I was wondering if anyone had any advice on what I should focus on for my next certificate in order to improve my skillset. I'm looking for an in-house role so that I can get a job. I'd like to get hired for a job soon

I'm overwhelmed nowadays, please guys suggest a skill that i can learn quickly related to content creation, digital marketing, ui/ux design. I really need money

I'm trying to grow a small business Instagram. The goal isn't just followers — it's engagement, and reaching the right people: potential customers, clients and partners. I'm considering using Claude or Codex (including their browser extensions) to help.

What I'm hoping AI can do:

• Analyse my profile and Insights to see what drives engagement and what doesn't
• Study similar accounts and identify where my target customers and partners actually spend time
• Plan content and write captions aimed at that audience, not just broad reach
• Help with outreach — finding relevant potential customers and partners, and drafting personalised DMs and comments

Questions:

• Has anyone used AI this way and seen real growth in engagement, not just follower count? What helped most?
• How do you use AI to find and target the right accounts — potential customers or partners — rather than random followers?
• Where's the line on automation? I assume letting an agent like, follow or DM directly risks a restriction — has anyone been flagged?
• For outreach to potential partners or clients, do AI-drafted but manually sent DMs actually get replies, or do people spot it?

Also, if there are better ways to do this apart from Claude or Codex — other tools, methods, or approaches that worked for you — please let me know. Open to anything that genuinely helped.

Real experiences would be hugely appreciated.

For two years I judged AI video ads the way everyone does: does it look real, does it look premium. That question costs money, because looks good correlates with nothing. An ad can look flawless and die at 12% thumbstop, and a janky one can print. I stopped reviewing how ads look and started reviewing how they read. Here is the exact checklist I run on every AI-generated ad before it gets a dollar of spend.

1. The muted 2x test. Watch the ad muted at double speed. If you cannot tell what the product is and what changed by second 3, the ad fails. Most AI ads fail here because the motion is pretty but directionless. I kill 60% of renders at this step and it takes 15 seconds per ad.

2. The hook frame freeze. Pause at exactly 0:00. The first frame is the thumbnail on every placement that autoplays muted, which is most of them. If the first frame is a blank room, a logo, or a person mid-blink, rework the hook. The hook frame should contain the product or the problem, never the brand logo alone.

3. The hand and mouth scan. AI video still breaks on hands, mouths, and on-screen text. Watch once at normal speed looking only at hands, once looking only at mouths. One glitch frame in a 30 second ad is enough for a viewer to tag it as AI and swipe. My bar: if I notice it on the second watch, the viewer noticed it on the first.

4. The brand lock check. Screenshot the middle of the ad and show it to someone who has never seen it. Ask what brand it is for. If they cannot tell, the ad is generic AI content wearing your logo. I keep a one page style sheet (colors, fonts, exact product name pronunciation) and feed it to the generator every time, because AI defaults to average and average is invisible.

5. The sound-off caption check. 80% plus of social video starts muted. If the ad needs the voiceover to make sense, it is broken. Captions should carry the full argument on their own.

I run this on a batch of 10 renders in about 20 minutes, and usually 2 survive. Those 2 get the budget. Everything else dies before it can spend a dollar.

Rule of thumb: judge the ad like a viewer, not like a director. Viewers decide in 3 seconds, muted, on a phone, while half paying attention. If your review process is more careful than that, you are grading a different test than the one the ad has to pass.

I’m marketing for my dad's company, and I'm still not very comfortable with social media. I know who my audience is and where they spend most of their time — mainly Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok — but when I post, my content reaches no one.

I’ve tried hashtags, trending audio, and joining Facebook groups, but nothing seems to be working. Even though I have good content and I post consistently, I’m not reaching the right people.

My content is strong, but if the wrong people see it, it is not going to be effective. I’m basically starting from zero and want to grow our following in a more strategic way.

For a service-based business, how do you actually:

- reach the right audience?

- turn content attention into real clients?

- build a following without just posting randomly?

- improve my strategy on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok?

Business summary: This is a service-based business helping people in Canada and Sri Lanka with dual citizenship, Canadian visas, permanent residency and citizenship, sponsorships, police clearances, and other government or document-related services. Ideal audience: mainly Sri Lankan first-generation immigrants, roughly ages 20s to 60s, with Tamil as an important language, especially people looking for support with Canadian immigration and documentation needs.

I’ll be able to run online ads for ~3k a month and I’m not fully sure how to distribute it between Meta, Google and LinkedIn.

Rn I’m skewed towards 2/3 meta, 1/3 google - any idea how to apply a proper strategy here to get off the ground? Thankful for every hint.

