Why Your $AI Marketing Investment Failed:

The 6 Rules That Drive Results

The Core Problem: The AI Hype vs. Reality Gap

You spent money on AI tools—and it’s not working. You’re not alone. The vast majority of companies are wasting their investment.

• 74% of companies implementing AI marketing tools report zero tangible value.
• The gap between using AI and driving revenue is massive; only 4% generate consistent value.
• The average marketing team only utilizes 33% of its expensive technology stack, down from 58% just a few years ago.

The New Reality: Search & Ads Are Becoming Obsolete

The fundamental rules of digital marketing have changed in the last 18 months, making old strategies financial suicide.

• Paid Search is breaking: Users can now permanently hide all your paid ads.
• Zero-Click World: Up to 70% of searches will end without a click to your website, with AI Overviews reducing traditional traffic by 30%.

The 6 Non-Negotiable Rules for 2025 Success

The 4% of winners follow a counter-intuitive formula. You must shift your focus from tools to strategy, integration, and people⁹.

Rule 1: Stop Trusting Your Dashboard -The Attribution Lie

Your analytics are lying to you. Traditional reporting overstates search ROI by a staggering 336% by ignoring the most important step. 30% of your perceived paid search success actually comes from elsewhere (like social media and brand building). Action: Fix your attribution immediately.

Rule 2: Flip the Budget Split- 60:40 is the New Standard

Performance marketing (direct sales) is essential, but it doesn’t work without brand power. Brand messaging outperforms direct performance marketing 80% of the time. The optimal budget split is 60% Brand-Building to 40% Sales Activation.

Rule 3: Invest in Creative, Not Algorithms

The tool and the targeting algorithm are only a small factor. 70% of your campaign success stems from creative quality. Enhancing low-performing ads can deliver a 2.5x ROI lift. Action: Cut media spend and invest in better creative.

Rule 4: Stop Cutting in a Downturn

Cutting marketing during a recession is financial suicide. Companies that maintain or increase investment during downturns achieve 256% higher sales growth when the economy recovers. Action: Your competitors are pulling back, making it cheaper for you to dominate.

Rule 5: Simplify Your Tech- People Over Platforms

Consolidating and integrating is the path to profit. The most successful companies follow the 10-20-70 Rule: 10% on algorithms, 20% on tech/data, and 70% on people and processes. Action: Consolidate your “Frankenstack” of overlapping tools.

Rule 6: Master GEO – Generative Engine Optimization

Since search is changing, you must optimize for AI. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) makes your business the answer AI tools (like Google’s AI Overviews) display. Early adopters are seeing 30-40% visibility improvements in AI search.

The Bottom Line

The difference between success and failure is not technology; it is strategy, integration, and expertise applied consistently over time.

Will you be in the 4% that captures the value, or the 74% that writes off AI as hype?

Let’s Talk About What’s Really Happening with Your Marketing Dollars

You’ve probably noticed something frustrating lately. Your team deployed AI tools, maybe ChatGPT for content or some fancy ad optimization platform. Everyone’s using them—your marketing director shows you dashboards with impressive activity metrics. But when you ask the hard question—”What’s the actual return?”—you get a lot of talk about “early stages” and “building capabilities.”

You’re not alone. We’ve spent over 25 years working with business owners facing exactly this challenge, and the data tells a story that might surprise you.

These are the numbers:  Digital advertising spending reached $750+ billion globally in 2025. This figure is for Digital advertising, which is a subset of the $1 Trillion total advertising market mentioned earlier. AI-driven marketing platforms are growing at 31-36% annually. Seventy-eight percent of organizations deployed AI across business functions, and 71% regularly use generative AI—nearly double the adoption from just 2023.

On paper, we’re in the middle of a marketing revolution.

But here’s what the vendor presentations don’t tell you: Only 26% of companies have moved beyond proof-of-concept to generate tangible value from AI. Just 4% have developed capabilities that consistently deliver significant returns. Nearly 64% of enterprises cannot push pilots into production, and 85% of AI/ML (complex Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning projects) projects fail to deliver measurable impact.

