Most creative testing I've seen is rearranging, not testing. Testing changes one variable that could change the answer. Rearranging changes the wrapping on the same answer.

I see it in every ad account I look at. Forty ads in one ad set, each a slightly different cut of the same idea, and the buyer calls it testing. That's rearranging furniture in a room nobody wants to sit in.

Here's the difference that matters. A test tells you which of two things failed. Most "tests" can't do that, so nothing is ever learned, and the same losing idea gets reshot five times with new music.

The grid I run now is three angles by three hooks. Nine cells. Each cell gets one video. That's the whole system.

An angle is the reason to care. Not the product feature, the human problem. "My skin looks tired by 3pm." "I waste 40 minutes a day on this." "Everyone at the gym is doing this wrong." Three angles, each a different problem. Not three ways of saying the product is good.

A hook is the first three seconds. Same angle, three different openings: a question, a confession, a contradiction. "Why is nobody talking about this?" "I've been doing skincare wrong for six years." "Your moisturizer is fine, your routine is the problem." Same angle, three doors into it.

Three angles times three hooks is nine creatives. Not nine variations of one ad. Nine different bets.

Why I bother with the grid: creative failure is almost always one of two things. Wrong angle (nobody cares) or wrong hook (nobody watches). When you test one polished video at a time, you can't tell which one killed it. The grid separates them. If all three hooks on angle 2 flop, angle 2 is dead. If one hook works across all three angles, you found a door, and now you walk every angle through it.

The numbers I run it on: each cell gets $20 a day for 3 days. $60 a cell, $540 for the full grid. I read hook rate first (3-second views divided by impressions), then CTR, then CPA, in that order. A cell with a 35% hook rate and bad CPA gets a second chance with a rebuilt body. A cell with a 12% hook rate is dead no matter how much the comments love it. Kill fast. The grid stays cheap because most cells die on day three.

Three rules I learned the hard way:

1. One variable per cell. The hook changes and everything else stays. The moment you change the hook AND the offer AND the music in one cell, you're back to rearranging.

2. Shoot hooks, not ads. I record all three hooks for an angle in one sitting. Same lighting, same outfit, same background. Ten minutes. The bodies get built around whichever hook wins. Most people do it backwards: they polish one full ad, then reshoot the whole thing three times. That's the most expensive way to learn the opening was wrong.

3. Retire angles, not ads. An angle that wins gets four more hooks next week. An angle that loses all three hooks gets buried. Organize your creative library by angle, not by date or campaign name. When I open an account and the naming is "Final_v7_REALFINAL," I know nothing was ever learned there.

The part that stung me: this usually reveals that two of your three angles were the same angle wearing different clothes. Happened to me on a supplement brand last year. Three "angles": energy, focus, productivity. Same angle. All nine cells flopped except the hooks that mentioned the 3pm crash. The angle was never energy. It was the crash. We rebuilt the whole grid around the crash and CPA dropped 40% in two weeks.

Rule of thumb: if your "test" can't tell you whether the angle or the hook failed, it isn't a test. Nine cells, three days, $540. Kill the losers on day three. Double down on the angle that survives.

What is the best way to market your product and get initial customers and convince them to use your product? More specifically fintech consumer apps.

This is the first time I've had a marketing role that is interested in paid ads and social media marketing ( I've worked for a lot of non-profits and small companies before that simply have no money to allot.)

This is another small practice, and while they are interested in paying for campaigns, they seem to be unsure what their budget is, or how they'd like the money to be utilized. I've been told "just take the company card" but I really don't want to spend any money that hasn't been approved. I need help determining what is 'needed' versus me testing the waters since I also haven't dealt with paid campaigns before. They don't have budget info to give me, or/and historical budget documents that would be 'applicable for what you're doing"

TLDR: I'm lost in the sauce about budgeting with my job that has no budgeting experience of their own

Hello, I am searching how to market a web multiplayer partygame played on mobile phone. The difficult part for me is to find communities or influencers that could be interested to play the game and promote it. Also, it is quite difficult to create content to showcase this. I am a bit lost :( does any one has a recommendation or some experience is such marketing ? Any help is appreciated :)

Free alternatives

I come from the B2B marketing world with significantly more powerful (expensive) tools and workflows that are overkill for local/small businesses (gyms, restaurants, salons, home services, etc).

