Lately it feels like every new AI tool claims it can replace another part of marketer's job.

One tool writes email, Another builds landing pages.

Another promises better ad copy, content, research, or even your entire strategy.

Don't get me wrong, I use AI almost every day, and it's definitely made part of my workflow faster. Brainstorming, first drafts, summarizing information...it's great for those kind of tasks.

But I've also realized that speed isn't usually what determines whether a campaign succeeds.

The harder part is "deciding what to say, who to say it to, and why that message matters in the first place." That's where I still end up speeding most of my time.

AI can give you ten different ideas in seconds, but it doesn't always know which one actually fits your audience, your business, or the moment you're in.

Sometimes I wonder if marketing has shifted from "creating more" to simply making better decisions.

Curious how everyone else is approaching it.

Has AI genuinely changed the way you work, or has it mostly become a tool that helps you get to the starting line a little faster?

Half the leads my lead generation chatbox puuls are junk, fake emails, somehow who bounced the second it asked a real question, the classic asdf at asdf and every tool demo still swears theirs converts at some absurb rate. I am not anti chatbox, I just think the widget isn't the point, the qualifying logic behind it is. A bot that captures everyone is worse than no bot, because now sales is chasing ghosts and quietly blaming me for it. So for anyone whose chatbox for lead generation earns it's slot in the funnel, what are you asking people before you let them through? Intent, budget, timeline, something smarter than a name and an email?

I'd been reading these AI visibility studies and something bugged me. They're all run in English, on US brands, and then we cite them like they apply to a business in Bogota or Valencia. I went looking for the Spanish-language version and found nothing, so we ran it ourselves.

I picked a market with plenty of real players, marketing agencies in Argentina, and wrote 100 searches the way an actual person would type them. I ran them across four engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overview and Perplexity. And here's the part almost nobody does, I repeated the same 100 searches three times, same day, without changing a single word. That's 1,200 queries in total.

The first thing that came out already felt big. Two AIs agree on average on just 9.6% of the brands they recommend. So out of every ten brands that show up, nine don't repeat in the other model. And when I pooled everything I ended up with 932 distinct agencies, of which 81% appeared in a single engine and in none of the other three.

But hold on, because that still wasn't the thing that broke my brain. Before comparing the models against each other I asked the obvious question. If I run the same search on ChatGPT three times in a row, same day, do I get the same brands?

And the answer is no. ChatGPT agrees with itself just 26% of the time. The most stable, AI Overview, reaches 39% and even that doesn't clear half. Meaning three out of four brands it names change between one answer and the next.

And that one finding breaks half the study, mine included. Because two models can't agree with each other more than each one agrees with itself. That 9.6% doesn't mean the AIs think differently, it means a big chunk of what looks like disagreement is actually noise.

One last thing I didn't see coming. Perplexity plays a different game, it recommends global networks like VML, Ogilvy or Dentsu, while the other three reward local agencies. One example, the same agency that shows up in 70 of the 100 searches for Gemini shows up in 9 for Perplexity.

What I take from it is simple. Measure all four engines separately because one doesn't predict the others, never trust a single query, and if your brand is local start with Google, since AI Overview and Gemini are the closest pair.

Required disclaimer, I work at CreceRank and we ran all of this on our own tool, so it could be biased. And the worst part is I've got nothing to compare it against, because there's nothing like this done for the Spanish-speaking market. If anyone has data that contradicts me or wants to rip the methodology apart, please do, that's the most useful thing for me.

When I started learning digital marketing, I assumed I needed to master SEO, Google Ads, social media, email marketing, analytics, and content creation all at once.

That approach only left me overwhelmed.

What finally helped was choosing one small project and learning through execution. I created a basic content plan, researched keywords, wrote a few posts, and checked which topics received the most engagement.

A few things I learned:

• Pick one digital marketing channel before trying everything.
• Learn basic customer research before creating content.
• Track clicks, leads, engagement, and conversions—not only followers.
• Study successful campaigns, but don’t copy them blindly.
• Test different headlines, formats, and calls to action.

My biggest suggestion for beginners is to build a small real-world project. Even a simple Instagram page, blog, or mock business campaign can teach you more than watching endless tutorials.