Even more telling? Forty-eight percent of companies abandoned their AI projects entirely in 2025—up sharply from previous years.  The gap between “we’re using AI” and “AI is driving revenue” is enormous. More than likely, it’s costing you money every month.

The Search Game Just Changed—And Not in Advertisers’ Favor

Let’s talk about something that happened while you were focused on your business. The way people search for products and services has fundamentally transformed in the last 18 months.

ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion prompts daily from 700 million weekly active users. Google’s AI Overviews reach over 1 billion users monthly across 100+ countries. Perplexity AI handles 780 million monthly queries. Your potential customers aren’t just using these tools; they’re replacing Google with them for specific types of searches.

The numbers are stark. Fifty-eight percent of users have replaced traditional search engines with AI tools for product and service discovery. Remember when getting traffic to your website was the goal? Zero-click searches (when the user gets the answer directly from the search result page without clicking a link) increased from 26% in 2022 to 60% in 2024, with projections exceeding 70% by year-end 2025.

Here’s what that means for your business: people are getting their answers without ever clicking to your site. When Google AI Overviews launched, businesses saw a 49% increase in total search impressions but a 30% decrease in click-through rates. You’re visible, but invisible at the same time.

And now Google just made it worse. In a development that dropped just weeks ago, Google launched a new “Sponsored results” header globally, and gave users the ability to hide entire groups of paid ads with one click.

Think about what this means. You’re already dealing with:

• 60% of searches end without clicks
• AI Overviews reducing traffic by 30%
• Now users can permanently hide all your paid ads

The playbook of “just spend more on Google Ads” isn’t just less effective—it’s becoming obsolete.

Local Search Still Matters—If You Know How to Optimize for AI

Before you panic, here’s some good news. Forty-six percent of Google searches still have local intent, and 78% of mobile local searches lead to offline purchases within 24 hours. People are absolutely searching for businesses like yours.

But here’s the problem: Only 30% of businesses have implemented local SEO strategies. And traditional local SEO is just the starting point now.

Sixty-three percent of websites report traffic from AI search engines, yet most companies have no Generative Engine Optimization* strategy.  Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) refers to strategies that specifically optimize your content for AI search tools like Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT.

GEO makes your business the answer AI tools show when people ask questions.   It structures your website and proof — services, FAQs, and reviews — so AI can understand and trust you.  That is a simplified, very basic explanation of how GEO works. For more on using GEO in your business, connect with us.

Result: more visibility in AI answers and local search, leading to more calls and customers. Early movers implementing GEO methods? They’re seeing 30-40% improvements in AI visibility, with some case studies showing lifts of 33% to 55% in AI response appearance rates.

Voice search makes this even more critical. We’ll have 153.5 million U.S. voice search users by the end of 2025, with 76% of voice searches focusing on “near me” and local inquiries. Voice search results load 52% faster than text and drive $164 billion in global purchases via smart devices.  Your competitors that figure this out first are going to own the local market while everyone else keeps dumping money into Google Ads that users are now hiding.

The Marketing Math That Changes Everything

Over 25 years, we’ve analyzed thousands of campaigns. The patterns are consistent, and one finding stands out above all others.  For every marketing channel you add to your campaigns—when done correctly—you improve ROI and effectiveness by up to 35%. This isn’t a small improvement. This is the difference between barely breaking even and building a real growth engine.

Let take a closer look at what this looks like in practice:

LinkedIn combined with display ads: 50% more clicks, 35% higher engagement, and 30% better click-through rates

Google Ads plus display advertising: 7x increase in attributed pipeline and 12.5x influence on closed revenue

Email marketing paired with push notifications: 600% improvement in response rates—14% versus 2% for push-only campaigns

Connected TV combined with display ads: 46% increase in domains visited and 54% more clicks

These aren’t marginal results. They’re significant game-changers that will improve findability.  Yet only 20% of companies integrate their above-the-line (mass media brand-building) and below-the-line (direct, measurable response) efforts, which means 80% are leaving 5-8% sales growth on the table.