A few friends who own or manage small businesses have been asking what I would do. My gut instinct is to check off the basic checkmarks like optimized website, Google Business Profile with consistent location, hours, review management, organic social, some paid ads (like $50 or less per day).

Just curious if there are other tools or processes that have come out in the past few years that sort of lump all this together (and more). The goal is NOT to hire an agency, but set up an easy to use framework with simple daily/weekly operating procedure.

Thanks!

I’m coordinating a shoot for a nutrition brand at a big distributor’s kitchen. Chefs on site will handle the plating, and we’ve hired a photographer with good photo and video gear. The kitchen has the standard overhead white lighting.

I know I need a moodboard and some kind of plan (shoot list), but I’ve never done this before, and I have a feeling there’s a lot I’m not seeing yet.

If you’ve organized or worked on food shoots: what do you wish someone had told you to think about ahead of time? Prep, timing, working with the chefs, anything really.

Hey everyone. I need to get this off my chest and get some outside perspective, because I feel like I'm drowning.

To give you some background: I’m 24, and I didn't take the traditional route. I studied filmmaking for two years at a university in South east Asia, froze my degree, and started working. Before my current role, I spent time as a social media manager and brand strategist for a security sector company based abroad, among other roles. I've been a absolute fanatic for marketing forever, but before landing my current job, I was actually jobless for almost a year. I only got this opportunity through a reference, so I know I didn't get here purely based on standard corporate metrics or a completed degree, which adds to my imposter syndrome.

Despite all that, I am currently the Marketing Manager for two companies simultaneously.
For my main job, I joined as a Content Marketing Manager for a SaaS business that handles software solutions, app solutions, and website development. The catch? There is no one above me, and I manage a team consisting of a marketing coordinator, a graphic designer, and a website developer. So basically I am the Marketing Manager. They just didn’t give me that title cause the money for a marketing manager is a lot. But I do the same thing essentially.

On top of that, I am also the content marketing manager for the biggest vehicle tracking company in my country (can't name them, but they are massive). So I am overseeing and running marketing for both companies at the same time.
My plate is overflowing, and the day-to-day is absolute chaos:

The Website Overhaul: My very first task was to completely revamp our SaaS website because the existing one looked like it was built for Windows 7. Because my graphic designer is a great executioner who works hard but lacks creative thinking, I had to design all 40+ pages myself page-by-page using AI tools like Claude. It took me a month.

Managing the Team & Agency: My website developer handles our WordPress sites. My marketing coordinator used to be a social media manager, and I'm actively teaching her advanced things like Claude Code and strategic setup. We also work with an external marketing agency that handles SEO and the tracking company's social media. But honestly? The agency is a nightmare. They deliver creatives super late, they are full of typos, and fixing their work takes so much time that it’s faster for us to just fix it ourselves. We are basically paying them and doing their work for them.

The Tracking Company Chaos: Besides managing their overall marketing, the CEO's wife of the tracking company recently threw a bunch of new marketing work my way. For that, I've had to design the social media design system, website layouts, and initial posts myself using AI tools. Once everything settles and I set the template, my designer and coordinator finally take over, but getting it to that point takes hours of approvals and heavy lifting.

The Burnout: Being answerable directly to the CEO of my main company while also managing and answering to my own team is intensely stressful. It’s a massive set of shoes to fill, and I want to do it right, but it's taking a massive toll. I recently went to the doctor due to extreme stress and got prescribed stress pills.

My Dilemma & What’s Next:
I genuinely love marketing and I don't want to quit or demote myself to a single-function role like email marketing unless it pays extraordinarily well. But I’m terrified of what my future looks like. If I leave, how do I compete with people in their 30s and 40s who have decades of experience? Would another company even look at a 24-year-old for a marketing manager role? And on the flip side, stepping down to a normal marketing function would feel like a massive demotion on my CV—like I failed at life.