What part of digital marketing was the most confusing when you started?

it feels like every week another conversation about agentic ai changing GTM. So im interested in what teams are using today rather than what vendors are promising. a few patterns i've been noticing is accounts being monitored countinuously instead of someone manyally checking for updates every few months, segments updating automatically based on buying singlas rather than static CRM listing and outreach happening when there are meaningful changes instead of stricly following a sequence. for people actually using it all in FTM, does this match what youre seeing? or are most teams still just in experimenting phase??

Every platform seems more crowded than ever. Users are exposed to ads on search engines, social media, streaming services and even AI tools. Yet many campaigns struggle to capture attention despite bigger budgets and better targeting.

Do you think consumers are becoming better at filtering out marketing messages or are brands simply relying too much on the same tactics?

What's one ad or campaign you've seen recently that actually made you stop scrolling and pay attention?

I get asked this constantly by clients, and it's almost always coming from a place of fear, like they're going to publish a few AI-assisted pages and get wiped out. So figured I'd share how I actually think about it.

Google doesn't care if one page was written by AI. They're not even trying to detect that, and honestly I don't think they can. What they're looking for is patterns of people trying to game the results. Publishing a ton of optimized content at scale is one of those patterns, because it works really well. If you've got even a little authority and you pump out a lot of content aimed at what people are actually searching, you'll probably see a big traffic jump. But that's also what puts you on the radar for a penalty.

The ones I've seen have all been manual so far. It's the scaled content abuse thing, where someone at Google basically notices what you're doing and drops a penalty on you by hand. There's a decent argument (David Quaid made this on Edward Sturm's podcast) that they'll eventually have to do it algorithmically instead, where the system just catches the pattern on its own. Not sure we're fully there yet but it makes sense.

Anyway, the actual question is how much is too much, and the answer is honestly way more than most people think. Most of the people who are nervous about this are one or two orders of magnitude away from tripping anything.

It mostly comes down to authority and size. Authority being your links, branded searches, how much traffic you already get. Size being how many pages you already have indexed (the Pages report in Search Console). If you've got 100 pages indexed and you add 1,000 in a month, yeah, that looks weird. But if you've got 50,000 indexed and add 1,000, that's just a normal month for you.

The people actually getting hit are adding hundreds or thousands of pages a day. If you're sitting there nervous about doing one page a day, you really don't need to be. For most sites the problem isn't that they're making too much content, it's that they're not making enough.

Hi all!
We’re trying to ramp up our creator partnerships this quarter, but manual discovery is honestly becoming a massive time sink. Browsing social feeds and using basic search tools takes forever, and we keep hitting the same issue: creators who look great on paper, but turn out to have totally irrelevant audience locations or padded follower counts. To actually get a solid pipeline going, we need a reliable way to filter by exact audience demographics, spot fake engagement, and run lookalike searches off our best-performing creators.

I’ve been looking into Influencer Hero alongside tools like Modash and Upfluence to see if we can streamline things. Modash obviously has a huge database for quick searches, and Upfluence we know is more famous but havent received news for a demo yet. Influencer Hero claims to pack AI search and lookalikes right into their CRM. We really want to avoid juggling three separate tools just to find, vet, and manage creators, so I’m curious how well Influencer Hero actually holds up purely as a discovery engine.

For anyone who’s used Influencer Hero to source talent: how accurate are the audience filters and authenticity checks in practice? Do you prefer Modash or Upfluence? We have a demo booked with Modash first and are waiting on the responses of the other platforms.

What ad-related tasks are you still doing in Google Sheets every week that your reporting tool doesn't handle?

Hi there lovely people. I have done a lot of research between Xiaomi and Vivo phones and have come to a conclusion that I want to buy the VIVI X300 Pro mobile phone for taking photos and videos of Gemstones and Jewellery for my new small business. Sunlight is limited in my apartment so it will be used at a work desk. I don’t want to spend too much time on editing and prefer not to. What do you guys think? Anyone has experience with that phone?
I currently have iPhone 15 Pro and I’m not happy with it for many reasons. I personally do not like any Apple products. Used Huawei phones in the past and they were excellent but they now have limitations in North America so thats not an option.
Please advise. Thank you 😊

i run a small bike repair shop in Amsterdam (near the De Pijp area). with everyone riding e-bikes now, we've been slammed. last month, my new mechanic accidentally installed the wrong torque sensor on a cargo bike. the customer noticed it, got understandably frustrated, and instead of calling us, they posted a savage 1-star review on Trustpilot calling us "incompetent and dangerous."