Notice the obvious missing element – Conversions!  Clicks, engagement, CTRs, domain visits and response rates are great for analyzing KPIs and measuring campaign results but how does this translate into sales revenue or appointments?   We’ll cover The Conversion Method in another article.

The Attribution Lie That’s Killing Your Budget

Here’s something that will probably make you angry, especially if you’ve been making budget decisions based on your analytics dashboard.  Thirty percent of the ROI you’re attributing to paid search actually comes from other marketing activities—particularly your social media and brand-building campaigns. Meta’s 2024 analysis found 50% of sales driven by its platforms were misattributed to search results.

Your analytics are lying to you. Traditional last-click attribution overstates search ROI by a staggering 336% while understating social media ROI by 44% compared to what’s actually happening.

We watched one company shift 61% of their brand budget to performance marketing because “the data showed it was working better.” Result? 22% decrease in performance ROI and 16% decrease in total marketing ROI. They thought they were optimizing. They were actually destroying the brand activities that made their performance channels work in the first place.

In Simple English

Most people don’t buy after just one click. They notice you on social, read a post, see an ad again, then Google you and buy—yet the last click gets all the credit.  Search didn’t do it alone. People usually meet your brand on social, see a few ads, maybe read a blog, and only then search your name to buy. Old “last-click” reports hand all the credit to that final search click, making search look bigger than it is and shortchanging the work your social and content already did.  Think of it like a relay race: social and content run the first laps, then search crosses the finish line. If you only thank the finisher, you miss who set up the win.  Your channels are co-dependent—social and content warm people up, search closes the loop—so don’t judge success by the last click alone.

This is why having someone who understands the full picture—not just reads dashboards—is critical.

Brand Building vs. Direct Response: The 80/20 Rule You Need to Know

Let’s address something controversial. You probably think direct response marketing—the kind that drives immediate sales—is more effective than brand building. Every fiber of your business sense says “show me the immediate ROI.”

The data says otherwise and understanding why might be the most valuable message you take from this article.  Brand marketing and messaging outperforms performance marketing 80% of the time in terms of sales and ROI. This finding comes from analyzing 1,000+ brands across 50 countries representing hundreds of billions in marketing spend.

Upper-funnel tactics, awareness & interest —are defined as activities that help people discover you and start caring—e.g., social posts, videos, blog articles, PR, display ads. Goal: get on their radar and spark curiosity. They prove to be 60% more effective long-term than lower-funnel approaches (consideration & conversion—activities that help people decide and act—e.g., search ads, product pages, demos, reviews, email offers, retargeting). Goal: answer final questions and drive purchase or signup)  while showing only 25% less effectiveness short-term.

Aggregated data indicates that companies increasing brand spend by 40–50% year-over-year between 2023–2025 saw profit increases averaging 61–68%, while firms expanding performance marketing alone by similar levels (roughly 30–35%) experienced around 44–49% revenue uplift, confirming a gap similar in direction—but slightly narrower—than the 2020–2022 numbers.  (The key takeaway here is that Brand spending leads to significantly higher profit growth over time.)

Notice what happened there?  Brand investment takes longer to generate visible ROI, its compounding effect significantly improves long-term profitability. In contrast, performance marketing remains key for driving measurable short-term revenue, but without brand equity reinforcement, it risks diminishing returns beyond the 12–18 month horizon.

The optimal split for maximizing ROI and profit is consistently found to be 60% brand-building and 40% performance (sales activation) marketing. This statistically and historically reinforces that companies maintaining this balance realize higher long-term revenue growth, stronger brand equity, and less vulnerability to market fluctuations.

Here’s the timing element that matters, quarterly-focused performance campaigns may yield higher immediate ROI, but as much as 58% of profit from advertising accrues beyond the first 13 weeks, disproportionately benefiting those with significant brand investment.

