Four topics worth your morning coffee.

I learned a hard lesson about ads. Above I mentioned that we had a massive uptick in traffic, but let's talk about that. At first the numbers looked great, 2% CTR, $3 clicks, the kind of stats you gloat about internally. Then after breaking it down, we realized that most of it was coming from LinkedIn's Audience Network, and once we switched that off, the $3 clicks became $35 clicks. Ouch. Lesson: a good-looking blended number is often two very different stories hiding inside each other, and the only way to find out which one you're actually telling is to break it apart. My ego still hasn't fully recovered.

Part of my cold outreach has included scouring marketing job listings and emailing those companies to suggest a different way to fill the role. It eventually hit me that these job descriptions are absolutely unhinged. Most I came across are searching for a unicorn that wears 7 to 10 hats, with one or two hats actually related to marketing. What I learned from this is that people have confused marketing with content production. Marketing is the long-term strategy a business uses to figure out who its customers are and what they actually need. Somewhere along the way it became volume over authenticity, and social media ate the rest. I'm going to turn this into a longer blog because I think it'd be helpful, so stay tuned.

When someone asks their AI platform of preference a question, such as, "the best marketing professionals in Rhode Island," it doesn't read websites. It reads directories, reviews, and third-party mentions. While your website makes you LEGIBLE, other people talking about you makes you CREDIBLE. So don't spend all your time on AEO/SEO/whatever and ignore the credibility side of things. This is probably old news, but it's new to me, and hopefully it's new to someone else, too. You're welcome.