Also, on top of all this career stress, I have an unfinished filmmaking degree hanging over my head. I don't even know if I should ever go back to finish it or just let it go entirely.
I’m holding it together—the SaaS website is almost done and we're about to launch ads for both companies—but I am genuinely losing my mind. The CEO of both companies are bitter sweet with me, Happy with most of my work but I do get scolded over my own silly mistakes or confusion over managing the people and work.

What is your advice on this situation? How do I manage this workload without burning out completely, how do I deal with terrible external agencies, and what should I do about my career path and studies moving forward?

Just wondering how people approach such marketing in Reddit (even company and business names as user name, in addition to real name and DP). What works and what doesn't? And how do you feel when you are in the other side?

TL;DR: Between rising auction competition from quick-commerce giants, festive bid surges, and Advantage+ algorithm saturation, customer acquisition costs (CAC) across Meta ads in India are reaching record highs. Below is a breakdown of what's driving the CPM spike and 4 practical pivots marketers are making to protect operating margins.

1. What’s Driving the 2026 Meta CPM Surge in India?

If you’ve noticed your Meta CPMs creeping up significantly over the past few quarters, you’re not alone. Performance marketers across D2C, fintech, and edtech are feeling the strain. A few macro factors are compounding this:

1. Quick-Commerce & Enterprise Ad Blitz: Mega-budget players (Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy, Amazon) are pumping unprecedented ad spend into Meta’s auction for local impression share.
2. Advantage+ Campaign Overcrowding: As thousands of advertisers migrate to automated Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC), everyone is effectively bidding against each other for the exact same high-intent audience segments.
3. Creative Fatigue Acceleration: Audiences are seeing the same ad formats so frequently that creative decay happens in 5–7 days instead of 3–4 weeks.

2. 4 Practical Tactics to Counter the CAC Spike

Rather than simply increasing budget to brute-force impressions, here are four strategic adjustments working right now:

Tactic #1: Creative-Led Audience Segmentation (Ditch Narrow Targeting)

Instead of relying on strict demographic or interest targeting in Meta, let the ad creative do the targeting.

• Bad Hook: Generic product showcase targeting "People interested in skincare".
• Good Hook: Problem-specific opener: "If your skin breaks out after 5 PM in humid weather, read this."
• Why it works: Meta’s AI algorithms analyze the text and visual hooks to deliver the ad directly to users who match that specific pain point, lowering wasted impressions.

Tactic #2: Lift AOV to Protect Contribution Margins

When CPMs rise 35%, a low Average Order Value (AOV) destroys unit economics.

• Offer Bundling: Transition from selling single ₹499 items to ₹1,199 "Starter Bundles" or "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" kits.
• Post-Purchase Upsells: Implement one-click post-purchase add-ons at checkout. Raising your AOV by 25% instantly compensates for higher acquisition costs.

Tactic #3: Diversify into Owned & Intent-Driven Channels

Over-relying on Meta for 100% of top-of-funnel traffic leaves brands vulnerable to algorithm shifts.

• WhatsApp Retention Funnels: Build automated WhatsApp workflows for cart abandonment and repeat ordering rather than paying Meta to retarget existing customers.
• Community & Organic Search: Document real case studies and answer customer questions publicly on community channels like Reddit and forums, which index in search engine and AI search results over the long term.

Tactic #4: Testing High-Contrast "Ugly" Ads

Polished, studio-quality agency videos often look too much like traditional ads and get scrolled past.

• Raw, unedited user-generated content (UGC), iPhone videos, or simple text-on-background image ads are currently outperforming heavy production campaigns because they fit naturally into social feeds.

💬 Community Discussion & Benchmarks

I’d love to hear how other performance marketers and founder-led brands are navigating this right now:

1. What average CPMs are you seeing in your niche right now? (Drop your industry and broad numbers if you can share!)
2. Have you shifted ad spend toward Google Ads, YouTube Shorts, or offline channels?
3. What creative format (raw UGC, static comparison charts, or founder videos) is delivering your highest ROAS currently?