i called them immediately, apologized, swapped the part for the correct one in 30 minutes, and even gave them a high-quality U-lock for free as a peace offering. they were actually super happy with how we handled it and promised to update the review, but it’s been three weeks and nothing has changed.

the real problem is Google. whenever someone in the city searches for my shop name to check our opening hours, that Trustpilot page is the very first thing they see right after our website. the search snippet literally highlights the words "bad service" and "dangerous." in a city where biking is everything, this is a massive blow. i can literally see people stopping their bikes outside, checking their phones, and then just pedaling away to the next shop.

how do you actually deal with a "digital scar" like this that won't go away? i’m looking for a way to re-balance my search results so one mistake from a busy Tuesday isn't the defining characteristic of my brand online. has anyone successfully managed to reorder their page1 or 'diulite' a specific link like this?

I'm curious what hiring managers and agency owners prioritize when evaluating candidates today.

Beyond certifications, which skills make someone stand out?

• SEO
• Google Ads
• Meta Ads
• GA4 & analytics
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• AI tools
• Communication and problem-solving
• Something else?

If you were hiring a junior digital marketer today, what skills would make you choose one candidate over another? I'd love to hear your perspective.

Hi everyone,
I need some guidance from experienced performance marketers.
I’ve been working in Performance Marketing for the last 4 years, but most of my experience has been in small agencies with very limited budgets. Because of that, I never got proper exposure to managing Meta Ads and Google Ads at scale.
In every company, I ended up handling multiple responsibilities like websites, creatives, tracking, and other tasks beyond my role, so I never had the chance to work in a structured team or learn under a senior.
Even though I have 4 years of experience, I honestly feel there are gaps in my knowledge. I want to strengthen my fundamentals and become as skilled as someone with 4 years of solid hands-on experience should be.
If you were in my position, where would you start? Any roadmap, resources, or advice would really help.

Hi everyone,
I need some guidance from experienced performance marketers.
I’ve been working in Performance Marketing for the last 4 years, but most of my experience has been in small agencies with very limited budgets. Because of that, I never got proper exposure to managing Meta Ads and Google Ads at scale.
In every company, I ended up handling multiple responsibilities like websites, creatives, tracking, and other tasks beyond my role, so I never had the chance to work in a structured team or learn under a senior.
Even though I have 4 years of experience, I honestly feel there are gaps in my knowledge. I want to strengthen my fundamentals and become as skilled as someone with 4 years of solid hands-on experience should be.
If you were in my position, where would you start? Any roadmap, resources, or advice would really help.
Thank you!

I started Ved Bracelets about 2 months ago and I’ve been trying to post 3-4 times per week on TikTok and Instagram. I am running out of content to post because I feel like it’s becoming repetitive. It’s the same product, nothing is changing, how am I supposed to put new fresh content out over and over again? Does anyone have tips on what I can do to continue bringing fresh ideas to my accounts? My website is vedbracelets.com and on TikTok and Instagram I can be found @vedbracelets.

I used to work in digital marketing, but I switched careers into public service a few years ago. I now own a small side business designing/mfg landscape lighting in canada and it feels like the marketing landscape has changed significantly with AI and automation.

Most of my sales are B2B. I usually generate interest through cold calls, then send prospects to my website. I want to run social media ads mainly for retargeting website visitors rather than broad prospecting.

Right now, my process is very manual:

• I use ChatGPT to write captions
• I choose one product photo
• I manually post to Facebook and Instagram
• I manage any paid ads directly through Meta
• Right now my meta ads are targetted at people that hold a b2b job title related to landscaping work
• I also run google ppc if that matters

What is the easiest modern setup for managing organic social media and paid retargeting across the main platforms? I want to include linkedin, meta, pinterest, maybe tiktok but my customers are 40+.

Are there tools that can help me:

• Create and schedule content across multiple platforms
• Turn product photos into better posts or short videos
• Automatically generate platform-specific captions
• Build and manage retargeting campaigns
• Reuse one piece of content across several channels
• Track leads that started with a cold call and later visited the website

I am currently a one-person admin, marketing, and sales team, with a couple of employees handling assembly. I am less interested in complicated enterprise software and more interested in a practical system that saves time.

What tools, workflows, or AI automations are small business owners actually using successfully?

