Many marketers mistakenly assume performance marketing channels scale linearly. Co-founder Andy Lambert learned that simply increasing the budget doesn't produce proportional results. Instead, efficiency breaks down, and customer acquisition costs rise, highlighting an over-fixation on demand capture versus sustainable demand creation.

A client wasted $100,000 because marketers executed isolated tactics like SEO without a cohesive plan. An effective agency must first deeply understand the core business strategy—mission, growth goals, ideal clients—before implementing any marketing activities to ensure alignment and ROI.

Stop planning creative and media buys simultaneously. Instead, post creative organically first. Then, exclusively allocate media spend to amplify the content that has already demonstrated strong consumer engagement, forcing creative to be effective on its own merit before receiving paid support.

To challenge managers' insistence on expensive Yellow Pages ads, Jim Clayton installed a dedicated red phone with a number used only in that ad. When the phone never rang, it provided undeniable proof of zero ROI, allowing him to cut the spend based on data, not opinion.

Many marketers focus on generating traffic first. A more effective approach is to perfect the bottom of the funnel—like post-booking emails and landing pages—before driving traffic. This ensures you can actually convert the audience you build, preventing wasted effort.

Pinterest ads amplify existing success; they do not create it. Before investing, marketers must have a product or offer that is already selling consistently to a cold audience. The platform is a tool for scaling a working sales process, not for finding product-market fit.

When ad performance breaks at scale, the problem isn't your bidding strategy; it's that you've saturated the 3% of the market ready to buy now. To grow, you must target the other 97% with broader, less direct hooks and lead magnets that educate them first.

The company heavily invested in product trials via paid search, but analysis revealed these leads had a mere 5% win rate and the lowest average contract value. This demonstrated that their primary lead source was also their least efficient for generating actual revenue.

Pouring marketing resources into a "leaky bucket" is inefficient. If customer onboarding is flawed, prioritize fixing it before optimizing top-of-funnel campaigns. The highest leverage is in ensuring activated users convert, not in acquiring more users who will quickly churn.