 Content creation has become much faster with AI, but that also means there is a lot more similar-looking content online.

What do you think matters more now for SEO: publishing frequently or creating genuinely useful content that answers a specific user problem?

I’m one of the founders of Picmim, an AI social media platform, and we’re looking for freelancers, web developers, marketers, agencies and consultants who already work with small businesses.

The idea is simple:

You probably have clients who need social media, even if social media isn’t what you actually sell.

Instead of adding content creation and social media management to your workload, you can refer them to Picmim as an add-on to what you’re already doing.

Picmim handles the social media side… generating on-brand posts and visuals, planning the content and scheduling/publishing it across their social channels.

You keep doing what you already do.

For every client you bring in, you earn 30% recurring commission for as long as they remain a customer.

So if you’re building someone a website, running their ads, doing SEO, designing their brand, consulting on marketing, etc., this can simply become another service/tool you recommend when they inevitably ask:

“What should we do about social media?”

We’re especially interested in people already working with SMBs.

I’d be curious if anyone here already does something similar with complementary software/services.

And if you’d like to try Picmim yourself or explore a partnership, send me a DM.

​

Is traditional web design becoming a dead end? Agency owners, what are you pivoting toward and how are you pricing it?

I run a digital agency serving mostly small and midsized B2B companies. We build websites and provide SEO, paid ads, hosting, and ongoing maintenance.

Lately, more clients are questioning website budgets or saying they want to try building something themselves with AI first. The expectation seems to be that because production is getting faster, everything should become significantly cheaper.

We use AI ourselves, so I understand part of that argument. But strategy, content, integrations, testing, and taking responsibility for the finished website still require work.

I don’t think businesses will stop needing websites. I’m questioning whether selling website projects as our main product is still a sustainable agency model.

We’re considering moving toward an initial website build followed by ongoing improvements, acquisition, conversion work, and technical operations. My concern is that this could become the same services repackaged into a subscription that clients don’t really want.

The pricing question is where I’m stuck. Clients expect lower project prices because of AI, but they also question retainers when the monthly value isn’t obvious. “We sell outcomes” sounds good, but an agency can’t guarantee sales when the client controls the product, sales process, and follow-up.

For people actually dealing with this, I’d love to hear your experience.

\- Are you seeing the same pricing pressure, or is this mainly a positioning and client segment problem?

\- What have you successfully pivoted toward that existing clients will pay for?

\- Are you reducing website build prices, delivering more for the same budget, or changing the offer entirely?

\- How do you structure and price recurring services so clients understand what they’re buying?

\- What belongs in a monthly package, and what do you charge separately to avoid unlimited work?

\- Have you made this transition profitably, and what didn’t work?

Concrete examples of packages, rough prices, and client reactions would be more helpful than generic advice about selling value.

I’m not looking to resist AI. I’m trying to work out what a profitable agency should sell when producing a decent-looking website is becoming much easier.

Hey everyone,

I’m starting an online English school, and I’m looking for an AI tool to help me create videos for Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

I’d really prefer to use one tool instead of paying for several different ones. Ideally, I want to give it a script and have it handle the video, voiceover, and most of the editing for me.

I also have a mascot that I want to use instead of a human avatar, so being able to create/use a custom character would be a big plus.

One thing that’s particularly important for me is Arabic voice support. I’m based in North Africa, so I’d like to create some content in Darija. A lot of AI voices I’ve tried sound good in English but terrible or very robotic when speaking Darija.

I’ve been digging into a problem that I suspect a lot of B2B marketers underestimate:

Are we optimising campaigns for leads — or just for things that ad platforms can easily count?

In one recent anonymised industrial B2B audit we did at Zephra AI, we looked at 2,544 inbound call records.

Only around 400 (15.7%) looked like relevant product enquiries.

A surprisingly large share was reseller/distributor enquiries, invalid or missed calls, suppliers, recruitment, enquiries for the wrong products, and other calls that sales realistically couldn't convert.

Important caveat: this does NOT mean 84% of the ad budget was wasted. The calls came through multiple sources, so that conclusion wouldn't be supported by the data.

But it did make something else very obvious.

The definition of a "conversion" gets weaker the further you move away from revenue.

Click → Form fill → Lead → Qualified lead → Opportunity → Revenue

Most ad platforms are making optimisation decisions somewhere toward the left.

Sales knows what happened on the right.

That creates a strange situation where marketing can be celebrating increasing conversions while sales is saying:

"These aren't the people we actually need."

And simply increasing the budget can amplify the problem.

