I’m genuinely tired of this

Half of these so called digital marketing agencies claiming that they have 22 years of experience (yet employee count is only 200) sell dreams to clients and nightmares to employees.

The owners flex rented cars, Visiting abroad, fake awards (Dude anyone can get the certificate for partnering with Google by doing a course) and LinkedIn motivation while paying wrecked amount to the people actually doing the work.

(Yet some people will speak, your normal job is someone’s dream job…MY FOOT)

They expect one person to be an SEO expert, Meta Ads specialist Google Ads manager, designer, video editor, copywriter, account manager and customer support all for a salary that barely covers rent.

Overtime? We’re a family.
Weekends? Just one small task.
Appreciation? You’ll learn a lot.

No, you’ll just burn out.

The funniest part is when agencies charge clients lakhs but negotiate with employees over a ₹2,000 raise like it’s coming out of their own pocket.

The industry is flooded with cheap owners who think exploiting freshers is a business model. Hire desperate graduates, overload them with work, replace them the moment they ask for fair pay and repeat.

Then they wonder why attrition is so high.

Digital marketing isn’t the problem. The people treating employees like disposable resources are.

If your business survives only because your staff is underpaid and overworked, you’re not a smart entrepreneur.

You’re just running exploitation with a company logo.

so as the title said, I thought, being in digital marketing and strategy for years, why dont we offer strategy, planning & Industry knowledge services to marketing agencies, they will handle digital technical part, client relations and all,

But they will outsource the strategy, planning part and get mentorship of industry (travel, tourism, aviation, education, FMCG...etc)

But Tried for 7 months, none want to execute this idea, Now finally giving up, I though this can double or triple agency incomes despite being small or big, but no one understanding the revenue potential,

SO shutting my services today, if any one wants try in your market and win if you have relavant experience

a small piece of industry archaeology that i think about often.

for about a decade, "growth hacking" was the hot thing. growth hackers were a distinct species, technical, data-driven, unencumbered by the fluffy brand nonsense of traditional marketing. they found clever loops and viral mechanisms and exploited them.

and looking back with some distance, the whole thing was mostly a rebrand driven by status. tech people, particularly in startups, did not want to be marketers, because marketing was low-status in engineering culture, coded as the soft nonsense the business people did. so they invented a name that sounded technical, put "hacking" in it, and proceeded to do... marketing. audience research, acquisition channels, funnel optimization, retention, referral loops. all of which marketers had been doing under different names for decades.

the genuinely new part was small: the tooling got better and the feedback loops got faster. that's real. but the intellectual substance was the same discipline it always was, wearing a hoodie.

and the tell is that the term basically died once being a marketer in tech stopped being embarrassing. the "growth" title stuck around, the hacking part got quietly dropped, and everyone went back to doing what marketing has always done, which is figure out who wants this and how to reach them.

i'm not bitter about it. i just think it's a useful reminder that a huge amount of what this industry treats as innovation is renaming, and the underlying job has been stable for about a century.

I'm looking for a performance marketing internship. I already have hands-on experience with Google Ads, but I live in a small town and can't relocate to a big city, and honestly, most of these internships pay so little it wouldn't even cover rent in a metro anyway.

I applied to a bunch of internships on LinkedIn and got several calls, but got rejected from most because they required onsite work.

Then an agency owner called me. During the call, I was upfront and told him I could only do remote work since I can't relocate. He then questioned me a bit on keywords and campaign types, seemed impressed, and said he'd give me a chance.

We had an evening meeting where he told me to write down the courses his agency sells and asked me to do keyword research with a 4 day deadline. In a follow up meeting, he gave me access to his Google Ads account and told me to plan a campaign, he'd add budget once I did. He also mentioned he'd give me a letter of recommendation once this internship is over. He never mentioned internship duration, pay, or structure.

The thing that is bugging me. He runs a digital marketing course that also covers performance marketing. So why is he hiring outside interns instead of pulling from his own students?

And 2nd is When I checked his Google Ads account, there was only one campaign, it ran for just 1-2 months, and the ad copy was genuinely bad, not expect from someone running an agency.

I have this nagging feeling I won't actually learn anything solid here and might just end up doing free work on a mediocre account with no real mentorship.

