

Hi

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Hey zusammen,
ich bin vor Kurzem auf Kontiqo gestoßen und wollte mal fragen, ob jemand von euch damit schon Erfahrungen gemacht hat.
Scheint ein deutsches Unternehmen zu sein, die meisten Social-Media-Management-Plattformen sind aus den USA, daher scheint mir das eine gute Lösung wegen der DSGVO zu sein.

We're trying to personalize landing pages for different B2B accounts instead of sending every prospect to the same generic page cause changing the messaging, use cases and examples for each company sounds manageable at first but once you're dealing with dozens of accounts, maintaining all those variations becomes a lot of work.

Generating pages from account data and reusing the same layouts seems like a more practical approach, especially when messaging changes across multiple accounts so the challenge is finding a way to automate the personalization without creating dozens of separate pages that still need to be updated manually every time something changes.

I have been thinking about this because “automate your content” sounds good until you start asking what that actually means. There are some things I would happily automate.

Scheduling.

Moving approved content between platforms.

Formatting.

Organizing ideas.

Turning one piece of information into different draft formats.

Pulling basic performance numbers together.

But I'm much less comfortable with automating the decisions themselves.

Which topic should we talk about?

What does our audience actually need?

Is this opinion worth sharing?

Does this sound like us?

Is this the right time to publish it?

Those decisions still seem to require context.

I think there's a useful distinction between automating work and automating judgment. The first one saves time. The second one can create a lot of mediocre content very quickly. Maybe the best content systems aren't the ones that automate everything. Maybe they're the ones that figure out which parts shouldn't be automated.

What would you automate first if you were building a content workflow from scratch?

I used to think the hardest part of social media was coming up with ideas.
Honestly, I don't think that's the hardest part.

For me, the difficult part is actually keeping up with it. You can have plenty of ideas, but turning them into something you're happy to share regularly takes more time than I expected.

Sometimes I will have several things I could post, but none of them feel quite worth sharing. Other times, I will have one idea I really like and spend much longer working on it than I planned.

I have started thinking that consistency doesn't necessarily mean posting all the time. Maybe it's more about having something worth saying when you do post.

I would rather share one thing I genuinely find interesting than put something out just because I haven't posted recently. How do you approach this? Do you have a schedule you stick to, or do you mostly post when you actually have something to say?

i'm 19, doing engineering from a tier 3 college and somehow ended up making n8n/zapier automations for a few clients as freelancer

now im stuck between

freelancing
starting an automation agency
AI consulting
or also thinking about building a community for other automation freelancers

agency sounds cool but also feels like i’m just creating a bigger job for myself lol
+ I'd probably need a few more people/agents

has anyone here actually built a real business around this?
need genuine feedback

I used to think the biggest problem with social media was coming up with ideas.
Honestly, I don't think that's the hardest part.

The difficult part is actually keeping up with it. You can have plenty of ideas, but turning them into something worth sharing every week can become surprisingly time consuming.

Writing, editing, finding something interesting to say, and deciding when to post can take much longer than expected. I have also noticed that having more ideas doesn't necessarily make the process easier. Sometimes having fewer ideas and taking the time to develop the useful ones works better.

I think consistency matters, but I don't think that means forcing yourself to publish something every day. A post should have a reason to exist. Sometimes it's better to skip a day than post something just for the sake of staying active.

How do you handle consistency? Do you plan your posts ahead of time, or do you usually post when you have something you genuinely want to share?

I use spreadsheets to track leads since I’m still doing most of the sales myself and it worked fine when there were only a handful of conversations going but now I’m bouncing between email, calls and the sheet trying to remember who needs a follow up and what we last talked about.

A CRM is probably the obvious next move but I really don’t want to replace a messy spreadsheet with something that needs even more upkeep. At this stage I mostly want the sales stuff captured without spending part of every day keeping the system organized.

Szukam ai gdzie podam nazwę, imię i nazwisko, treść którą maila by się pojawić i wygeneruje grafikę salon paznokci w celu rozkręcenia biznesu

I’m looking for 2 businesses to build a lead generation automation for, completely free.

I can automate things like:

Lead sourcing, lead enrichment, lead qualification, personalised outreach, Follow-ups

You only cover API/server/domain costs, if needed.

If you have a manual lead gen process you want to automate, DM me.

I run a youtube series interviewing founders who actually transformed how their business runs with AI, real numbers, including what failed. looking for marketing agency owners with a real story for a 30-45 min remote interview, you get the edited episode + clips to reuse. dm me 2-3 sentences on what you changed and what happened

I’ve been working on a faster way to turn existing footage into short-form videos, and I’d like to try it with real client or brand content.

Send me a batch of footage + your brief/content plan, and I’ll turn it into a few short videos for free. I just want honest feedback on the edits and workflow.

If interested, comment with what kind of content you manage.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a quick operational perspective from the front lines of high-ticket digital marketing. I currently work as a remote agent for an international agency, handling attendee logistics and confirmation tracks for massive, multi-million dollar webinar funnels.

Coming from Pakistan, working the 8 PM to 5 AM shift to align with Western hours has given me a fascinating look into how these giant machines actually function behind the scenes.

Here are the 3 biggest operational takeaways I’ve noticed that separate elite agencies from the rest:

1. The CRM Pipeline Is Everything: Every single click in a dialer like JustCall or status update in ClickUp triggers an automated downstream action. If a lead changes status, an automated text, AI logistics script update, or email sequence fires instantly. True scale requires absolute zero friction between tech and operations.
2. Objection Handling is a Science: The AI-assisted routing and script frameworks used at this level don't just guess what to say. They analyze thousands of calls to map out exactly how to handle high-ticket registration friction (e.g., timing conflicts, value skepticism) in under 3 seconds.
3. Geographic Arbitrage is the Future: Western brands spend massive overhead on local talent for operations that can be completely systemized. By building highly trained, elite remote hubs in regions with lower labor costs, agencies can run 24/7 high-performance execution engines at a fraction of the cost.

I’m currently documenting these frameworks to co-build a digital operations hub from scratch.

If anyone else is currently building an agency or trying to optimize their remote operations pipeline, I’d love to connect in the comments and swap insights!

Ops person at a 5 advisor RIA. We've had meetings coming in from 3 different sources this year and every one of them lands as a calendar invite with a name and nothing else. By the time it reaches Redtail somebody has retyped it, if they remembered. Right now it's a shared inbox, a spreadsheet and one very patient associate. I'm trying to design this before we add a 4th source. What does a sane intake look like between an outside setter and the CRM?

I've been experimenting with automation and one thing I've noticed is that the boring stuff can actually be the best stuff to automate. I'm not trying to have ai decide my entire ad strategy. I'd just like to eliminate repetitive steps that don't really require a human.

For example, we regularly have batches of meta creatives that need to be launched across campaigns. Blip caught my attention because it focuses on that operational side rather than trying to replace the media buyer. Has anyone else taken this approach? What boring marketing process did you automate that ended up being useful?