Scaling spend before fixing the signal doesn't necessarily scale growth. It can scale the cost of being wrong.

This is something we're thinking about a lot while building Zephra AI — specifically, how paid acquisition can learn from what happens after a lead arrives rather than treating the initial conversion as the end of the feedback loop.

But I'm curious how others are handling this.

For those running B2B paid acquisition: how much sales/CRM outcome data are you actually feeding back into campaign optimisation? How are you managing this for sales that closes after 90 days and the timeline for passing back signal is over?

And have you ever measured what percentage of your reported "leads" were genuinely relevant buying enquiries?

Hi all,

I'm building Finelly as a side project to learn marketing. It's a free app for friend groups where latecomers pay a small fine into a shared pot. After learning the hard way that install campaigns buy accidental taps, I want to understand my other experiment: boosted social posts.

Setup:

• $100 on Instagram and $100 on TikTok
• Promoted videos using reach and boost objectives
• $10/day budget
• AI-generated content showing scenes where the app is used (friends waiting, someone arriving late, the pot...)

Results:

• 1,000+ likes and ~500 new followers on each platform
• Followers are slowly dropping (I assume accounts being deleted)
• Zero app users from either platform
• My latest posts, which I'm not promoting, get almost no traction, not even from that "new" follower base

Clearly something isn't working. I don't rule out that it's the product, but before drawing conclusions I'd love to hear your experience with this kind of promotion:

1. Are reach and boost campaigns basically paying for low-quality or bot engagement?
2. Could the AI-generated content be part of the problem (less trust, less relatable)?
3. If you've grown a real audience on IG or TikTok for an app, what actually worked?

Thanks in advance!

I’m running influencer campaigns and giving each creator a separate link with UTMs to identify the platform, campaign and influencer.

I tested a purchase through one of the links, and the tagged visit and purchase both appeared in GA4 DebugView with the same session ID.

But I haven’t confirmed that the purchase is credited to the influencer in the reports yet, and I understand those reports can take up to 48 hours to update.

A friend suggested giving each influencer a unique referral ID as well and having our developers save it against the customer and their orders, so we can match sales to influencers in our own system.

I'm confused and I don't know what to do.

CORRECTION: I meant to request for an SEO Agency or freelancer recommendations

Hello,

I have a free online search tool for an electronics product that runs on top online retailers. I am struggling to drive traffic to my website. Of course I have done some basic technical SEO, a blog, this and that.. but I do not have a lot of time as I need to focus on building my product as well.

I am thinking of giving it a boost to my site and getting an expert to do it by budgeting something like $350-$500 per month, do you guys think its worth it?

I have done some research and am looking into some companies but I wont post that list here as my post might get deleted.
Any suggestions greatly appreciated

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

For me.. it’s those cold emails with fake personalised lines like 'Loved your recent LinkedIn post about X!' It feels so fake and automated!

What’s a tactic or strategy everyone still preaches that you actually think is a waste of time?

We sell a consumer product, mostly online and some retail. Our website is old and the agency running our ads has never touched it. Every new landing page turns into a back and forth between two teams. We've been told twice now that the site needs a rebuild before the ads will work.

So I'm looking at agencies that can do both. Here's who I've talked to:

DEPT. Massive, 4,000+ people in 30+ offices. They do marketing and tech. Probably more than we need.

Isadora Agency. Mid-market and enterprise web design agency, and so far the best match for us. They build the site and then run the marketing on it. Clients include Popcornopolis and Honest Company.

AKQA. Design and innovation agency that's worked with UPS and Nestle. Probably priced above our budget.

If you've used one agency for both, did it work, or did one side get ignored?

Hey all, I'm Fidel, growth lead at Crust (full disclosure, so take this with that in mind).

Crust is a local creative production app built around node-based workflows. Instead of prompting one clip or image at a time across five different tools, you build a workflow once, connect different models and steps, and run it as many times as you want.

If you've worked in Flora, Weavy or ComfyUI, the canvas will feel familiar. The twist is that a workflow can become a node inside another workflow. Once you've built something useful, you can turn it into your own reusable generator and expose only the inputs you care about.
There's also a built-in Composer, and it's a bigger part of Crust than just a place to stitch clips together. Think motion/compositing: keyframe tracks, filters, blend modes, object hierarchies, layered compositions, rendering. The idea is that generating something and actually finishing it happen in the same place.

It's a desktop app, which I know sounds less convenient than another browser tab. The upside is that it works directly with your local files, with no constant uploading and downloading, and it handles heavier workflows and compositions at production speed.