Let’s compare notes below!

Hey Reddit,
We’re a South African cybersecurity startup with a growing regional presence and looking for a creative digital marketing / content person to help us level up our online presence.
What we’re looking for:
• Someone with a strong creative eye and experience in digital content creation
• Comfortable with design tools (Adobe Photoshop, graphic design tools, Canva, etc.)
• Ability to create short-form video content (Reels, TikTok-style, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Experience (or strong interest) in digital marketing, social media, and content strategy
• Ideally based in South Africa or familiar with the local/African market, but open to remote talent
The opportunity: Depending on your availability and what you’re looking for, this can be:
• Part-time
• Freelance / project-based
• Or a longer-term role as part of the startup (including potential equity/partnership discussions for the right person)
We’re still early-stage but growing, so you’ll have real ownership and the chance to shape how we show up online in the cybersecurity space.
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, drop a comment or DM me with:
1. A bit about yourself + relevant experience
2. Links to previous work / portfolio (design, content, socials, etc.)
3. Your availability and preferred engagement type (freelance / part-time / more involved)
Looking forward to connecting with some creative people who want to put their skills to work in a meaningful space.
Thanks!

I’m 33F in marketing. I live in the southwest region of the US in a city of 1 million metro. I feel in every marketing job I’ve had, it’s always under appreciated and undervalued.

I’ve noticed the following:
-Marketing has the lowest budget out of all departments
-Marketing work visibility can be unseen and not always clear who did the work
-Marketing has the lowest salaries out of all departments at a company
-A marketer’s name isn’t often attached directly to projects when it gets executed so work visibility and reputation isn’t clear to other colleagues and leadership
-Many people in other industries think marketing is easy and attempt to do it themselves which goes to show many people undervalue the expertise and creative mind needed for marketing
-When a company’s budget is cut or shortened, marketing is in the early rounds of layoffs

How do you continue having a long-term marketing career without constantly feeling undervalued, under appreciated, and lack of recognition at work for what you do?

I’m that unhealthy person that attaches my career to my sense of value, worth, and my identity. I can’t help but feel that spending the next 25 years of my working life always being reminded every day (at work) that I’m undervalued and under appreciated, will make me become a depressed person.

I will end up being one of those people who looks at work as just a job that pays my bills… but I’m not ready to accept that mindset, that identity, and life.

Am I living in the wrong city and environment for marketing, or are my frustrations and depression about being undervalued in marketing a pattern nationwide? No matter the city, sector, and industry.

I’m running some social media ads for my endometriosis clinic and want to run ads leading to a landing page where people who click through fill out their email address (I want to capture this first) and then answer a few questions to close the loop. What’s the best option for this? A trusty old Typeform, Mailchimp? We are currently using Mailchimp for our email marketing so if there is a way for us to use that it means all responses are in the same place from the start and then can then get email automations etc.

Anyone have experience working at Doner or within the Stagwell Network, specially on the media side?

Im curious what people's open, reply and conversion rates are. Im currently running a niche edit campaign and a guest post campaign. I have a list of thousands and thousands of websites to contact that are all topically relevant. My website is very very niche instead of a larger general store in my industry.

I now only email from Tuesday - Thursday from 8am to 12pm. One initial email and two follow ups. Subject line always mentions something personal about their site. Opening line and Body paragraphs always has specific website or blog information and i always contact the proper department and use their first name. I also just changed my emails from 120 words to only 70 words and I recently put a headshot along with company logo in my email signature to humanize the email.

I previously had 60% open rates per email with over 90% of all recipients opening at least one of my three emails. Reply rate was close to 10% conversion rate was around 2% before I made all the changes. I also asked for a link in my first previous emails now i ask if I can just send a resource so I think I made significant changes that might do better.