Most business owners evaluate campaigns at 30-60 days and make decisions based on incomplete data. The real returns are still building.  Instead measure ROI over a 12–24 month horizon.  Short-term windows underrepresent the true financial impact, often missing more than half of accrued returns.

Creative Quality Matters More Than Anything Else

Want to know what actually drives campaign performance? It’s not the platform. It’s not the targeting algorithm. It’s not the AI optimization.

It’s your creative, or lack thereof.  Seventy percent of campaign success stems from creative quality, relevancy, and personalization, with the remaining 30% from format, publisher and media targeting. (Research shows Creative contributes anywhere from 49% (Nielsen) to 70% of success, making it the single biggest factor.)  Nielsen’s research places creative’s contribution at 49% of total sales impact.

Enhancing low-performing ad creatives to high-quality standards can deliver up to a 2.5x ROI lift, as recent studies show that roughly 55–60% of video ads remain suboptimal in creative quality. That means most companies could double their advertising ROI just by improving what they’re saying and how they’re saying it—without spending another dollar on media.

But creative development is usually the first thing cut when budgets tighten. We’ve watched this pattern for over 25 years, and it never makes sense.

The Recession Playbook: Why Cutting Marketing Is Financial Suicide

Let’s talk about what happens when things get tight economically. Your numbers person (could be you, a CFO, partner or a staff member) looks at the balance sheet and says “we need to cut spending.” Marketing is usually target number one because it’s seen as discretionary.

Here’s what 100 years of data says about that decision.

Companies that maintained or increased advertising during recessions experienced 256% higher sales than those that cut spending when the economy returned to growth. Those maintaining spend achieved 275% sales growth over five years versus 19% for companies that reduced advertising.

Winners during the last recession grew at a 17% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate—the average annual growth rate over a specified period) during the downturn, versus 0% for companies that cut marketing. Maintaining Share of Voice during recessions delivers disproportionate market share gains at reduced cost as competitors retreat.

Here’s why this happens:

• Media rates decrease during downturns. Your same budget buys more visibility when competitors pull back.
• Competitors’ budget cuts create gaps. You dominate the conversation in your category.
• Brand memory weakens without reinforcement. Recovery after cuts costs 4-5x as much as maintaining presence.
• Most recessions end within one year. Short-term savings from cuts provide minimal benefit while creating a lasting competitive disadvantage.

There are several concrete competitor examples (2020–2025) that validate the recurring pattern: brands that sustain or grow marketing investment during downturns outperform rivals that cut back. Let me give you real examples:

The pattern repeats every economic downturn. Companies that maintain investment capture permanent market position gains that persist for decades. These modern scenarios—spanning consumer goods, tech, and fitness—strongly reinforce the long-proven economic truth: protect brand investment through downturns secure long-term profit and market share advantage

The Technology Trap: Why More Tools Usually Mean Worse Results

Here’s something you need to know about the marketing technology explosion.

The marketing technology landscape grew from 150 solutions in 2011 to 14,106 in 2024—a 9,304% increase over 13 years. Your marketing team probably already has access to dozens of these tools.  As of 2025, the marketing technology (MarTech) landscape has reached a record 15,384 solutions across 49 categories, marking a 9% increase from 2024 and a 100x (10,156%) expansion since 2011. This surge reflects both relentless growth in new AI-powered tools and substantial turnover, with over 1,200 older platforms exiting the market in the past year alone.

Here’s the problem: The latest data for 2025 confirms that marketers are now utilizing only about 33% of their technology stack’s capabilities—unchanged from 2023, and down significantly from 42% in 2022 and 58% in 2020–2021. Notice the trend: as the number of available tools has increased, the percentage of tools marketers actually use has significantly dropped. This ongoing underutilization highlights persistent challenges such as tool fragmentation, lack of integration, and “stack sprawl,” with most organizations paying for triple the software functionality they actually use.

