Hey guys!

Thought this would be the best place to post about advice that I would need.

I used to run a social media marketing agency but we were mainly focused on B2C brands, so I don't have much experience regarding B2B.

After running the agency, my partner (who's an engineer) and I realized some gaps in the market regarding social media management tools. Not just scheduling but different tools that we used managing the social media accounts of our clients.

However, now came the time to market (we're still prelaunch) our own app and I wanted to know what your recommendations of platforms would be for this kind of software. The software is also very useful for businesses looking to manage their own social media accounts.

Now the problem that I am having is that I started posting about the journey a lot of Instagram and I managed to get quite a few people on our waitlist but I mainly attracted other founders (not agency owners). To the point that I got brand deals in the AI and business niche haha. But that is not my goal with social media

I also have connected with people on LinkedIn.

Guidance regarding where you think my ideal customer is would be super helpful given that I don't have much experience regarding B2B. I also would like to know if you think I should instead focus on paid ads (when we do launch).

Thank you so much!

Feel free to expand.

I've noticed that getting likes, comments, and clicks doesn't necessarily mean a campaign will generate actual business.

What do you think usually causes this gap? Is it the wrong audience, weak messaging, landing pages, poor offers, or something else? I'd be interested in examples from campaigns you've worked on.

Digital marketing keeps changing, especially with AI tools becoming more common and platforms constantly updating their algorithms.

If you were starting today, which skill would you focus on first: SEO, paid advertising, analytics, content marketing, email marketing, or something else? What makes that skill worth learning?

One way some B2B SaaS founders get inbound leads is by being active where their potential customers hang out online, like forums or niche communities. For example, engaging in relevant Reddit threads and helping people with their problems without pushing your product can build trust and interest over time. It takes time but can bring steady leads.
There's a tool called IndiePilot that helps find those conversations and suggests personal replies, which can save you a lot of time if you want to try this approach. I'm using it because it's providing great value for 9$ which is crazy but you can use other tools.

I saw a situation recently where something that should have taken a couple of minutes turned into a whole process. Multiple emails, unnecessary steps, unclear instructions, and nobody seemed able to give a straight answer.

It got me thinking about how businesses sometimes add processes to make things feel more organized, but end up making life harder for everyone involved. This can happen with customer support, buying something, getting a refund, signing up for a service, or even dealing with internal work processes.

What's the most unnecessarily complicated experience you've had with a business, and what would have made it easier?

Digital marketing offers different career paths, but learning the skills and getting practical experience can take time.

With more people entering the field and AI changing how marketers work, I'm curious about your opinions.

Would you recommend digital marketing as a career to a beginner in 2026? Why or why not?

Hey guys, I'm looking at marketing for a game discovery platform I've been working on.
It's at a place where initial adoption and feedback from real users would benefit in future product shaping and growth.
However I'm hitting bit of a wall in terms of marketing - the way I see it SEO/GEO and maybe social media could be the core of the strategy, but direct community engagement would provide more targeted feedback and adoption.

Problem is, doing this is very time consuming, I've tried to find some marketing help and reached out to some smaller (bootstrapped project, got to be sensible with $$) agencies but the results have not been that great.
Am I engaging the wrong help? Where should I be looking instead? Would it be advisable to reach out to the gaming community to get marketing help or the marketing community to get gaming niche support?

My team has been testing Fullenrich for about 2 weeks now. The waterfall enrichment setup is pretty solid - you can chain together like 6-7 data enrichment providers and it'll go through them sequentially until it finds a match. saves credits compared to burning them across multiple tools separately.

the ui is clean and the api works well. my main gripe is the pricing feels steep for what you get. almost 300 bucks a month for their starter plan with only 1000 enrichments. and their mobile number coverage is pretty weak compared to what they advertise.

data quality has been hit or miss. emails are decent (maybe 70-75% accurate in my tests) but the direct dials are rough. plus they charge you even when they don't find anything which is annoying.

been comparing it to a few others like Prospeo and SalesIntel. Prospeo's data seems fresher but doesn't have the waterfall feature. SalesIntel has human-verified stuff but the pricing is enterprise-level and we're a small team. still on the fence about which direction to go for our outbound stack.

would love to hear from anyone who's done their own fullenrich review or tested it against other tools. my boss is pushing me to pick something by the end of the month lol

Sometimes results take time, but continuing a campaign that isn’t working can waste money and effort. What metrics or signs do you look at before deciding whether to optimize, wait longer, or move on?

this is scam website and i paid for the services and they havent fulfilled order and now not responding to the tickets.

curious what actually sticks with people

I'm a second year undergrad who's currently majoring in communication. I have a lot dreams (not really comfortable calling them plans cause I haven't start planning them) and one of them is starting my own marketing agency. Any tips on doing that? Should I start working as an intern for an agency or anything non-agency is possible?