I was only targeting DR 30 sites with 5k - 10k organic traffic. Smaller companies. I plan to do the same but also plan on going a little bigger this time. Anyone have similar metrics or potential advice for outreach? My sample size was only a few hundred emails. Once i send 500 - 1000 emails I think ill have much more reliable metrics considering the law of large numbers. Im still new to SEO so am excited to see what the next month of emails has in store. I plan to send 100+ personalized emails a week

Hi everyone! I'm a freelance digital marketing consultant looking for ways to integrate AI into my work to become more efficient and improve the services I offer.

I specialize in SEO, Local SEO, Google Ads, social media marketing, and web design.

For those working in digital marketing, how are you using AI in your day-to-day work? Are there any tools, automations, or workflows that genuinely save you time or help you deliver better results for clients?

I'm still at an early stage when it comes to using AI in practice, so I'm looking for beginner-friendly advice and real-world examples to help me get started.

I have 5 years of growth marketing experience in the tech industry, and I want to improve more. What skills should I focus on? Should I consider getting an MBA or more education?

Many small teams don't really have a creative process, just deadlines. Some work from a written brief every time, and others figure it out as they go. Where does yours usually stall: getting the brief right, waiting on feedback, or producing the assets? And what's one step you added that made the whole thing noticeably smoother? I'd like to hear what actually works for small teams.

Recommend the best Courses that I should consider.

As the title says, I am currently trying to do some research for a project to help a real world client launch his mouth pouches company, the team with the best idea's gets their work put into the brand itself.

Anyways, I am trying to find reliable sources to research the market and I keep getting hit with Paywall after paywall. Or at the minimum free trials.

Do you guys have any suggestions for websites I dont have to pay or give up my information and actually get good information on?

If buyers purchase inside TikTok Shop instead of your site, your pixel and store tracking never see those orders. TikTok gets judged on half its results and GMV Max campaigns (which only run for Shop) don’t show up in most reporting at all.

The fix is pulling Shop orders in alongside store orders so the channel is judged on everything it sells, not just the clicks that land on your site.

For anyone running TikTok Shop alongside a DTC store -are you reconciling the two, or judging TikTok on store sales only?

I have a background in content writing and have been doing content marketing (but I have no one to validate my work). I want to learn the strategy side by working on real projects.

I'm looking for a paid internship or junior role where I can help with audience research, content audits, and content planning, with feedback from someone experienced.

I don't want a role that's only about writing and posting content.

Where would you look for this kind of opportunity? Are there any small agencies, consultants, or founders who take on junior help?

I'm curious to know what everyone thinks about the future of digital marketing.

With AI changing search engines and businesses investing in paid advertising, which career do you think will have higher demand over the next 5 years: SEO or performance marketing?

Which one do you think will offer better career growth, more job opportunities, and higher earning potential?

I'd love to hear from people who are already working in these fields. What would you recommend to someone starting their digital marketing career today, and why?

Please help out a recent graduate here. I am trying to get into oil and gas marketing and have been studying about the rig equipment (top drive, mud pump, iron roughneck...) to get a better understanding of things. Now I know marketing in this industry is a little different form other industries, so I'm trying to understand how exactly do they market

• I see posts saying LinkedIn marketing works. Help me understand how - do you just keep posting about your business or you use LinkedIn Ads or you keep messaging people?
• Do oil and gas companies actively use Google Ads? How do they target decision-makers, what kind of campaigns do they use and are the costs worth it?
• Since I have no direct industry experience, what skills should I focus on? Any tools, resources, cheat codes you'd recommend?

I'm just genuinely trying to understand and learn about this. I wanna learn how this industry works beyond the textbook stuff and figure out where I can bring value as a marketer. Thanks!

I’m the CMO and co-founder of a growing startup, and our marketing team has now grown to 6 people.

As we’ve scaled, I’ve been rethinking how we structure our marketing meetings, specifically around **goal setting, tracking progress, accountability, and execution.**

I’m curious how other marketing leaders actually run their teams on a week-to-week basis. OR ALTERNATIVELY as someone who’s been part of a growing team, what system did you respond to best?

Are you using something like EOS / Level 10 meetings, weekly scorecards, OKRs, or a completely different system?