You bought more tools, and performance got worse, not better.  Why? Sixty-five percent cite data integration as the biggest stack management challenge. Only 17% of business leaders report their martech components work “extremely well together”. Companies manage an average of 291 SaaS subscriptions, with enterprise organizations using 62 marketing tools on average.

It’s what is commonly referred to as the “Frankenstack”—overlapping, duplicative, incompatible capabilities that create complexity rather than deliver results.   The companies that figured this out went the opposite direction:

IBM: Consolidated from 40+ marketing solutions to 5, saving $120 million while improving performance

Lenovo: Consolidated 3 martech solutions into one platform, saving $11 million annually while increasing content volume 53% and improving click-through rates 12.5%

Fewer tools, better results, more money saved. That’s the pattern we see consistently. Companies in manufacturing, IT services, media, and consumer brands—alongside tech giants—are now consolidating their martech stacks, reducing costs, boosting productivity, and accelerating marketing outcomes by systematically eliminating duplication and enforcing unified governance.

The Skills Gap Nobody Talks About

Here’s the other side of the technology trap. Thirty-seven percent of marketers identified data and analytics as their most significant skills gap—and that number is growing. Forty-nine percent of marketers in 2024 were not offered opportunities to upskill, up from 34% in 2023.  Organizations struggle to find qualified individuals with current digital skills and to retain staff with sought-after capabilities.

Some studies show that 61% percent of CMOs lack in-house capabilities to deliver their strategy, despite allocating 25.4% of budgets to technology.  Now, how does that compare to a small to mid-sized business where a select few individuals wear multiple hats?

You see the problem? Companies are spending heavily on tools while starving the capabilities, training, and integration work that make tools effective. It’s like buying a Ferrari and hiring someone who’s never driven a stick shift.

What Actually Separates Winners from the 74% Getting Nothing

After 25 years of watching companies succeed and fail with marketing technology, the pattern is clear. It’s not about which tools you buy. It’s about how you implement them.  But here’s what separates them: systematic capability development, not tool acquisition.

Data-driven companies are 23x more likely to acquire customers, 19x more likely to be profitable, and make decisions 5x faster than competitors. They achieve 30% annual growth on average while being 6% more profitable and 5% more productive.

The 10-20-70 Rule Nobody Follows -But Everyone Should

The successful companies follow what we call the 10-20-70 principle: 10% of resources in algorithms, 20% in technology and data, and 70% in people and processes.   This isn’t theory. It’s what’s actually working in 2025, especially for companies generating real ROI from AI-powered marketing. Industry leaders consistently report that the bulk of their resources go toward change management, talent development, and operationalizing new workflows—not just buying tools or building models.  Most companies do the exact opposite. They overemphasize tech spending while underinvesting in people, which explains why marketing stack utilization sits at just 33% in 2025.

Stop Trying to Boil the Ocean

Here’s something we see constantly: companies try to implement AI everywhere at once. Ten pilot projects. A dozen “priorities.” Teams are spread impossibly thin. Zero results.

The winners do the opposite. Leaders pursue approximately 50% fewer opportunities than their peers but concentrate on the highest-priority, highest-value initiatives. They deploy 1-3 use cases per workflow and execute deeply rather than spreading across 6+ shallow implementations.

Think about it like this: Would you rather have your team trying to use AI for email subject lines, ad copy, customer service, content creation, lead scoring, and social media posts all at once—or nail one thing so well it transforms your business?

Example: Instead of “we’re using AI for everything,” successful companies say “we’re using AI to dramatically improve how we qualify leads before our sales team touches them.” One thing. Done right. Massive impact.

Your Data Is Probably a Mess – And That’s Why Nothing Works

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: 80% of AI failures trace back to poor data hygiene.  What does that actually mean for your business?

• Customer information is scattered across your CRM, email platform, website, and spreadsheets
• Duplicate records (Joe Smith, Joseph Smith, J. Smith all treated as different people)
• Incomplete information (missing phone numbers, email addresses, purchase history)
• No single source of truth about who your customers actually are

You can’t get good answers from AI if you’re feeding it garbage information. It’s like asking a brilliant analyst to make sense of a filing cabinet that’s been through a tornado.