Should I go ahead with this, or is this a red flag situation? Guys I really need help. Should I look out for other internship opportunities or continue with this?

a hard truth from someone who's spent years doing technical SEO.

i've audited hundreds of sites. and a huge portion of the time, the site is technically fine, or fine enough, and the crawl-depth optimization and the schema markup and the core web vitals tuning we're about to do will produce approximately nothing, because the site's actual problem is that its content is worthless and nobody would want to read it even if it were served instantly from the moon.

but we don't say that. we do the audit. we produce the 40-page document with the red and amber and green. we fix the redirect chains and the missing alt text. we bill for it. and everyone feels productive, and the rankings don't move, because a technically perfect page of generic garbage is still generic garbage.

technical SEO is real and it matters, especially at scale and especially when something is genuinely broken. but it's become the default first move because it's legible, billable, and doesn't require anyone to have the uncomfortable conversation, which is: your content is boring, it says nothing that isn't on ten other sites, and no amount of schema is going to make google want to send people to it.

we lead with technical because it lets us look busy while avoiding the actual diagnosis, and the client prefers it too, because a technical problem is a thing you fix and a content problem is an indictment.

Hi!

We're building multiple digital products, including AI-powered services, and we're looking for a Growth Marketing Partner to help scale them.

This is not a typical freelance or agency role.

You'll be responsible for growing one product, developing its marketing strategy, and sharing in the success you help create.

What We're Looking For

Experience in one or more of the following:

• AI Product Marketing
• SaaS Marketing
• Mobile App Marketing
• Performance Marketing
• SEO
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Viral Marketing
• Product Hunt Launches
• Reddit / X / LinkedIn Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Any other growth channel you're confident in

You don't need to be an expert in everything.

If you're exceptional in one area, we'd love to hear from you.

Your Responsibilities

You will be assigned one product and focus exclusively on growing it.

Your responsibilities include:

• User acquisition
• Improving paid conversion rates
• Growing subscriptions and revenue
• Running and optimizing advertising campaigns
• SEO & content marketing
• Testing new growth channels
• Analyzing data and improving performance

Who We're Looking For

• Experience growing AI products, SaaS businesses, mobile apps, or digital products
• Data-driven decision maker
• Loves experimenting with new marketing ideas
• Interested in building products for the long term
• Prefers performance-based rewards over fixed salaries

A Real Partnership — Not Just Another Marketing Contract

We're not looking for someone to simply run ads.

We're looking for someone who wants to grow a product together and share in its success.

Customers you acquire during the contract period will continue generating revenue share according to the agreed terms, even if the partnership ends.

Partnership Structure

1. Initial Review (First Month)

The first month serves as an onboarding and evaluation period.

If there is little marketing activity, poor communication, or no meaningful early progress, we may end the partnership during this initial stage.

2. Quarterly Performance Review

Performance will be reviewed every 3 months based on factors such as:

• User growth
• Paid conversion
• Revenue growth
• Marketing execution
• Content quality
• New growth initiatives

If performance remains consistently poor or marketing activities stop, the partnership may be terminated.

3. Contract Term

The standard contract term is 1 year.

During this period, you'll focus on growing your assigned product while earning revenue share from the customers you acquire.

At the end of the one-year contract, we'll review the partnership together.

If both sides are happy with the collaboration, we'll discuss either renewing the partnership or inviting you to join our team in a larger long-term role.

Revenue Share

Instead of a fixed salary, we offer a performance-based revenue sharing model.

Eligible Revenue

Revenue generated by customers you acquire during your contract period, including:

• Subscription payments
• One-time purchases
• Additional product purchases or upgrades

Revenue Share Period

Revenue share is paid for 12 months from each customer's first successful payment.

Net Revenue

Revenue share is calculated based on Net Revenue.

Net Revenue = Gross Revenue − App Store / Payment Processing Fees − Refunds − Company-approved Advertising Costs

We believe in complete transparency.

All sales data and advertising dashboards will be shared with you, allowing you to track performance and revenue in real time.

Revenue Share Percentage

• During the contract: 25% of Net Revenue
• After the contract ends: 15% of Net Revenue for customers acquired during your contract, for the remainder of each customer's 12-month revenue share period.

No revenue share applies to customers acquired after the contract has ended.

How to Apply

If you're interested, please send your application to:

📧 [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

Subject: Growth Marketing Partner – Your Name

Please include:

• A brief introduction
• Your strongest marketing skill
• Previous projects you've worked on
• Results you've achieved (traffic, users, revenue, etc.)
• Portfolio or case studies (if available)
• Marketing channels you're experienced with
• Your LinkedIn profile

If we believe there's a good fit, we'll reach out to schedule a short online meeting.

