Why digital marketing is about relevance not budget

fame doesn’t sell. followers don’t convert. visibility without relevance is just noise. we’ve all seen it—celebrities launch brands, the internet buzzes for a moment, and then… nothing. meanwhile, smaller creators with deep audience relationships are building brands that sell out, over and over again. the difference? relevance. the old playbook was simple: make a product. spend millions on marketing. hope people buy. that formula? it’s dead. today’s most successful brands do the opposite. they build an audience first, listen closely, and then create products people already want. this isn’t a hack. it’s not a shortcut. it’s the new foundation of brand building. when we worked with Chase Business, they could have focused on financial campaigns. instead, they leaned into what their audience actually needed—guidance on marketing, tech, and business growth. they didn’t push products. they built trust. same with rhode skin. hailey bieber didn’t just slap her name on a beauty brand—she built something her audience already wanted. $14 million in sales in six months. a 60,000-person waitlist before launch. not because of her fame. but because of her relevance. acquisition without relevance is wasted investment. visibility without connection is just noise. so before your next product launch, ask yourself: who exactly are we serving? what do they actually care about? how well do we truly understand them? because when you get this right, selling isn’t even selling. it’s just delivering what your audience has been waiting for. brands aren’t entitled to attention. they have to earn it. so, who are you really building for? because in this new world, that’s the only question that matters.

If your 2026 budget still prioritizes ad spend over authority, you’re building a loud brand, not a trusted one. We’re deep into budget season, and I’ve had the same conversation with half a dozen OEM and aftermarket execs in the last two weeks. The spend breakdown is nearly identical: 📊 Paid media: heavy 📉 Earned media: light 🤷♂️ Content: unclear who owns it Meanwhile, everything about how people discover, evaluate, and trust brands is shifting—fast. • Consumers trust earned media, not ads. • Creators outperform traditional media in engagement and reach. • AI assistants—used by over 100 million people weekly—don’t serve ads. They surface credible sources. So if your PR and brand storytelling are underfunded heading into 2025, you’re not just underexposed. You’re invisible where it matters most. At Kahn Media, we’ve helped brands shift budget toward high-trust visibility: → Authority-rich PR → SEO-optimized storytelling → Creator partnerships that convert → AI Visibility Audits to see how your brand appears in search and chat interfaces The results? Lower CAC. More organic traction. More trust at the top of the funnel. Attention is easy to buy. Trust is earned. And in 2025, only trusted brands get surfaced, shared, and selected. As you lock your plan; don’t just ask where you’ll spend. Ask what earns you relevance.

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗘𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁. Most marketing teams aren’t short on ideas. They’re short on relevance. Here’s what I mean: Too often, marketers are busy running campaigns, tweaking messaging, or building funnels for problems customers never actually had. -We obsess over “awareness” when the real issue is trust. -We optimize click-through rates when customers are still confused about why they should care. -We create fancy loyalty programs when the product experience is what’s broken. The result? Beautiful strategies. Great decks. Clean dashboards. But… zero real impact. The best marketers don’t just solve problems. They find the right problems to solve—the ones that keep customers awake at night. And here’s the kicker: Most of those problems don’t show up in a campaign brief or analytics dashboard. They show up in conversations, support tickets, and the messy, unpolished feedback no one wants to read. Marketing is not about doing more. It’s about doing what matters. So the next time you’re about to launch something, ask yourself: Am I solving a problem my customer actually has—or just the one that looks good in a report? That simple filter can save months of wasted effort. LinkedIn LinkedIn for Marketing LinkedIn News

Too many leadership teams still treat digital marketing as a set of disconnected actions: a refreshed website, a burst of LinkedIn ads, maybe an email campaign when time allows. They tick boxes. But they don’t set direction. That’s because they confuse tactics with strategy. A strategy is the overarching plan that aligns digital activity with business objectives. It answers questions like: How will digital help us win the right type of clients? Where do we need visibility in the age of AI search? Which risks (compliance, reputation, migration) could undermine growth if left unchecked? Tactics, by contrast, are the specific tools: SEO, LinkedIn carousels, webinars, HubSpot nurture sequences. They’re essential, but without strategy, they’re just noise. Here’s the problem: when senior leaders conflate the two, three things happen: 1️⃣ Budgets get wasted — money poured into channels without clarity on ROI. 2️⃣ Teams get frustrated — they’re executing but not moving the needle. 3️⃣ Firms get exposed — missing compliance obligations, or losing visibility during platform changes. A proper digital strategy is not about doing more marketing. It’s about making informed marketing decisions, based on evidence, that align with the firm’s growth agenda. It’s the difference between: “Let’s post more often on LinkedIn” vs “Let’s use LinkedIn to shape our authority in professional negligence law, building trust with referral partners and clients.” Boards wouldn’t accept a financial plan built on ad hoc spending decisions. Why accept a digital approach that does the same? How does your firm draw the line between strategy and tactics?