If you're starting digital marketing today, I'd focus on these skills:

• SEO fundamentals (still brings long-term traffic)
• Google Analytics & GA4
• AI-assisted content creation (don't rely on AI alone)
• Paid advertising basics (Google & Meta)
• Email marketing and automation

Don't try to learn everything at once. Build one skill, create projects, then move to the next.

Question: Which skill helped you land your first marketing job?

From my experience working on local SEO campaigns, strong entity signals come from making sure every platform tells the same story about the business.

I usually start by aligning the business name, address, phone number, services, and locations across the website, Google Business Profile, directories, and social profiles. I also add accurate LocalBusiness schema, improve service and location pages, strengthen internal links, and build citations from trusted local and industry websites.

Reviews and branded mentions also help reinforce what the business does and where it operates. The best results usually happen when the website, GBP, citations, reviews, backlinks, and social profiles all support one clear and consistent business identity.

What strategies have worked best for you when building stronger entity signals for a local business?

Looks like Google is finally merging Display into Demand Gen.

From what they've announced:

• Starting May 2026, they're encouraging everyone to create Demand Gen campaigns instead of Display.
• By January 2027, you won't be able to create new Display campaigns.
• Later in 2027, existing Display campaigns will be migrated automatically.

Google says we'll get more inventory (Discover, Maps), better creatives, AI tools and improved reporting. They also shared a case study claiming 24% lower CPA and 19% higher conversions.

Personally, I'm not surprised since Google has been pushing automation for a while now. What I'm more interested in is whether we'll keep the same level of placement control and targeting that Display campaigns offer today.

Is this actually a positive move or are we losing another campaign type to automation?

**Looking for the best AI video creation workflow (moving beyond Pictory)**

We currently use **Pictory AI** for our video production workflow and are exploring better alternatives.

Our typical workflow is:

**Script → Video Clips → AI Voiceover → Edit → Publish**

We create both **YouTube Shorts** and **long-form YouTube videos** for clients, including marketing, educational, and explainer content.

A few questions for those creating videos regularly:

1. What tools are you currently using for this workflow?

2. Are you using a single platform (e.g., InVideo AI) or combining tools like Kling, Runway, Veo, ElevenLabs, CapCut, etc.?

3. Which tool gives the best balance of **quality, speed, and cost**?

4. For AI-generated video clips, which platform has the best output today?

5. If you were starting from scratch in 2026, what would your complete AI video creation stack look like?

Looking for recommendations based on **real-world experience**, especially from agencies or creators producing videos at scale. Thanks!

recently started freelancing in Shopify website development. How do you get your first US clients? Cold email, LinkedIn, Upwork, or another method? I’d appreciate advice from people who’ve done it.

For years, digital marketing focused on getting users to click through to websites. Now, AI search tools and AI generated answers are giving people information directly, often without requiring a click at all.

If this trend continues, do you think marketers should stop obsessing over traffic and focus more on brand mentions, authority and visibility across AI platforms?

How do you see marketing changing if fewer users ever visit a company's website?

Recommend a competitor analysis tool to me. It must include or search LinkedIn data

Small B2B SaaS here around $3.2M ARR with a sales team of 5.

About 8 months ago, we started adding AI tools into our workflow. Lead enrichment, scoring, follow up suggestions, email drafting, crm updates, reminders, reporting, all the stuff that used to eat up hours every week.

The impact has been real. Reps spend more time talking to customers and less time doing admin work. One rep now handles the volume that used to require two and things like reporting, lead cleanup, and call logging are mostly automated. What surprised me is the hiring side of it. We were about to open a junior sales role and realized most of the work that used to be considered entrylevel is now handled by workflows. The grunt work that people traditionally learned on just isn't there anymore.

We also recently evaluated two AI vendors. One promised to automate everything and basically turn sales into a black box. The other focused on removing a handful of manual tasks while keeping reps in control. We chose the second one because it supported the team instead of trying to replace it. Now i am wondering what sales teams look like in the next 12-18 months.

How are people creating a learning path for future senior reps when so much of the traditional training ground has disappeared?

I'm looking to improve my marketing workflow with ChatGPT and would love to see prompts that people actually use.

For those using ChatGPT regularly:

• What prompts save you the most time?
• Do you use it for SEO, ad copy, content ideas, email marketing, or analytics?
• Any prompt frameworks that consistently produce better results?
• What's one prompt you couldn't work without?

I'd love to build a collection of practical prompts that marketers use every day.