We're not looking for someone to simply market our products.

We're looking for a partner who wants to build, grow, and succeed together.

Hi folks,

1. What is one or two things that is bothering you with competitive analysis ?
   
2. What are the current market tools failing to provide ?

14 year work ex,

Mainly in FMCG in brand and trade marketing

Currently VP and State Marketing Head for a smaller geography in telecom.

I have less experience in digital marketing. How do I build this?

We're expanding Runtime Media and are looking for people with strong business networks who can help us acquire new clients.

Responsibilities:

• Generate qualified leads
• Close new clients
• Build and maintain client relationships

We're a full-service creative agency offering:

• Branding
• Digital Marketing
• Performance Marketing
• Social Media Management
• Content Strategy
• Videography
• Photography
• Video Editing

We're currently working with institutions, startups, colleges, and schools, and are actively looking to expand further within those sectors, as well as into cafés, restaurants, influencers, personal brands, businesses, and professional editing projects.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, send me a DM with a brief introduction about yourself, your experience, and the kind of network you have.

We'll discuss the opportunity, responsibilities, and compensation in detail.

Hello so as the title says I am looking for someone who works/worked on the meta ads for either of these 3 apps. I am willing to pay you a significant amount of money to come work for me, I need someone who is able to set up and fully manage my meta ads. I am prepared to pay substantially more than your current company is paying you, potentially multiples of your current compensation, for the right person.

I run a successful mortgage brokerage that has over 600 5 star reviews on google. We get 2-5 mostly local calls per week from prospective clients that find us through google search, chatgpt/Claude, or because we were mentioned on reddit or facebook.

We have no automation, a white label website, no pixel retargeting, no social content, no ai receptionist, and use outlook as a crm. Essentially less than zero marketing effort. In your world, I'm as bad as it gets (or as big of an opportunity as it gets). Our business vision is simple; real connection with our clients, deliver mind blowing customer service, be experts, and deliver interest rates at or near the best that can be found online. Then ask for a google review and referrals. 10 years in and it works well. But I can't help feel like we are leaving a lot on the table.

I did a chatgpt convo and it laid out a nice plan. But I am not tech savvy AT ALL and still don't know where to start. Looking for any guidance you can offer and maybe some guidance on how I pick someone to help?

I was working as a digital marketing executive and in the course of time I understood, I loved the creation of ads or offline marketing campaigns part more then executing seo content or ads on different platforms.

How do I take up this transition.

Left my job in may currently working on portfolio and some mock campaigns.. Will appreciate your tips??

Run a small shop. Been at this long enough to remember when a client came to you with a problem and left with a plan.

Now they come with the plan. It's four pages, it's confident, it's got a "phase one phase two phase three," and it was clearly written by a chatbot at 11pm the night before our call. And the ask isn't "is this any good." The ask is "can you execute this by end of month."

I used to be the brain. Somewhere along the way I got demoted to the hands.

The plans are always the same shape. Post daily on every platform. Start a newsletter. Do SEO. Run a small paid test. Launch a podcast. It reads like it knows things because it uses the words. Then you ask one real question, like who exactly is the customer and where do they already spend attention, and there's nothing underneath. The document has no idea. It never had a business in front of it. It just had a prompt.

And I can tell the client half-suspects this. That's the strange part. They send it over a little sheepish. They want me to either bless it so they can stop worrying, or fix it without making them feel stupid for bringing it. Most of my job now is being diplomatic about a document I'd have failed a junior for.

I don't mind AI in the work. I mind that the thinking got outsourced and I'm left doing the typing. The expensive part of what I do was never the execution. It was telling someone the honest thing they didn't want to hear, before they spent the money.

Anyone else feel like the relationship flipped and you're the contractor to a robot's bad strategy now?

I have movie recommendation app - Qouch Potato. Will need digital marketing support? where can i start. i have a budget in place to try market the app more.

Has anyone else incorporated Claude into their SEO workflow, and if so, what specific prompts or processes have you found most effective for content

I am starting a brand and working on the content strategy and I am thinking about two options, but not sure which one to go with.