Revenue is still NOT a marketing KPI. (Yup, still ruffling some feathers) Reverse-engineered relevance is. Most marketers start at the top of the funnel. They build campaigns for clicks, chase MQLs, and cross their fingers for pipeline. Not me. If I’m scaling a startup from $2MM to $20MM ARR, I start with what’s already working: 👉 Our best customers 👉 Our real revenue 👉 Our actual buying committee Then I work backwards. -Who were they before they found us? -What did they care about before they cared about us? -Where were they actually spending time? (Hint: probably not reading that gated ebook.) But here’s the edge: I use AI to make all of this faster, smarter, and sharper. → AI helps me spot patterns across top accounts. → AI surfaces what content they’re consuming before they convert. → AI refines messaging until it resonates like a tuning fork. → AI tells me where to show up and what to say when I get there. Because marketing’s job is engineering precision demand at scale. That’s good marketing. And it’s not measured in revenue. It’s measured in: ✅ Message-market resonance ✅ Influenced buying conversations ✅ Target accounts lighting up like a Christmas tree ✅ Sales saying “whoa, they knew who we were before I cold-called them” Revenue is the outcome. Relevance is the input. Want to win the game? Stop aiming at the scoreboard. Start aiming at the people who actually buy. Your move: Are you building awareness and demand—or just reporting on results you didn’t control? PS: You don’t need to own the revenue. You need to own the engine that makes it possible. PPS: Revenue is the scoreboard, not the strategy. Marketing’s role is to control the inputs that make revenue happen: -right message -right channel -right buyer -right time

Marketing isn't just big-budget campaigns. It's content → community → problem solving, And the small details that excite people enough to tell others. This is exactly why the most successful brands aren't just outspending competitors - they're outcaring them. Look at what's working in 2025: → Content that solves real problems (not just promotes) → Communities that create belonging (not just customers) → Small details that trigger word-of-mouth (not just impressions) The brands winning right now understand that marketing at its core is about creating moments worth sharing. And the beautiful part? These strategies work with any budget. Some of the most viral campaigns of the past year cost less than $1,000 to execute. It's about understanding what actually motivates people to share: 1. Solutions to real pain points 2. Genuine connection with others 3. Surprising moments that break patterns Do you agree?

42% of social media users trust Reddit's recommendations more than influencer posts and ads. This begs the question: Are you focusing your marketing budget in the wrong places? People are increasingly seeking authentic conversations rather than polished promotional content. They value genuine back-and-forth discussions that address real questions and concerns. It's not something you could get 20 years ago from a celebrity-laden TV commercial... And you won't get that back-and-forth from an influencer sizzle reel, either. Here's what makes Reddit particularly powerful: - One in four recommendation posts triggers product consideration of previously unknown brands - People rely on Reddit's discussion format to build purchasing confidence - For every 1,000 ad impressions on Reddit, brands see approximately two new organic posts, each generating around 3,500 views - Community-driven content helps overcome consumer frustration with irrelevant search results This gives marketers a strategic opportunity to rethink resource allocation. As expensive influencer partnerships or traditional ad placements slowly lose power in buying decisions... We're finding new ways to participate authentically in relevant community conversations. Should you COMPLETELY abandon existing channels? No. They still have their place. But if your approach doesn't ALSO include these high-trust environments, you are getting left behind. The most successful brands are those that: 1. Monitor relevant subreddits for product mentions and questions 2. Contribute helpful insights beyond simple promotion 3. Address concerns transparently rather than with marketing speak 4. Create value through expertise rather than sales pitches Authentic community engagement has and always will be the most powerful force in marketing. ---- My time spent in digital marketing ALMOST predates the internet itself... and I've spent the last three decades trying to stay one-step ahead of the curve. Subscribe to my Digital Marketing Mix newsletter for insights on content strategy, SEO developments, and everything else. Link in comments.

If you held your sales reps to the same standard as your site search, you’d never sell a thing. A customer asks for a stainless steel screw, and the salesperson proudly comes back with a stainless steel refrigerator. Or a sheet of stainless steel. The customer wouldn’t just think the rep was clueless—they’d assume your whole business doesn’t understand its products. That’s what poor relevance looks like in digital. And here’s the key: relevance isn’t something your platform just “does.” It has to be tuned. Before ranking ever enters the picture, your search engine has to decide—out of millions of SKUs—which ones even belong in the conversation. That decision is your first impression. Get it wrong, and no amount of fancy ranking logic will save you. The best B2B eCommerce teams treat relevance as a discipline, not a default. They start broad, tuning results around their customer base. Then they refine by segment—industry, geography, even specific buying teams. It’s a spectrum of excellence, achieved through regular, iterative improvement. Relevance isn’t a box to check. It’s a capability to master. If your current search platform doesn't let you tune relevance the way you want (or at all) then it's the wrong platform. And if the person managing your search doesn't want to tune relevance, then they are the wrong person. Want to know if you have a problem? Take a few minutes and type in some searches of terms you know are relevant to your site search, then ask your favorite AI platform for some related terms or alternative synonyms, search for those and see how well your site does. See if your digital salesperson brings you a refrigerator...

Thrilled to Share Our First User Case Study — From an Ads Researcher’s Lens 🚀 As someone who’s obsessed with ads measurement, I’m excited to finally share AgentWeb's first real-world case study. For me, digital campaigns aren’t just marketing — they’re living experiments. Every impression, click, and conversion feeds a dataset. For small-budget advertisers, this becomes a pure statistics problem: fewer samples, higher variance, and almost no room for random error. In that world, audience vectors and configuration parameters must be engineered for statistical validity, not just aesthetics. When Cora (a digital companion app for therapists and clients) came to us, the challenge was high-risk: ⚡ Saturated digital health vertical ⚡ Market-inflated CPMs ⚡ $300 total budget (forcing high efficiency per dollar) We built the campaign like a research study: disciplined measurement, feature testing, and conversion-path vetting. The results: ✅ 13.19% CTR — ~10× the vertical benchmark (~0.9%) ✅ $0.74 CPC — in a high-CPM environment ✅ 435 qualified clicks (clinicians + administrators), verified through lead-quality metrics ✅ Total spend: $321 This is what happens when you move from “spray-and-pray” to precision-engineered acquisition pipelines. Big budgets hide noise. Smart budgets surface the signal — and that’s the data science edge in marketing. #AdsMeasurement #AI #DigitalMarketing