How to get your digital marketing performance out of the toilet

~ A Simple Guide ~

In 2026, the term “digital marketing” can mean almost anything: SEO, AEO, paid search ads on Google or Bing, paid social ads on Meta or TikTok, Reddit or Snapchat advertising, streaming TV commercials, digital billboards, organic social media, influencer marketing...the list goes on.

It can seem dizzying, but it doesn’t have to be.

Here’s a simple guide to what I’d recommend evaluating and taking action on as a marketing professional, especially if you’re working with limited resources, such as:

• A small marketing team
• Tight timeframes
• Smaller budgets
• A leadership team that doesn’t fully understand marketing but still wants to see results tied to revenue

Yeah, we know them!

Note: You might enter this process at any of these points based on your current or historical marketing strategy, company setup, and experience. You don’t necessarily have to start at step one and follow everything in order.

1. Get Clear on Your Goals

Before you start launching campaigns, answer these questions:

• What is your baseline goal for qualified leads per month?
• What is your ideal goal for qualified leads per month?
• How many conversions does it take for your marketing spend to become profitable?
• Is there a specific ad spend budget you need to stick to?
• Are there timeframes you need to consider for seasonality, product launches, promotions, or other business needs?

Ultimately, you need to understand what it will take to prove a positive return on investment, because that’s what the big bosses really care about.

2. Understand Your Current Landscape

Whether your data is stored in a CRM—we recommend HubSpot—a spreadsheet, Google Analytics, or a literal notebook, I need you to understand where you currently stand.

Before you go too far into this journey, you should know the answers to these questions:

• How many leads are currently coming in each month?
• How many of those leads are qualified?
• How many are marketing-qualified leads, or MQLs?
• How many are sales-qualified leads, or SQLs?
• How many qualified leads eventually convert?
• What is the average lifetime value of a conversion?

Yes, MQLs and SQLs both matter. Reducing the gap between the two will also become important later.

With this information, you should be able to calculate:

• Cost per acquisition
• Return on investment
• Lifetime value-to-customer acquisition cost ratio, or LTV:CAC
• Conversion rate

These are the important metrics you’ll use to present your results and demonstrate improvement.

3. Determine Your Most Relevant Platforms

Start with some quick research into who your audience is and how they typically find the service or product you offer.

For example:

• If you’re a service-based B2C business, your best platform might be Google or LinkedIn.
• If you’re a direct-to-consumer e-commerce business, your best platform might be Meta or TikTok.

But not always!

I know that almost every platform can be relevant to almost every audience in certain situations. However, I need you to determine the one to three platforms where you have the best chance of winning, based on your goals and budget.

Use an AI friend to help you narrow down your options.

You don’t need to find every possible audience or advertise on every potentially relevant platform right away. You want to identify your most profitable audiences and grab the low-hanging fruit.

You can always expand later, once you have more data to inform your future campaigns. Don’t try to be everywhere at once when you’re just getting started.

4. Set Up the Campaign

Prepare Your Ad Creative

Get your ad creative ready.

Don’t have a designer? Try a tool like Genspark, and continue prompting and refining until it gets the creative right.

Most importantly, don’t make ads based only on what you like. Make something that will resonate with your audience.

Create an Offer

If you can create an offer, your ad will be much more interesting to potential customers and more likely to generate leads.

Your offer could include:

• A free demo
• A free consultation
• A buy-one-get-one promotion
• A 10% discount with a coupon code
• A free download
• A limited-time deal
• Another valuable incentive

Write the Ad Copy

AI can be useful when writing ad copy, but don’t rely on it to automatically produce something effective or human-sounding.

Review the copy carefully and make sure it sounds like your brand, speaks directly to your audience, and clearly communicates why someone should take action.

Set Up and Verify Your Ad Platforms

Make sure the necessary ad accounts are properly created, connected, and verified before launching.

Select and Review the Landing Page

Choose the landing page your ads will direct people to and review it carefully.

The page should include:

• A clear call to action
• Messaging that matches the ad
• An easy way to convert
• Only the information someone needs to make a decision

Avoid including too much additional or distracting information.

5. TURN OFF THE PLATFORM SETTINGS

Don’t automatically trust the audience targeting and AI-powered settings that Google, Meta, and other platforms recommend.

Test everything, and research individual settings before enabling them. Automatic settings can get you into trouble quickly and spend your entire budget on spammy or irrelevant audiences.

Depending on the platform and campaign, you may want to turn off:

• Audience expansion
• Search partner networks
• Automatically applied recommendations
• Other automated targeting or placement settings

Remember: The platform’s goal is for you to spend money.

Your goal is to generate revenue.

Don’t get it twisted.

6. Get Conversion Tracking in Place

First, define what actually counts as a conversion for your business.

Is it:

• A form submission?
• A phone call?
• A purchase?
• A booked appointment?
• A download?
• A subscription?

Once you’ve defined your conversions:

• Set up the appropriate tag or pixel.
• Connect Google Analytics.
• Create UTM parameters.
• Test every conversion action before launching.

Do not assume your tracking works just because it has been installed. Test it yourself.

7. Launch Your Beautiful Campaign

Sit back and relax.

Just kidding. I know you have 700 other things to do.

But at least take one deep, satisfying breath. You’ve done well.

8. Give It Some Time—but Track Everything

Watch your results carefully after launching a campaign, but remember that the platforms and their algorithms need time to learn.

Giving a campaign approximately three to four weeks to gather data is often recommended.

Of course, if something looks brand-damaging or is generating large amounts of spam, pause it and reevaluate.

But if the campaign simply feels a little scary because it’s new, try not to make constant changes. Give it time to learn, collect data, and optimize.

You should also have a pivot plan ready in case the campaign truly isn’t working.

9. Feed Data Back Into the Platforms

This can be done by connecting your CRM directly to your advertising platforms and creating a system for qualifying leads within the CRM.

That system can automatically send lead-quality signals back to the advertising platforms, helping them improve results over time.

Did that hurt your brain?

There is also a simpler option.

You can use a spreadsheet to manually review each lead and sort it as qualified or unqualified. You can then send that information back to the appropriate platform using tools such as:

• Meta’s Conversions API
• Google’s Enhanced Conversions for Leads

If you’re a smaller business receiving a limited number of leads, this manual process can work well.

At a higher volume, however, it becomes exhausting. That’s when you’ll want to connect with a CRM expert like ours.

10. Retarget Your Audience

Collect first-party data or use pixel data to create audiences based on intent signals. You can then remarket to those audiences through advertising, email, and other channels.

These can be some of the easiest people to reach because they have already interacted with your business.

You might encourage them to:

• Convert for the first time
• Complete an abandoned action
• Make another purchase
• Renew a subscription
• Reengage with your brand

Don’t Have the Time, Resources, or Expertise?

Do you like the concept but don’t have the time, resources, or expertise to accomplish all of this?

Perfect. That’s literally why we exist!

We do everything above and more, with a team of technical experts specializing in every facet of digital marketing.

We’d love to get our team on your team.

Some of our 2026 successes include improving one client’s conversion rate by 457% year over year and reducing another client’s cost per conversion by 35% year over year.

Want to be our next success story?

We specialize in making you look like a rock star by handling the technical work and heavy lifting behind the scenes, so you can focus on your most urgent priorities.

Sound like a dream?

Let’s chat!