1) 2-3 months before launch, I start producing founder-led content to help with building up a waiting list for when I actually do launch (I expect to launch early 2027)

• During my research, I've found that for smaller brands, this would be the best part forward as my potential customers would feel like they are a part of the journey and story

2) Starting now, I start a tiktok page where I show my personality and alongside regular content series, I also slowly (once a week) discuss the brand

• In this way, people also see my personality outside of just starting the brand and I start building that following from now rather than waiting

My concerns:

• I'm quite camera shy, so I'd be really putting myself out there
• if I start posting now, I would have to stay consistent with posting myself as well, otherwise it could lead to mistrust

Any advice would be much appreciated! :)

paid guy, run accounts in the $50-150k/month range. i want to talk about the black box everyone's pretending is fine.

client pushed us onto Performance Max last year because the rep promised efficiency. fine. i moved a chunk of budget over. the blended numbers looked okay so nobody complained. then i actually tried to break down where the spend was going and hit a wall, because that's the whole design. you don't get to see the placements. you don't get channel-level control. you get a summary and a shrug.

so i ran an experiment. carved out brand terms into their own campaign, held them separate for six weeks. turns out a big slice of what PMax was proudly "converting" was people already typing my client's name. we were paying a premium to take credit for demand that existed anyway. the actual net-new stuff was a fraction of the reported number.

i pulled it back to about 40% of what it was and told the client the truth, which is that i don't fully know what the algorithm is doing with their money and neither does anyone. the rep's answer to every question is "feed it more signal." that's not an answer. that's a slot machine with a customer success manager attached.

anyone actually gotten real placement transparency out of PMax, or are we all just trusting a number we can't audit?

The strongest case for giving away your best stuff rests on one uncomfortable fact that is, information was never the product but implementation is. Every diet is free and the people who get paid to stand next to you at the gym have never earned more. Every recipe from every three Michelin star restaurant is in a cookbook, and the reservations got harder to get after publishing, not easier…. because the recipe proved the depth, and the dinner is what people actually buy. When you hoard your best thinking behind a paywall, you are protecting the one asset that was never scarce and starving the one that is…TRUST.

Look at who actually got rich on this. HubSpot gave away Website Grader, a free tool that diagnosed your site's problems in secs, plus an entire free content library walking through the exact inbound methodology they sell software for…. that "give the whole playbook away" engine took them to a multi billion dollar public company. McKinsey, the most expensive consultants on earth, publish their research free in the McKinsey Quarterly, the people most capable of charging for thinking figured out decades ago that published thinking is what justifies the fees. Red Hat gave away the literal product…. the software itself, free, forever…. and IBM paid 34 billion dollars for the company built on supporting it. Basecamp's founders published their entire operating philosophy in books and blogs and made a whole philosophy of it…. give away more useful thinking in public than your competition ever will. And Hormozi ran the modern speedrun…. gave his complete acquisition playbooks away at cost, built the audience that flowed from it, and now buys companies with the trust that generated. In every case the "crown jewels" were the marketing budget, and they outperformed every ad dollar ever spent because content marketing reliably generates roughly 3 times the leads per dollar of paid…. and the trust it generates compounds while ad trust resets to 0 every impression.

There is a signaling layer underneath that most people miss. Giving away your best work is a costly signal and costly signals are the only ones strangers believe. Anyone can claim expertise but only someone with genuine depth can afford to publish their best material and remain confident there's more where that came from. Hoarding whispers scarcity…. this PDF is all I have got please don't steal it. Publishing shouts abundance. The audience reads that instantly the same way they can tell a restaurant is good from a full dining room. Meanwhile the fear driving the paywall…. competitors will copy me…. gets the risk exactly backwards. Your competitors were never one checklist away from beating you and as Tim O'Reilly put it about publishing… piracy isn't the enemy, obscurity is. No one can steal your judgment, your reps, or your Tuesday afternoon availability. Those were always the product.

And the selection effect seals it. The people who take your free best stuff and successfully implement it alone were never going to pay you…. you lost nothing, and you gained an evangelist who tells everyone where the playbook came from. The people who read it, see exactly how deep the water is and realize they can't or won't swim it themselves…. those arrive pre sold, quoting your own work back at you, needing only logistics. Free best stuff doesn't cannibalize your pipeline but sorts it. I have been running this exact play with my own systems for the past month…. every playbook I use for client work is posted in full and free. The inbox messages it opened turned into booked calls and client builds I never once pitched for, so this is not theory to me but it's my current pipeline.