There’s plenty of advice online about the usual marketing tactics, but I’m curious about the less obvious strategies that have delivered real results. It could be something small, unconventional, or specific to your industry.

I run a small clothing store on Shopify, and we're getting a lot more LLM traffic these days. I'd like to leverage that as much as possible, especially if I can get our products into more recommendations by shopping assistants. Our descriptions were originally written for people skimming, so they're short and mostly 'vibes', with some half-baked SEO magic sprinkled in here and there. Any tips for optimizing product pages for AI? I'm hoping for personal success stories/what worked.

Hi all- it looks like more and more people are finding answers from ChatGPT. So I was wondering whats the best tool to track my business visibility on common questions customers are searching for and get some email notifications on updates.

So experts, what is the best tool to track and improve visibility on ChatGPT?

A simple question that invites contrasting views.

For teams working on EU-facing campaigns, has Article 50 of the EU AI Act changed your content approval process?

An image might start in a generative tool, be edited by an agency and then become several ads or video cutdowns. How are you tracking what was generated or altered, deciding when disclosure is needed, and checking what survives into the published version?

Interested in practical workflows who owns the final check in your team?

I’ve spent 15+ years in B2B marketing across India, APAC and the Middle East, and the same argument shows up everywhere.

Marketing says we ran the ads, built visibility, created awareness, introduced the brand. The deal closes and sales says, “I met them last month,” or “we knew them before.”

Both are partly right. The fight itself is the problem, and leadership ends up refereeing instead of fixing it.

My take, for what it’s worth.

Sales can’t win just by getting there first anymore. Walk into a client with an unknown brand and no credibility and you’re doing far more work to close. Case studies, testimonials, a brand the buyer has already seen a few times: that’s marketing’s job, and it matters.

But marketers overrate their share too, and I say this as one. A campaign built without ever hearing a customer’s real objections won’t carry a deal, and a click isn’t what closed it. On long-cycle deals with big buying groups, I’d put marketing’s part at maybe 30–40%. Someone still has to cross the finish line.

Clean 1:1 attribution on these deals is mostly fiction anyway. Dozens of touchpoints, several people on the buying side, months of back and forth.

So I think the fix sits with the CEO. Stop letting the two teams compete with each other and get them working the same accounts together.

Curious what this looks like where you work:

• How does your company split credit on closed deals?
• If you’ve seen this fixed, what changed? Comp plans, shared targets, better measurement, or just a leader who put their foot down?

Full disclosure: I’m co-founder of Zephra AI, a full stack marketing architecture, so I’ve got skin in this game. Not linking anything. I’m here for the answers to the question above. Also have been most of my life in the marketing side.

Hey everyone! Anyone seeing the post-update impact on their rankings yet? 

Our team broke down how the latest update might affect your site, plus collected the top news from this week. Check it out:

Updates

• Google September 2026 spam update is done rolling out

The September 2026 spam update is complete — two weeks of rollout, significantly longer than the previous 2026 spam updates (March, June, and August all completed in 2–3 days). Three distinct impact waves emerged across the rollout: September 25–27 (initial weekend hit), September 30, and October 4–6. 

Multiple SEOs described the impact as “more core update-like” than a typical spam update. Barry Schwartz noted a core update may follow “really soon.” Sites hit should review Google’s spam policies and plan for a long recovery timeline—Google reiterates recovery can take many months, with periodic refreshes to the spam update expected before meaningful improvement is possible.

Source:

Google Search Status Dashboard

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

_________________________

Search / SEO

• Google launches UGC Fresh Data Program, a dedicated ingestion pipeline for UGC platforms like Reddit

Google announced the UGC Fresh Data Program, a new initiative that gives approved UGC and forum platforms a dedicated data ingestion pipeline to push fresh content and interaction signals directly to Google Search—bypassing traditional crawling. 

Approved platforms can send content within minutes of creation and update engagement counters within 72 hours. Eligibility criteria are strict: 

• platforms must be high-volume UGC/forum/social sites
• host content on public stable URLs (not profile or feed pages)
• require every post be attributable to a creator with a public profile
• implement OAuth 2.0 authentication with validated JSON-LD payloads
• use SocialMediaPosting or DiscussionForumPosting schema with interactionStatistic sub-fields, and maintain active moderation

Not open to everyone—Google will accept applications selectively and takes 6-8 weeks to respond.