The smart plan is to maintain unified, high-quality customer data with centralized management BEFORE deploying advanced analytics. Boring? Yes. Essential? Absolutely.

One Dashboard Is Lying to You

Remember earlier when we talked about how 30% of your paid search results actually come from other marketing activities? That’s happening because you’re probably looking at one report—usually Google Analytics or your ad platform dashboard.  Companies that have a thorough understanding  of their campaign statistics use multiple measurement approaches—marketing mix modeling, multi-touch attribution, and incrementality testing—rather than trusting a single dashboard. They look at marketing from three different angles:

• Marketing Mix Modeling: What happens to sales when we increase or decrease spending in each channel over time? (The big picture view)
• Multi-Touch Attribution: Which marketing activities did a customer actually interact with before buying? (The customer journey view)
• Incrementality Testing: What sales would we have gotten anyway, versus what sales happened BECAUSE of our marketing? (The “did it actually work” view)
• Companies actively managing customer touchpoints and journeys this way achieve 54% greater return on marketing investment than those with fragmented measurement.

This should matter to you because that report showing “paid search is our best channel” might be completely wrong. You could be defunding the activities that actually drive sales while doubling down on channels that just happen to be the last click before purchase.

Your Six-Point Action Plan (What to Do Monday Morning)

Let us bring this home with specific guidance you can act on immediately.

Point 1: Maintain the 60:40 Split—No Matter What

Keep 60% of marketing budget in brand-building and 40% in sales activation. In some categories, innovators and marketing mavens allocate up to 70% to brand building. Never shift brand budget to performance marketing during economic downturns—this reliably produces 20-30% decreases in marketing ROI.

Point 2: Fix Your Attribution Before Making Another Budget Decision

Thirty percent of paid search performance originates from other marketing activities. Attribution models systematically overvalue clickable channels by 2-10x while undervaluing brand-building activities. Get this right before you optimize anything else.  This is another way of stating that last-click models grossly over-credit the final touchpoint, just as we showed with the 336% overstatement earlier.

Point 3: Consolidate and Integrate Your Tech Stack

The 9,304% growth in MarTech solutions since 2011 hasn’t improved average marketing performance as evidenced by the decline in utilization rates from 58% to 33%. Companies consolidating stacks while investing in integration and training outperform those expanding tool counts.

Point 4: Invest in Creative as Your Primary Performance Lever

With 49-70% of advertising impact stemming from creative, campaigns featuring optimal executions deliver 2.2x ROI improvements. Yet organizations systematically underfund creative development relative to media spend.

Point 5: Recognize Channel Synergy as Multiplicative, Not Additive

Each channel added improves ROI by up to 35%—but only when properly integrated. Point solutions operating in isolation capture perhaps 25% of potential returns. The 80% of companies not integrating efforts sacrifice 5-8% sales growth.

Point 6: Prepare for the New Search Reality

With Google now letting users hide all sponsored results, zero-click searches at 60% and rising to 70%, and AI Overviews reducing click-throughs by 30%, traditional paid search strategies are becoming obsolete. Sixty-three percent of websites now get traffic from AI search engines, with early GEO adopters seeing 30-40% visibility improvements.  AI search engines now drive traffic to 63% of websites. The old playbook isn’t just less effective—it’s becoming obsolete.

The Choice That Will Define Your Next Five Years

Here’s what’s happening right now, this week, while you’re reading this.  There is no doubt that your competitors are splitting into two groups.

Group One is chasing every shiny new tool, spreading teams thin across shallow pilots, trusting single dashboards, cutting brand budgets when things get tight, and wondering why their 88% AI adoption rate isn’t moving the revenue needle.

Group Two is investing in people over platforms, integrating rather than accumulating, measuring what matters rather than what’s easy, and maintaining strategic conviction even when short-term pressure tempts budget cuts.

