You’re doing the best you can, given the circumstances. You’re likely stretched thin with limited resources, and fatigued by the ever changing landscape of digital marketing.

You’re only human. Life is trial and error. We all make mistakes, but wisdom is not making the same mistakes again. When it comes to digital marketing, there’s some mistakes that will ruin most your efforts. You can do more with less (mistakes):

Not Knowing Your Audience
First question I ask any client – “Who’s the audience?” Few have market research on their customers. But, it’s easy to get some insights – Ask the sales team what they know. Better yet, ask a few customers some simple questions. Some information is better than none. When guessing how best to target an audience, try to make an educated guess. An audience targeting tool I sometimes use is Spark Social.

Suffering Shiny Object Syndrome
If there’s one thing marketers love it’s jumping on trends. Try this, try that, always looking for our next fix. We’re notorious for going wide instead of deep. Unfortunately, when you try too many things you don’t end up doing a good job at any of them. Focus on one or two channels where you know your customers likely are. You don’t have to be trendy, you need to be relevant: Right message, in the right place, at the right time.

Lack of Performance Tracking
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. It’s tough to know what’s working when there’s no key performance indicators or attribution tracking. Make use of tracking pixels provided by the big ad platforms and use UTM parameters on your links so you know what channels are driving traffic. Set up conversion tracking on your forms and checkout pages. It can get technical so that’s why many skip this step, but that’s a big mistake especially if you’re paying for advertising.

Underfunding Advertising Spend
The organic reach of social media posts and website content is small and getting smaller. Only 1 – 2% of your followers are seeing your social posts and AI overviews in search results are cannibalizing website visits. It’s futile to spend hours on content if nobody views it. You need to pay for digital advertising, period. Companies will spend thousands on a radio ad or trade show booth, so treat digital ads with the same or more importance.

If your organization needs digital marketing, we’re glad to help. Deep Dish Digital always looks out for the best interest of clients even if that means referring them to somebody better suited. You can contact us by sending an email or calling 306-229-9437.

This isn’t a conversation about the latest viral hacks or “shiny object” tactics. Instead, it’s a masterclass in the “fundamentals first” philosophy. Harley explains why most businesses are busy but not productive, the danger of chasing algorithm trends, and why the “boring” basics—like high-performing websites, email marketing, and proper data tracking—are still the most powerful drivers of long-term ROI.

Key Takeaways:

• Activity vs. Achievement: Why doing “more” on social media often results in “less” for your bottom line.

• The Power of Fundamentals: A deep dive into why your website, email list, and tracking systems are the only assets you truly own.

• Strategy Over Hype: How to build a marketing plan that outlasts the next platform trend or algorithm shift.

• The “Long Game” of Marketing: Why consistency and patience are the most underrated competitive advantages in business today.

There’s no substitute for experience, but there are AI tools to make your marketing easier. Just keep in mind that easier doesn’t always mean better. Marketing AI tools are arriving daily so it’s important to know what’s hype versus what’s helpful. Here’s my take:

HYPE

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Optimization: Major paid ad platforms (Google, Meta, etc) are building in AI and automatic recommendations based on its algorithms. In my experience these AI enhancements have delivered few performance gains. More often than not they just get you to spend more money with the ad platforms. Approach these with skepticism and do some tests rather than blindly adopt their recommendations.

Automated Social Content Creation: There are some great AI tools for image creation (more on this below), but I don’t trust AI tools to come up with a series of creative and engaging social posts. Your social content needs to reflect your personality, people, and imagery unique to your business. Automated social content simply produces a generic stock image aesthetic. Don’t use tools that contribute to AI slop. Be unique.

Replacing Marketing Staff: AI investments for improving business processes have a high failure rate. AI will likely get better but right now organizations still need people to review what AI is producing and fix errors. In the near term marketing jobs will not be taken by AI, but marketing people with AI skills will have more job opportunities.

HELP

Image Creation: There’s various AI image/video creation tools and they keep getting better. Some of my favourites are Playground, OpenAI Sora, and Google Nano Banana. Canva also keeps improving and recently released a free suite of tools (Canva Affinity) to rival Adobe Suite. However, if you want something truly unique it’s still worthwhile hiring a graphic designer.

Copywriting: Most people can drive a car but most can’t drive a race car. The same goes for writing; most people can write but most are not professional writers. Tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly, and Jasper aid tremendously in generating well written content. However, don’t just use their output verbatim. It still needs adjustments to sound like you, a human.*

Data Analysis: Most marketers are not numbers people, but data analysis is an increasingly important part of the job. This is where AI tools can assist greatly. You can upload a spreadsheet (CSV) to ChatGPT and ask it to summarize key metrics, Google Analytics is building in AI to uncover website traffic insights, and Google NotebookLM can summarize multiple documents and produce a slide presentation.

* I did not use any AI copywriting tools for this blog post. I also think I’m a pretty good driver.

It’s August 2025 and it’s not news that marketing budgets are getting squeezed – The uncertain economy, proliferation of AI, and decreasing online engagement have been the perfect storm. The result is a shift in the marketing landscape unlike anything I’ve seen in the past 15 years.

Marketing is increasingly fragmented and unpredictable. Many industry experts advocate a sophisticated multi-channel strategy which is just another way of saying “keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks”. While I believe multi-channel marketing is important, it’s more important to focus on what works. The best type exercise is the one you’ll actually do.

Instead of chasing every change and trend, you can make the most of your marketing budget by playing to your strengths. Nobody knows your customers better than you. So, focus on the channels and tactics you know best. Get back to the basics and go deep instead of wide. Here’s some examples:

• Evaluate Analytics: You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Review analytics and metric tracking to get a baseline for performance.
• Email Marketing: There’s a 90% chance customers will see your message instead of the 2% chance they’ll see your social media post.
• Convert Followers: Give social media followers a reason to take the next step. Craft paid campaigns and offers specifically for existing followers.
• Focus Paid Advertising: Provide one offer for one audience. Set up multiple small campaigns instead of one large campaign.
• Community Visibility: Speak at an industry event, be a guest contributor to a publication, sponsor or lead social-good initiatives.
• Website Maintenance: Keep things fresh and ensure it’s technically sound. Ensure content answers questions instead of holding things back.

The only constant is change, and being consistent leads to change. It’s important to be aware of what’s going on around you but don’t let it distract you. The most important thing is knowing what’s important. Take care of your customers and they’ll take care of you.