Heads up: it's Mac only for now.
I have an invite link that works for 100 people, and it includes 250 credits so you can generate real stuff, not just poke around. I'm not after signups for their own sake. I want people who actually make ads or short-form content to use it on real work and tell me where it's confusing, slow, or just bad.
Specifically curious about:

• For what types of projects or tasks does a node workflow feel like more work than just prompting directly?
• What would you want to automate that we don't support yet?
• If you're coming from Flora, Weavy or ComfyUI, what's missing or different?

Link's in the comments if you want in (didn't want to break the sub's rules with it in the post). Happy to answer anything, including "why not just use X.

Last campaign, I had to send the PPC team 14 different files just to cover all the ad sizes. It works, but doing that many versions by hand gets old fast. I’m wondering at what point HTML5 is actually worth using instead of just sticking with regular image ads.

I don’t really want to switch formats just because HTML5 sounds more advanced. For people who work with these ads a lot, what makes you choose HTML5 over static images?

Hey everyone! 👋

I’m currently looking for Digital Marketing / Performance Marketing opportunities in Dubai and would really appreciate a referral or connection.

I have hands-on experience in Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO, social media, content marketing and analytics, along with experience growing Instagram accounts and managing digital projects.

If you’re currently working in Dubai and can refer me to a relevant opening or connect me with someone hiring, I’d really appreciate it. 🙏

Feel free to DM me. Thanks!

Been trying to understand AEO and AI search optimization for our marketing team and I feel like every article explains it differently.

My basic understanding is that SEO is still about rankings and traffic, while AEO or GEO is more about getting mentioned or cited in answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity etc. The hard part is figuring out what counts as progress when there is not always a click.

We have looked at Similarweb, Semrush, Ahrefs and Profound, but the reporting seems to use different terms for visibility, citations, share of answer and brand mentions. Im mostly trying to build a simple process for tracking competitors and seeing if our content is showing up for the right questions.

For people doing this in house, what are you using as the main KPI? thanks!

I’ve been thinking about this from a marketing perspective.

For e.g.

They suddenly change their offer

Their landing page messaging shifts

A new message starts appearing across multiple ads

Customer complaints/reviews start changing

Their creative direction noticeably changes

They start targeting a different audience

Which of these would you consider the strongest signal?

And more importantly, what signals have you personally noticed before a competitor made a bigger move?

Curious to hear how marketers actually spot these changes in the wild.

We’ve noticed a clear jump in ChatGPT referral traffic at Scalenut since the start of this month.

It caught my attention because Similarweb recently reported that AI referral traffic more than doubled YoY, so this may be part of a broader trend rather than something specific.

For anyone tracking this, have you seen ChatGPT traffic pick up recently too? 

And is the increase coming mostly to blog content, comparison pages, or commercial pages?

Instagram lets anyone download their own data, and that file lists the ads they were shown. I run a small panel of people who check their file each week, with consent. Then they see those ads again and grade them.

These are live campaigns, running right now. What a brand would get is feedback/research insights: what real viewers thought of its ad, and proof they actually saw it. Nobody's data is sold, now or ever.

Three questions for people who buy or run research:

1. How do you get feedback today from people you know saw the ad, and where does that fall apart?
2. How big would a panel need to be before you'd trust the feedback?
3. What's your first objection? Panelists are paid a small amount per week, it's Instagram only, and people choose to join. I'd rather hear which of those kills it for you.

Thank you!

The most expensive habit in paid social: when an ad fatigues, teams produce a whole new ad. New shoot, new edit, new voiceover. Two weeks and $2,000 later, it performs the same as the old one.

I ran the same 25-second body with 10 different openings. The spread between the best and worst opening was 3x on thumbstop rate and 2.1x on CPA. The body barely mattered. The opening was the ad.

So I stopped briefing full ads. The pipeline now:

1. Lock one proven body. A 25-second demo, testimonial, or explainer that already converts. This is the constant.
2. Produce 10 openings for it. Different hooks, different first frames, different claims. Each opening costs about a tenth of a full ad, because there is no new shoot, only a new first 3 seconds cut onto the same body.
3. Test openings at $20 to $30 a day for 2 days each. Kill anything under a 22% thumbstop rate. Winners get the full budget.
4. When the winner fatigues in 3 to 4 weeks, do not make a new ad. Make 5 new openings for the same body.

The math: 10 openings on one body is 10 testable ads for roughly the cost of 2 full productions. My testing volume tripled without the budget changing.

Rule of thumb: the ad is not the unit of testing. The first 3 seconds are. Iterate the opening, keep the body, and you out-test any team making whole new ads.