The gap between these groups isn’t small. The statistics are startling.  Those innovators in Group Two know the formula.  It’s 256% higher sales growth. It’s 23x better customer acquisition. It’s 54% greater marketing ROI. It’s the difference between thriving and treading water.  We’ve just proven that the success gap is widening every single day.  Isn’t it the right time to start doing things differently?

The $1 Trillion Question

The global advertising market hit $1 trillion in 2025. The opportunity is enormous for businesses that implement strategic marketing capabilities.  But here’s the truth we’ve learned over 25 years: tool adoption alone even at 88% daily usage rates delivers zero return without organizational sophistication, integrated systems, measurement discipline and long-term strategic commitment.

The 4% of organizations generating consistent, significant value from AI investments follow five fundamentally different approaches than the 74% generating no value because they:

1. Invest in people over platforms
2. Integrate rather than accumulate
3. Measure what matters rather than what’s easy
4. Maintain strategic conviction even when pressure mounts
5. Understand that 70% of success comes from people and process, not algorithms

The question isn’t whether AI will transform marketing because, obviously, it already has.  The question you should be asking yourself and your key business development teams is whether you’ll be in the 4% that captures the value or the 74% that writes it off as hype that didn’t deliver.

Why This Moment Matters

After more than two decades living and breathing in this ‘space’, helping businesses navigate exactly these challenges, we can tell you this with certainty: the difference between those outcomes isn’t technology. It’s strategy, integration, and expertise applied consistently over time.

The companies that win won’t be the ones with the most tools. They’ll be the ones who understand what actually drives results—and have the discipline to execute against that understanding even when vendors are selling something easier or that appears to be

• Easier
• Less Costly
• Quick To Integrate
• The Next Shiny Object

Pick one that resonates with you and re-read this article because the ‘understanding’ doesn’t come from reading one article. It comes from experience; from watching thousands of campaigns, analyzing hundreds of billions in marketing spend, and seeing patterns repeat across industries and decades.

It comes from knowing which 3 marketing activities will actually move your needle versus the 47 things your team could be doing. From understanding when attribution is lying to you. From recognizing the difference between activity and results.

Here’s what we know about your business right now without ever meeting you:

You’re generating leads (or you’re not), but conversion rates could be better (couldn’t they always be better?). Your team is busy (but does busy translate into revenue), and you’re still not sure all that activity translates to revenue. (What KPIs or ROIs are overshadowing the realities?) You’ve invested in tools (how many are actively being put to productive use?), but you’re not confident you’re getting the ROI you should be. (Isn’t that the most telling of all?) And when you look at your marketing dashboard, you’re not entirely sure you can trust what it’s telling you.  Does this sound familiar?

Let’s Have a Conversation

We’re not going to pitch you anything on a first call. We’re not going to tell you what tools you need to buy. We’re not going to sell you a package, a process or a product.  What we promise to do is listen to where you are, show you where the gaps might be, and have a conversation about whether what we’ve learned over 25 years can help you get from where you are to where you want to be.

Maybe you’re in the 26% already generating value from AI and need help scaling. Maybe you’re in the 74% wondering why your investment isn’t paying off. Maybe you’re somewhere in between, doing some things right but leaving significant ROI on the table.

The only way to know is to talk.

• No pressure. Zero sales pitch. Just a straightforward chat about your business, your goals, and whether the patterns we’ve seen in other companies apply to yours.
• Because here’s the thing: the window to adapt isn’t closing next year. It’s closing right now. Every week, your competitors are making their choice—chasing tools or building capabilities. Every week that gap widens. Every week the new search reality makes old strategies less effective.
• You don’t have to figure this out alone. That’s what 25 years of experience is for.

Ready to talk? Schedule a no-pressure strategy conversation here or email us at contact@efriendmarketing.com

We’ll bring the questions. The insights. The patterns we’ve seen. And the honest assessment of whether we can help. You bring your business challenges, your goals, and your curiosity.

Let’s figure out which group you want to be in—and how to get you there.