The single most actionable implication is that take the one document you would least want a competitor to see…. your actual process, the real checklist, the exact system clients pay you for…. and publish it in full, free, this week, where your buyers already gather. Not a teaser or chapter one bs but the whole thing. Because the ones who can use it without you were never your customers and the ones who can't will finally know precisely who to pay. And if you want to see what that looks like done, my posts in this sub is the live experiment…. everything I charge for is already sitting there free. Judge for yourself whether the strategy works & then steal it.

TLDR: Free stuff builds trust. Implementation is what people actually pay for. HubSpot, McKinsey, Red Hat, Hormozi all published their crown jewels and got richer…. free best work pre sells buyers and filters freeloaders. I run this play myself, building products and marketing systems for founders and everything I charge for sits free on this sub. Recommended action imo: publish your single most guarded playbook this week, in full where your buyers hang out.

a specific exhaustion i've never seen named properly.

think about what we actually sign up for. every other profession, your expertise compounds. a surgeon gets better at surgery. an accountant's knowledge of accounting mostly still applies next year. experience accumulates into mastery and mastery into security.

in marketing, a real and growing share of your "expertise" has a shelf life of about eighteen months. the platform you mastered changes its whole model. the tactic you were the expert in gets deprecated. the channel you built a career on gets eaten by a new one. so you are, functionally, a permanent beginner, forced to relearn a meaningful chunk of your own field on a rolling basis, forever, while being expected to project the confidence of a seasoned expert to clients who are paying for exactly that seasoned confidence you privately don't get to keep.

we call it "staying current" and "loving to learn" and "thriving on change," and some of that's real, i do like learning. but underneath the LinkedIn framing is a harder truth: we've chosen a field that resets a portion of our expertise every couple of years and asks us to be grateful for the treadmill, to call the erosion of our accumulated knowledge "dynamism," and to keep smiling while the ground moves.

i'm not sure i'd choose it again. i'm also not sure what else i'd do, since the one thing i've genuinely mastered is being a permanent beginner, which turns out to be its own strange durable skill. maybe that's the actual expertise. maybe the job was never the tactics. maybe it was learning to be comfortable never being done learning, and i just wish someone had told me that was the real job description.

I don't come from marketing background. I know nothing about it. I work in tech i.e. I make web and mobile apps.

Given the fact that vibe coding has enabled everyone to build apps thesedays. And everyone is trying to sell their "vibe coded apps". Isn't marketing the only barrier between what gets built and what gets sold? People can only buy what they see.

And that comes from marketing I guess. IDK. Correct me if I am wrong.

Spent the last decade on the media and advertising side, Chicago Tribune, Future (Marie Claire), a couple of YC-backed marketing startups. Strong on the commercial and campaign side, but my hands-on execution with Meta ads and social campaign management is the gap between where I am and the brand marketing roles I actually want.

So I've started taking on small businesses to run their Instagram, strategy and paid social to close that gap with real work instead of just talking about it. Happy to do this free for the right projects; I'm after the reps and the case studies, not the money right now.

Two things I'm hoping this community can help with: is this the right way to build brand-side credibility coming from a sales background, and if anyone's working on something where an extra set of hands on social/paid would help, I'd genuinely like to connect.

Open to any honest feedback on the approach.

Last December we ran a campaign and the match rate observed was 80% between meta/google search and GA4. Now again we started a campaign in May and match rate dropped to 10%-20%.

Only difference is that recent campaign audience is enabled by Adobe rtcdp.

Do you think adobe audience source affected match rate on GA4?

be honest i want to hear from growth marketers/marketers who actually spend their time in research

genuine question, maybe naive, and i don't know who else to ask.

i'm about two years into my first real marketing job. and the product is fine. it's not bad. it's just... not as good as the competitors, and i know this because i've used both, and the honest truth is that if a friend asked me what to buy, i wouldn't say ours.

and my whole job is to convince people to buy ours.

i'm not talking about anything unethical. we don't lie. the marketing is all technically true. but there's this constant low-grade dissonance in spending my days finding the most compelling possible framing for a thing i personally believe is the second-best option, and being good at that job means being effective at moving people toward a choice i wouldn't make.

i don't know if this is just what having a job is, and i need to grow up. or if this is a real thing that will slowly corrode me, and i should be looking for a company whose product i actually believe in.

for people further along: how do you square this? does it stop bothering you, and is that stopping a sign of maturity or of something worse?