Source:

Google

_________________________

SERP features / Interface

• Google emails site owners their Preferred Source selection counts for the first time

Google Search Console started sending site owners emails revealing how many users have selected their site as a Preferred Source. The email includes the property name, the exact Preferred source selection count as of the data date, and a nudge to install the JavaScript Preferred Sources button on the site. 

• Google Search profiles expand to India and Canada, with Brazil coming soon

Google is expanding Search profiles beyond the US to India and Canada, with Brazil coming soon. Publishers and creators in those markets can now claim a Search profile (subject to the 10K-follower threshold on YouTube, Instagram, X, or TikTok, which Google lowered in September). 

Source:

Kyle Sutton | X

Robby Stein | X

_________________________

GSC

• Google Search Console Performance report now supports multi-select country filters

Google added multi-select country filtering to the Search Console Performance report, letting SEOs group multiple countries together to analyze combined search traffic. 

Operators running in multiple markets can now view combined traffic across them (e.g., US + Canada for North American performance). The update also applies to device filtering.

Source:

Google Search Central | LinkedIn

_________________________

AI

• Google adds a formal warning against deceptive authorship—AI-generated headshots, fake names, and false credentials

Google added a new warning to its Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help documentation telling publishers to avoid using deceptive authorship information. 

The quoted passage: “Fabricating creator profiles (such as by using AI-generated headshots, made-up names, or false credentials to make content appear as if it was written by human experts) is a form of deception. Any form of deception makes a page untrustworthy to both users and our automated quality systems, and is a signal of a low-quality page.” 

• Nano Banana 2.1 now live in Google AI Mode for image generation and editing

Google released Nano Banana 2.1 and the new image generation and editing model is already rolling out in AI Mode in Search. 

Google says the new version “outperforms our previous models across the board, with notable leaps in visual design, mask-based editing, and subject consistency” for more natural-looking images. Users can access it by opening the Google app and tapping the banana icon under the Search box. 

Source:

Google Search Central 

Google | X

_________________________

E-commerce

• Google Merchant Center rolls out a UCP integration hub for US merchants

Google is rolling out a UCP integration hub inside Merchant Center for US merchants, giving a dedicated onboarding path for the Universal Commerce Protocol program directly from their Merchant Center account. 

The hub consolidates UCP onboarding, cart transfer configuration, and enhanced checkout flow testing into one place. Rolling out in the US now; Google says Australia and Canada are coming next year.

Source:

Google Merchant Center Help

Afternoon all,

I've recently came across a large amount of social media engagement from an agency / company called 'Elevate Digital Academy'.

Essentially they allegedly help people who want to become self sufficient and quit the 9 to 5 hell establish themselves in the world of self employed Digital marketing. Sounds fantastic at first glance. However, they charge 380 dollars / pounds for their services.

I've reached out to them but can't seem to find any solid answers as to 'how' exactly they set you up to bring in a stable income after completing the course and materials they provide for said fee.

Has anyone Here came them or got any experience of them ?

I'd be inclined to say they make their money by course resales and those who pay are Essentially also making money by then being allowed to resell the same course lol - if this isn't true then please advise ! Hopefully it's not.

Thanks for reading

I know each has its own advantages, but I'm curious which one would give the best results when you're just starting out. Would you focus on long-term organic growth or try to get faster results?

I'd love to hear your experiences and why you'd choose that channel.

Title.

Paid $149. Got a report bragging about 500+ reprints. google visibility? From my checks, the indexed pages barely filled one hand. Some placements appear to block indexing altogether. Hundreds of links mean squat if people can’t find the pages.

USA TODAY Network was the selling point for me. Turns out pickup isn’t guaranteed. I found four placements myself, but they weren’t in the report.

Support’s fix? Run the release again. Free credit to do that? Nope. A complete list from their distribution partner? Still no. They keep pointing at 500+ reprints instead of resolving the missing report. For my SEO goals, this was a waste of money and hours chasing answers. I wouldn’t give them another dollar.

anyone else dealt with this?

IV been in Digital Marketing for over 10 years and have basically done it all:

* Social Media

* Paid Advertising

* SEO/SEO

* Integrated/Product marketing

* Web Operations

* Management

On top of that, I have been in main industries, Including Travel, Automotive, Transportation, SaaS, and most notably Healthcare where I feel IV found the most success and have the strongest background.

Currently I'm in the process of starting my own business, but still working full time. And as the small business grows, I want to also start transitioning into consulting roles so I can split my time across the two as needed.

But I am at a loss for basically how to start, is it just reaching out and building a simple presence? Leveraging LinkedIn? Going through a firm initially?

And how are your structuring your charges? Hourly? Or by Job?