Earned media was never just about awareness. Here's how to turn coverage into pipeline. Most mid-market businesses treat PR like a feel-good expense. You land a story, share it on LinkedIn, clip it for the quarterly report, and move on. Leadership nods. Nobody asks what it generated. Nobody asks because nobody knows how to find out. That's not a PR problem. That's a measurement problem. And it's costing you. 67% of CMOs say PR directly influences revenue growth over a three-y

I've written about broken attribution before. More than once. If you've been following along, you know my position: last-click measurement was always a simplification, AI amplifies whatever data infrastructure you feed it, and most mid-market businesses are optimizing against a distorted picture of reality before a single bid is placed. I'm not going to repeat all of that here. What I'm going to do is tell you what's actually changed recently, because Google just published a

Your Google Ads search term report is trying to tell you something. The queries are getting longer. More specific. More conversational. Less like someone typing at a desk and more like someone talking to a device while they're doing something else entirely. That's not a glitch. That's voice search, and it's reshaping how buyers find businesses like yours. Google's own data shows 27% of the global online population now uses voice search on mobile. There are more than 8.4 billi

Every platform claims credit for the same sale. Your paid search dashboard shows a conversion. Your display report shows a conversion. Your social team is celebrating a conversion. Your programmatic vendor sent a recap email with impressive numbers. Meanwhile, your CFO is looking at actual revenue and asking why none of it adds up. This is the attribution paradox, and it's not a minor reporting annoyance. It's a structural problem that quietly eats marketing budgets, defunds

There are now 15,384 martech solutions in the market. Up 9% year over year. That number should give every CMO pause, not because there are too many tools to evaluate, but because the entire premise those tools were built on is crumbling. Your martech stack was designed around a simple assumption: that buyers would discover your brand, visit your website, click through your content, and move through a funnel you controlled. Every platform you bought, including your CRM, your M

What the data says about modern cold outreach and the framework behind campaigns that actually generate replies. If your cold email response rates have cratered in the last two years, you're not imagining it. The average reply rate dropped from 8.5% in 2019 to roughly 5% in 2025. The rules have changed — and most people are still playing by the old playbook. Batch-and-blast is dead. Generic value props get deleted on sight. And the technical requirements for even landing in t

Most mid-market companies I work with are spending serious money on paid search, SEO, content, and social ads. They're tracking cost per lead, conversion rates, and pipeline attribution down to the penny. And they're losing customers out the back door because nobody is watching what happens after the sale. This is not a customer service article. This is a marketing ROI article. Because if your post-sale experience is broken, you are paying to fill a leaky bucket. And no amoun

Revenue Growth Is the One That Matters Now I've already made the case for why AI discipline has to come first. If your data is fragmented, if marketing and sales aren't aligned, if nobody can sit in an ROI conversation comfortably, AI doesn't fix that. It accelerates it. You can read that argument in full [here] . That work matters. But discipline is not a revenue strategy. It's the foundation you build one on. This piece is about what comes next. Specifically, how AI becomes

Why That Matters So Much for Your Budget For two years, Performance Max has been Google's favorite way to eat advertising budgets while keeping advertisers in the dark about where their money actually went. The pitch was simple; hand over your creative assets, set a budget, and let Google's AI do the rest. The reality was messier. Advertisers lost control of where ads ran, which search queries triggered them, and whether the system was cannibalizing existing high-performing c

Most businesses take 42 hours to respond to inbound leads. We respond in 10 seconds. We spend a lot of time getting businesses found online. SEO. Paid search. Content. Conversion optimization. All designed to drive high-intent prospects to click, call, or submit a form. Then what happens? For most businesses, the answer is nothing good. Calls go to voicemail. Forms sit unread for hours or days. By the time someone responds, the prospect has already moved on to a competitor wh

When ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends your business, it's not the same as ranking on page one of Google. It's closer to a trusted advisor handing someone your business card and saying, "These are the people you need to call." That distinction matters for how you measure, budget, and staff around AI search visibility. It also changes where the dollars should come from. This isn't a brand awareness line item. It's demand capture. Why AI Search Signals Higher Intent Traditional

Every week, another article promises to explain how to “win online.” And almost every one of them is just a sales pitch wearing an education costume. This isn’t that. This is for mid-market leaders who are tired of marketing hype, skeptical of vendor promises, and quietly frustrated by the gap between what they’re told should work and what actually does. I’ve watched enough so called revolutions come and go to recognize a pattern. Most advice about online presence in 2026 is

Only 8% Of Companies Are Aligned I've spent 25 years in performance marketing. For at least 20 of those years, I've been having the same conversation with clients about sales and marketing alignment. The conversation hasn't changed. The data hasn't changed. The advice hasn't changed. And somehow, only 8% of companies have actually fixed the problem. 92% are about to learn what that costs when the old playbooks stop working altogether That's not a trend piece. That's an indict

Mid-Market Companies Can Play This Game Too Big tech is buying up AI sales agent companies. The acquisitions are making headlines, and the enterprise platforms are racing to build autonomous pipeline generation into everything they sell. If you're running marketing or sales at a mid-market company, you might assume this doesn't apply to you. Enterprise tech, enterprise budgets, enterprise problems. That's wrong. And waiting to find out could cost you. What's Actually Changing

Why Your Google Ads Person Needs to Stop Acting Like It's 2015 Here's something I keep seeing with mid-market companies: you're paying someone to manage your Google Ads, but they're still using tactics from a decade ago. And when they try to run Performance Max campaigns? It's a disaster. Not because Performance Max doesn't work. It does, when handled correctly. But because they're bringing the wrong mindset to the table. Let me be clear upfront: Performance Max isn't always

Let me start with something most consultants won't tell you: 65% of contact information from online forms is wrong. And 57% of marketers are getting bad outcomes because they're misreading their data. So when someone promises you AI-powered personalization that actually works, here's what they're not saying: AI can't personalize chaos. It just makes the chaos faster and more expensive. This Is The Same Problem I Keep Seeing A while back, I told you AI won't fix your broken ma

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